Social care faces further damaging cuts in the Capital
But disastrous slashing of services provided by Third Sector will not be repeated
Welcome to your midweek edition of The Inquirer.
Today, Sarah McArthur brings you the latest on one of the longest-running - and one of the most concerning - issues that we have been reporting on since our launch. The continuing running down of social care services in the Capital
We promise to bring you some more uplifting reading in the days to come, but in the meantime we felt this was far too important an issue for us to ignore.
One of the reasons we launched The Inquirer was to shine a light on some of the important social issues in the Capital that are not being reported elsewhere.
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You can read more on the ongoing social care crisis below, but first your regular midweek news roundup and your cultural highlights for the week ahead.
Your Edinburgh Briefing
BEST OF BRITISH? When George Clooney and Sir Bob Geldof return to Edinburgh for the British Business Awards next month, it is sure to be a glamorous affair. Among those shortlisted for awards are Anne Budge, the impressive off-field leader behind Hearts resurgence in recent years, and Forth Ports, which is working to deliver thousands of jobs through the Forth Green Freeport. One of the names on the shortlist will have the good people of Cramond spluttering over their cornflakes…. AMA Homes has been shortlisted for the Leadership Award. (If you’ved missed our reporting on their failures in Cramond this is a good place to start: ‘To come along today with their waffle, it was absolutely astonishing’ On a cheerier note you can read more about Anne Budge’s work at Hearts here: Why does a football club want to run an upmarket hotel?)
CHOOSE TRAINSPOTTING THE MUSICAL: Irvine Welsh’s cult novel about heroin addiction in Leith will celebrate its 30th anniversary this summer with the Trainspotting musical opening in London’s West End. The new stage show has been adapted by Welsh in collaboration with Caroline Jay Ranger, whose previous hits include Starlight Express.
CHOOSE FLATS: Meanwhile, a fresh bid is being made to develop Dalton’s scrapyard in Leith which featured in the second Trainspotting film. The latest plans feature a mixture of build-to-rent flats and student accommodation.
DON’T ‘JUST GET ON WITH IT’: Speaking at the launch of a drive to encourage Scottish men to get tested for prostate cancer, Sir Chris Hoy has highlighted a national trait many of you might recognise, the tendency to ignore important issues and just soldier on. He told The Herald: “As men, we are often at fault for prioritising others things. Life is busy, there's always something else to do and personally, my situation was that I always assumed that there would be some kind of symptoms or early warning signs.” Shockingly, Scottish men are more than three times more likely to have stage four prostate cancer than those living in London. Early detection is the key to high survival chances, through a simple PSA blood test.
DALMAHOY DELAY: Long-awaited safety improvements at the A71 Dalmahoy junction on the edge of Edinburgh has been delayed after the death of one of the landowners held up talks to buy land crucial to the £1.6m project.
Your Pick of the (Cultural) Pops
Will’s copy and pic go in here
Greetings, Pop Pickers!
Welcome back to the chart. As the clocks prepare to spring forward, we have a proper shake-up in the list this week. A host of fresh entries means our previous heavyweights are gracefully bowing out of the top spots.
Before we kick off the official countdown, let’s look at who has dropped out of the Top 5...
Honourable Mentions: One Day & Death on the Nile. After briefly holding the top spot only to drop mid-table, One Day (Royal Lyceum Theatre, until April 5th) sinks into the honourable mentions. The drama has stayed with me (in retrospect, it is almost certainly far better done than the rather soppy Netflix version), but I couldn’t whistle you a single bar from the show only a couple of weeks later. Meanwhile, Death on the Nile (Festival Theatre, March 24th – 28th) continues its run, but you only have a few days left to catch this lovely, surprisingly humorous production before it skedaddles.
New in at Number 5 is... The Light House (Traverse Theatre, March 28th). Created and performed by Alys Williams, The Light House is an autobiographical real-life love story about holding on when the person you love doesn’t want to be alive. Balancing heavy themes with puppetry and clowning, it has received consistent praise from critics since its debut. The Traverse is definitely the right intimate space for Scottish audiences to catch its Scottish premiere.
New in at Number 4 is... Footloose (Edinburgh Music Theatre, March 31st - April 4th 2026). This musical enjoyed a stronger run on Broadway than it did in the West End back at the turn of the millennium. Still, there’s no doubting the nostalgic power of Footloose, or the appeal of Kenny Loggins’ iconic theme. Edinburgh Music Theatre haven’t been thriving amongst the elite world of the city’s unpaid professional theatre scene for so long without doing plenty of things right. I expect this to be a superbly fun, boppable night out, whether or not the drama is quite up to snuff.
New in at Number 3 is... The Capital Theatres Double Bill. In fairness to the other venues around town, I’m grouping these two Capital Theatres shows into a single entry.
First up is The Constant Wife (Festival Theatre, March 31st – April 4th). When the Royal Shakespeare Company puts a show on tour, they generally mean business, and as seals of quality go, there are few with more cachet in the country. Adapted by Laura Wade and directed by Tamara Harvey, this staging of W. Somerset Maugham’s razor-sharp 1920s comedy delighted audiences and critics alike during its original run. Frankly, if you can trust the RSC to stage Shakespeare, you can trust them with Maugham.
Over at the smaller stage, we have Crime and Punishment (The Studio, April 1st – 4th). This Northern Broadsides production arrives with some serious provenance. Directed by Laurie Sansom and starring Connor Curren, expect this one to be one of the more ambitious and intense productions to grace the Studio stage yet.
New in at Number 2 is... Amy Mason: Behold! (The Stand, March 26th). I loved this show from the brilliant Amy Mason when I caught it at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe. Between a mysterious box of bidirectional sex toys, getting hacked, running out of meds, and somehow losing the actual doors to her house, Mason delivers an hour of wonderfully deadpan chaos. She is smart, sharply observed, and thoroughly hilarious. She is playing for one night only, and you really should go to it.
And new at Number 1 is... BBC SSO: Pelléas et Mélisande (Usher Hall, March 29th).
Taking the top spot this week is the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra flexing its production muscle to assemble rather a mighty line-up for a concert performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The casting is genuinely top-tier: soprano Sophie Bevan MBE brings her highly respected pedigree to the role of Mélisande, while English baritone Huw Montague Rendall takes on Pelléas. He has been quietly establishing himself as a fixture across European houses, with Le Figaro recently going so far as to dub him the Pelléas of his generation.
Concert-stage operas in the Usher Hall work a treat thanks to its glorious acoustics and a stage with enough space to allow a touch of theatrics to gild the lily. If you want to hear exceptional vocal talent tackling a complex score, this is the ticket to book.
And that’s your Top 5! Get out there, book some tickets, and tell them who sent you. As always, I’d love to hear whether we put you onto a good thing, or if you think we sent you out for a night to forget!
Social care face further damaging cuts in the Capital
But disastrous slashing of services provided by Third Sector will not be repeated
by Sarah McArthur
The downgrading of social care services in the Capital is set to continue with further significant savings being ordered following successive rounds of cuts in recent years.
The Edinburgh’s Integration Joint Board (IJB), the partnership between NHS Lothian and the city council which oversees social care services in the city, has approved a plan to cut another £18 million from its £968 million budget for the 202672027 financial year. While the board’s Chief Officer Christine Laverty said the IJB is in a “better position than last year,” the leadership of Edinburgh’s health and social care partners argued further cuts are necessary because costs are rising faster than funding.
