Chamber and committees

On the practicalities of local authority partners implementing elements of the bill, one issue relates to supervision or guidance for those over the age of 18 and aftercare for those leaving secure care. As has been mentioned, COSLA gave evidence to the committee last week. Ben Farrugia and Jillian Gibson highlighted the difficulty of costing aftercare support. Ben Farrugia said that local authorities have to find a way to fund aftercare packages, because that is a statutory duty for them, and that that sometimes leads to overspends, which means that savings and cuts have to be made elsewhere. Jillian Gibson, from COSLA, said that the bill will expand aftercare support to more 16 and 17-year-olds but, as has been mentioned, there is no way to know what support needs those young people will have and, therefore, what the costs will be. Do you have any ideas?

I thank the witnesses for their useful information, which will help us going forward. Speaking of going forward, the work that you all do helps in the development of young people so that they can become better and stronger adults.

On the terms of supervision or guidance post-18, the committee heard at stage 1 that there is a need to ensure that young people do not face a “cliff edge” of support at the age of 18. To what extent can the updated costings—to come back to those—enable that issue to be addressed?

That is very helpful. Thank you.

On that basis, are the numbers of 16 to 18-year-olds coming through those services increasing, decreasing or standing still? How do you plan for what will be required in the future? Has that been thought about?

I can see that Stephen Bermingham wants to come in.

That is extremely useful. As you know, the updated financial information estimates the cost of providing aftercare support for children over the age of 16 when they leave secure care at around £200,000 a year. It is being suggested, as you have addressed, that that could be absorbed into existing aftercare services. Has how much would be required going forward been thought about if that money cannot be absorbed into existing budgets? It is a considerable sum of money considering the number of young people we are talking about. Are there on-going talks to address that issue?

On what happens in New Zealand, where Scotland has links and all sorts of stuff, do we need to learn more about what is going on over there and are correspondence and conversations, at least, needed between Scotland and New Zealand to develop that? Perhaps we could move things on better by working together.

Thank you for your responses so far. Section 8 talks about regulatory categories and sets out that a regulator of legal services providers is subject to different requirements according to whether it has been assigned as a category 1 or category 2 regulator. It says that the Law Society of Scotland is assigned as a category 1 regulator and that the Faculty of Advocates and the Association of Commercial Attorneys are assigned as category 2 regulators.

As you have already noted, section 8(5) gives a power to Scottish ministers that would enable them to reassign legal regulators between category 1 and category 2, which would change the requirements that such legal services regulators are subject to. The Scottish Government has stated that that regulation-making power is required so that ministers can respond to any fundamental changes that regulators undergo. Can you imagine what those fundamental changes would be?

Morag, would you like to add anything?

Those are very clear standpoints. Thank you very much indeed.