Chamber and committees

I call Paul O’Kane.

Welcome back. We move on to evidence from our second panel as part of our scrutiny of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. In this session, we will focus on local government.

One of our panellists joins us online and the other two are here in person. With us in person are Councillor Paul Kelly, health and social care spokesperson for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and Eddie Fraser, chief executive of East Ayrshire Council, who is representing the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers Scotland. Joining us online is Jackie Buchanan, director of legal and democratic services at Angus Council, who is representing the Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland. I welcome you all.

I hand over to the deputy convener, who will start off our questioning.

I have a follow-up to Carol Mochan’s questions about consistency. Was it not a geographical inconsistency that led to the calls for Anne’s law? In some areas, care homes were very good at realising people’s human rights—and, at this point, I must declare an interest, in that my grandmother’s care home allowed visiting throughout the pandemic, although in a very safe way. However, we have heard complaints from other parts of the country, where people were effectively kept away from vulnerable adults, and that is what has led to the calls for Anne’s law. Is not the whole point of ministerial accountability to address that differentiation and lack of a consistent application of human rights across the country by having the ability to centrally monitor whether those rights are being adhered to consistently throughout Scotland?

I come back to the idea of people’s awareness of their rights and of which body they go to if they have a complaint. Is that not really the issue here? Is it not, as Frank Jarvis has said, all about the mechanism?

The bill is a framework bill that will allow co-design to happen. That will then inform the secondary legislation, which is where the detail will lie. We hear—as an elected member, you probably hear this too—that the public sometimes feel that things are done to them in a top-down way. There is a desire to put the voices of lived experience at the heart of the process so that the system is co-designed and the secondary legislation actively meets people’s needs. Are you saying that that is the wrong way to do things?

I will bring in Stephanie Callaghan, who is online.

We will now move to the issue of local accountability, which has been much discussed throughout the session. As Sandesh Gulhane has a question on that, I will go to him first and then come to Paul O’Kane. After that, we must wrap things up.

I am conscious that a member of our panel is joining us online. Jackie Buchanan, if you want to come in at any point, let us know in the chat box. Because you have not come in so far, I want to bring you in now to give your view on some of the points that have been raised in this part, before we move to the next theme.

We can hear you fine.

Tess White has some questions.