Chamber and committees

You are trying to paint me into a corner. That is part of the co-design process. We must discuss with folks how they see the future. I would not paint myself into a corner by saying that the minimum would be eight or nine or the maximum would be 32. A fair number of ideas and suggestions will come out during the co-design work. I have heard a lot of ideas and suggestions myself, but I will leave others to bring those to the table when it comes to co-design.

Is that helpful?

What we will continue to do as we move forward, as I said earlier, is to update all of our assumptions in the FM and business cases, but I do not think that it is possible to change the financial memorandum before stage 3.

I have said on the record that we will consult stakeholders and the public on the secondary legislation and that we will allow the maximum time for scrutiny. We need to get this absolutely right. I am not in the business of rushing that secondary legislation. To get this right, we have to take the necessary time.

No.

At no point today have I used the term “standardisation”, and I never will.

I do not like folk putting words in my mouth: I have not, at any point today, indicated that there are likely to be fewer care boards. I have not said that at all. I have said that everything is subject to co-design. As regards personalisation, the person-centred approach will be at very the heart of all that we do. We have moved in the direction of personalisation, which has made advances in some ways, but not in others. We want to ensure that people have as much autonomy and freedom as they can have regarding some of the services that they require.

Let me give the committee an example. One frustration for me concerns self-directed support. The Parliament passed the Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013, which was very good in its intention. Folk have found loopholes in some of the primary legislation and in many places they have not gone with the spirit of the act. We are currently changing the guidance again, so as to change the position, but we need to go further to allow people the autonomy and freedom to commission their own care if that is what they want to do, giving them the options that were laid out in the 2013 act, many of which are not available in certain local authority areas.

Beyond that, we should listen to people about where the legislation has worked for them and where it has failed. There are examples of local flexibilities that have been put in place and which have been absolute game changers in some people’s lives, yet other people in other parts of the country have not had access to the same services—services that would make their lives much better.

The scenario that I have highlighted concerns the personalisation of services to a greater degree, putting human rights at the very heart of things. In some places, we have not done very well on that front.

I will not pluck figures out of my head. That is one of the reasons why we have said that we will come back to the committee with business cases for other aspects of the bill. We must have a general stock take of what we have at the moment and whether we are able to use current systems and enable them to talk to one another.

Having been involved in public service for a fair amount of time, I am aware that there have been some IT difficulties in the past, some of which Mr Johnson has highlighted. I was involved in a project in which we replaced a system, which, to be frank, was the wrong thing to do because the existing system could and should have been adapted.

We need to have a stock take of all that. We need to see what is required and put forward the right business case. I assure the committee that, because I am well aware of IT cost overruns from a past life, I will keep a close eye on every aspect of the delivery of an IT system if it is required.

First, I do not recognise the figure of £7 billion being spent on social care that Mr Johnson mentioned. [Interruption.] I am just being corrected. That is the assumption for 2026-27.

As to whether I expect there to be a recouping of investment, again, I will not give an answer off the top of my head. I refer back to what I said earlier. At the moment, data collection is not easy. There is a clunkiness out there—there is a lack of connection. It is almost inevitable that that lack of data will lead to some wrong decision making at various points, which always costs money. That lack of data means that, at times, we do not have the ability to shape services in the way that we should in order to future proof them and make them sustainable.

If the question is whether, in the long term, that data collection will lead to savings, the answer is undoubtedly yes, but it would be foolish of me to make assumptions now about what those savings are likely to be.

As I have said on numerous occasions today, the financial memorandum covers the bill. As far as other aspects are concerned, without going along the same lines as Mr Johnson has done, we have said that, in order to get this right, we are allowing a process of co-design to take place. We will come back with business cases for every aspect that comes out of that, which will show costs as well as savings that are likely to be accrued through those investments. We will show how we can save by eradicating the implementation gap that we know exists between policy and delivery. We will do all that openly and transparently.

However, as I have said, today we are here to talk about the financial memorandum to the bill, and many of the things that Daniel Johnson has asked about are not part of the bill. That is not to say that we will not come back to Parliament—we will probably do so again and again—with the business cases, which the committee will rightly expect to be able to scrutinise to ensure that we are on the right track when it comes to the delivery of social care for the people of Scotland.