Earlier this month, the Scottish Parliament’s health committee heard how £28million had been spent on “work related to” the National Care Service (NCS) Bill.

Much of this cost included private consultancy fees in developing a new quango infrastructure to deliver the service.

Was this a good use of public money? Putting the cash on a bonfire would at least have generated some heat because, so far, we have a pointless, useless and botched bill.

Scotland’s local authorities and Cosla – the body which represents them collectively – walked away from the bill this month and no longer support it. As have the trade unions who represent the care workers.

Presumably, the only supporters of the bill are the Scottish Government and folk hoping to secure a remunerated gig in quango Scot-o-land.

Karen Hedge, deputy chief executive of Scottish Care, advised the health committee that one million hours of social care could have been funded with the £28m spent so far on the NCS.

Ministers rebuffed calls to ditch their flagship policy. If the bill was a flagship, it had all the attributes of Scotland’s delayed ferries.

The new national quango isn’t expected for another four or five years, at a cost that no-one really knows – with estimates from £500m to £2billion.

Most of this spending is to create unelected boards, as opposed to giving people more care or paying workers better wages.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the NCS was a pledge in the SNP’s manifesto for the 2021 Holyrood election. Three years on, we are no further forward and social care services have arguably declined with a reduction in funding.

Rachel Cackett, of the Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland, told the health committee: “We have people who are struggling to keep services going and we have 6,000 people waiting for a social care assessment and more than 3,000 not getting the care that they are assessed as needing.”

I was writing about the NCS in this column three years ago and my assessment then was it was ostensibly a power grab from local government.

The Scottish Government did this with the police and the fire service. That’s the problem with Holyrood. It has become a centralising power magnet.

First Minister John Swinney said the NCS is the “most effective way” of improving care services across the country. I disagree.

Scottish ministers could raise care standards uniformly across Scotland right now by issuing statutory guidance or directions to local councils in the exercise of their social care functions.

They have the power to do so under section 5 of the 1968 Social Work (Scotland) Act.

Section 5(1A) of the 1968 Act allows ministers to “issue directions to local authorities, either individually or collectively, as to the manner in which they are to exercise any of their functions under this Act or any of the enactments mentioned in subsection (1B); and a local authority shall comply with any direction made under this subsection”.

The fact is we don’t need an NCS bill. We need investment in local government.

We could easily use a fraction of the money earmarked for the bill to invest in social care services and implement the 2021 manifesto promise to abolish charging people for community care to lead an independent life.