Chamber and committees

Is there a wide variety of legal set-ups that we could have for the care boards?

As the convener said, there is quite a lot in here. I understand the point that pay for care workers is not part of the bill and therefore not part of the financial memorandum, and that whether care workers get paid more is a completely different issue. However, the right for carers to breaks from caring is part of the bill. Therefore, should all the costs of that be in the financial memorandum?

I get the point about pay, terms and conditions, but surely the cost of breaks for carers is part of the bill.

That means that the financial memorandum contains quite a lot of assumptions. As you work on and develop the bill, how will the Parliament and the committee be able to keep an eye on things? As has been pointed out, we will look at an FM in quite a lot of detail, but we do not often see much of the detail with regard to secondary legislation. How can the committee and the Parliament look at that?

Would you provide that information, say, every quarter or when you reached a significant stage? Would you do that by updating the financial memorandum?

The whole area of assets and borrowing could also be complex. CIPFA, I think, has raised the question whether—to take an obvious example—a care home that belonged to the council would transfer and, if so, what would happen with the borrowing. After all, most councils will have borrowed to finance such provision, although, in Glasgow, I think that a number of smaller care homes were got rid of in order to build some larger new ones. Would that sort of thing be taken on a case-by-case basis, too?

It was not made by you; it was made in one of the submissions.

The words “best value” have been used. It appears that £500 million to £1,000 million over the next five years will go into the structure of the new organisation. Is your argument that, if we have that kind of money sitting around, it is not best value to set up a new structure and that it would be better to use that money to increase wages or to improve the existing system?

Without being too specific, can you say whether Glasgow would, in general, use a prudential framework or whatever to borrow for such developments?

Some councils, if their care homes were built a while ago, will have paid off the debt, so the asset would not have any debt linked to it.