Seòmar agus comataidhean

Before I let John Mason come in, Michelle Thomson has a supplementary question.

Good morning, and welcome to the 24th meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Under our first agenda item, we will take evidence from the Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport on the financial memorandum for the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. The minister is joined by Scottish Government officials Donna Bell, the director of social care and national care service development, and Fiona Bennett, the interim deputy director for national health service, integration and social care finance. I welcome the witnesses to the meeting.

I invite the minister to make a short opening statement.

I know that consultancy figures are around £246,000 less than anticipated, but it still seems an awful lot of money for training people on a bill when we do not know how it will look. It is clear in the papers that we have received that a lot of the co-design work continues to take place. What was the staff training on?

You will understand that that makes scrutiny quite difficult. Minister, in your letter of 9 May, you said:

“It is not possible to separate costs relating to the provisions of the Bill and those which result from the wider NCS programme.”

That makes it very difficult to assess whether public money is being spent effectively. Can you give us a wee bit more information on that? One reason that the financial memorandum caused such alarm to the committee was because we were not getting those breakdowns and because of the scale of the money involved.

I will go into the figures in a minute or two, just before I let colleagues in, but I note that you said in your letter:

“An initial consensus proposal between the Scottish Government and Cosla (on behalf of local government) has been formed on a partnership approach that will provide for shared legal accountability. This will improve the experience of people accessing services by introducing a new structure of national oversight to drive consistency of outcomes, whilst maximising the benefits of a reformed local service delivery.”

You have also talked about the formation of a national board to provide

“national oversight and governance of social work, social care support and community health”.

How will that body actually work? When is it likely to be up and running, so to speak?

One of the figures that draws the eye is expenditure on engagement. It was envisaged in 2022-23 that the cost would be £475,000, but it turned out to be £1,026,000. The cost has also declined to a very small £7,000 in the most recent quarter of the current financial year. Why did the Scottish Government get the figures for engagement so out of kilter, and why has there been such a decline in the costs? I would have thought that with co-design there would have been more rather than less engagement. What is the Scottish Government’s thinking in that respect?

I hope that we will get more detail on that in the financial memorandum. I do not expect you to say, for example, 63.5 per cent, but it would be helpful to know the ballpark shares that we are talking about—perhaps two thirds or a half.

I appreciate the time given by the minister and her officials. In order to prepare for the next evidence session, we will have a wee break.

I had an Ardnamurchan holiday back in 1998 or 1999 and it was exactly like that then. It is clearly an issue in that part of Scotland. The only thing that I could get to feed the kids was beans, chips and chicken nuggets, which was not what I wanted to feed them. That was a quarter of a century ago.

I thank our witnesses for their contributions. We have run a wee bit over our time, but that is testament to the evidence that we have heard today. We will continue taking evidence on the sustainability of Scotland’s finances at our next meeting, when we will hear from the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Finance.

That concludes the public part of today’s meeting. The next item on our agenda, which we will discuss in private, is consideration of our work programme. We will move into private session and there will be a two minute break to allow our witnesses to leave.

Thank you. It is important to get that clarification on the record.

One of the things that concerns me—I am sure that other members will raise this issue—is that the costs that have been provided, such as those for 2021-22, 2022-23 and the current year, do not give us much more than the top-line costs. It would be useful to dig down into the costs, so I will do a wee bit of digging and I am sure that colleagues will do more of that as the meeting progresses.

In your opening statement, you talked about the need to look again at the profiling of expenditure. The annex in our papers shows the actual costs after revision, which are obviously the most important ones. In 2021-22, £1.387 million was spent on staff. In the following year, the figure increased quite dramatically to £9.8 million. One would anticipate that, because a lot more work was done to flesh out the bill. However, in the first quarter of the current financial year, the figure seems to have fallen back quite significantly to £923,000, which is only about a third of the quarterly spend in the previous financial year. Can you explain why there has been such a dramatic change in those figures?