Chamber and committees

A number of things are going on at the moment. We have, of course, listened to folk all the way through the process, and there has been a huge amount of engagement across the board by not only me but officials. For example, the national care service forum brought a huge number of people in person to Perth concert hall as well as a lot of folk online, including for a lot of stuff before the event.

We are now at the stage of recruiting for lived experience panels—lived experience expert panels, I should say. More than 450 folk have applied, and we are encouraging folk from throughout the country with different experiences to play a part in that.

Beyond that, we recognise that that is not for everyone. We are also involved in targeted engagement, supported by the third sector, and that will continue. People with lived experience will also be able to participate in the options appraisal that I talked about. Options appraisal workshops will be led by the Scottish Government specifically for people with lived experience of justice social work.

I am absolutely adamant that we will continue to listen to the voices of lived experience all the way through our journey. Earlier, I talked about the implementation gaps that we all know exist in service delivery. I truly believe that the only way that we can plug those implementation gaps is by having folk with lived experience help us to shape those services, along with front-line staff.

Absolutely. If we look at some of the survey work that the professional bodies have carried out, we see that some of that stress is caused by the fact that folk feel bound by budgets and eligibility criteria.

I come back to my earlier points about creating freedom and autonomy; being person centred in providing support; and changing the current situation, in which there is a huge amount of spend on crisis, by moving to prevention. That reduces not only the cost to the public purse but the human cost.

I think that a lot of the stress that is felt—I am sure that the committee has heard this from front-line social workers, too—is because folk do not feel that they are able to put in the right help and support at the right time. That is what we need to change.

I will try to answer everybody’s concerns and to find solutions to everything that is put in front of us. The Finance and Public Administration Committee went over that in some depth, as others have. Local authorities are concerned about the movement of budgets. I reiterate what I said to the Finance and Public Administration Committee: we will try to make it cost neutral. I want to ensure that we co-operate and collaborate to the max with local authorities.

Unfortunately, COSLA is not at the table on some of those issues at the moment. I hope that that will change, because COSLA needs to be at the table too. Others will be at the table for the co-design of the national care service, and COSLA needs to be there on all the issues—not just some of them—so that its views are also heard.

As I have said, there is worry about resourcing. Let us be honest: there always is. That is the way of the world. However, as I said to the Finance and Public Administration Committee, we will try to make this as cost neutral as possible for local authorities.

It might be helpful if I quote from the policy memorandum. The bill comes with a suite of other documents, and I am not sure that everyone has looked at those. It says:

“Section 30 of the Bill requires the Scottish Ministers to consult publicly about any proposed transfer relating to justice services using the enabling power before regulations are brought forward. When laying draft regulations to transfer JSW functions, the Scottish Ministers must also lay before Parliament a summary of the process by which they consulted in relation to the function transfer and the responses they received to that consultation.”

As I said, we are not necessarily talking about the wholesale transfer of staff. I have said that to every committee. However, no matter what, we need to get to a point at which we stop the kind of churn that Jamie Greene talked about earlier and, across the board, put in place the right pay and conditions for staff to aid recruitment and retention in social work and social care.

I know that the convener has asked me to be brief, and I could wax lyrical—maybe not so lyrical—or talk for hours about our ambitions for ethical procurement. Rather than me doing that just now, as I have done so elsewhere, perhaps I should just write to the committee about it.

No, I do not necessarily accept that. We have had situations in which a huge amount of tendering has gone on and the winning of contracts has been based on price. I will be honest with you: omissions from such contracting frustrated me over the years in which I was in a local authority—I hasten to add that not everything that we did was based on price. Other elements should be put into procurements. Fair work is the main example. We are looking at other elements that can be built into all of that.

Currently, there is a mixed economy for care. Let us be honest: the third sector plays a hugely important role in all of this, and I am quite sure that nobody wants to omit it as we move forward. Ethical procurement will drive up transparency and bring fair work into play. I will write to the committee in some depth about ethical procurement.

The independent review of adult social care recommended the establishment of a national organisation for training, development, recruitment and retention of adult social care support, including that specific social work agency for the oversight of professional development. Again, the policy memorandum outlines the intention to establish the agency.

A number of folk have come to me with comments about the social work aspect of the bill, and we will continue to listen to what folk are suggesting. We feel from our perspective that it should be part of a national care service but, as we have gone along, we have listened to people, and we will flex, if need be, on that front. If someone can convince me of the advantages of the agency being entirely separate from Government, I will listen to them. However, we have to remember the huge linkages between community health, social work and social care, and we do not want to create any further fragmentation in that respect.

As the committee will imagine, I have had a fair amount of meetings over the piece with various social work bodies—at this point, I should apologise for missing one such meeting last week, because I was unwell—but we will continue to do that and listen to people’s voices as we move forward. As I have said, though, I have to be cognisant of the linkages and whether a different approach will cause fragmentation—and, if so, what that will mean for service delivery to people, which, after all, is the number 1 issue.

I am sorry that I did not quite get it.

That is a huge question, which might take a long time to answer. I will be as brief as I can, and I will fill in some of the other detail in writing to the committee.

With regard to the care boards themselves and the design work regarding who is around the table and all the rest, that is, as I have already said this morning, part of the co-design process.

It has been thrown at me that the bill itself means that I or my successors could appoint and discard care board members at will. That is not the case—many of the powers that we are talking about in the bill are for NHS boards, and such powers are used extremely sparingly indeed.

However, I probably need to tease out even more detail on that area for the committee, so if the convener agrees, I will follow up on that in writing. I will also provide the committee with some of the comparisons that I have made with other bodies, if that would suit you.

On the last point in your question—the independence of this one, that one and the other—we will have to work some of those questions through. It has to be part of the co-design process. We have to consider the accountability aspects, too.

Some of that will be worked through in the co-design but we hope that we will have a skeleton—a draft—of it all by next summer. That is ambitious but I am sure that, with the co-operation of the folk who are helping us to develop the service, it is achievable.