Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good morning. Thank you for having me along to give evidence.

It is fair to say that the national care service is one of the most ambitious reforms of public services. It will end the postcode lottery of care provision across Scotland and ensure that the people who need it have access to consistent, high-quality care and support to enable them to live a full life wherever they are.

The NCS bill sets out a framework for the changes that we want to make and allows scope for further decisions to be made. That flexibility enables the NCS to develop, adapt and respond to specific circumstances over time. I will reflect on why change of that scale is necessary.

Scotland’s community health and social care system has seen significant incremental change over the past 20 years. Despite that, people with experience of receiving care support, and of providing it, have been clear that there remain some significant issues.

We are not making changes to address only the challenges of today. We must ensure that we build a public service that is fit for tomorrow. About one person in 25 receives social care, social work and occupational health support in Scotland. Demand is forecast to grow and the NCS must be developed to take account of our future needs.

We will build a sustainable and future-proofed system to take account of the changing needs of our population. The principles of any new system will be person centred, with human rights at the centre of social care. That means that the NCS will be delivered in a way that respects, protects and fulfils the human rights of people who access care support, and their carers.

Improved carer support is one of the core objectives of establishing the NCS. As part of the human rights-based, outcome-focused approach, carers and people with care needs will be able to access support that is preventative and consistent across Scotland.

Nationally and locally, the NCS will work with specialist charity and third sector providers of social care as well as other third sector organisations in the field of social care to meet the needs of people.

The NCS will bring changes that will benefit the workforce, too. The importance of staff in the social care sector has never been clearer and we are fully committed to improving their experience, as we recognise and value the work that they do. The NCS will ensure enhanced pay and conditions for workers and will act as an exemplar in its approach to fair work.

Our co-design process will ensure that the NCS is built with the people that it serves, and those that deliver it, at its heart. We are committed to working with people with first-hand experience of accessing and delivering community health and social care to ensure that we have a person-centred national care service that best fits the needs of the people who will use and work in its services. Human rights will be at its heart.

Mr Briggs and others around the table know the role that I had previously and the changes that we made to homelessness legislation and regulation, as well as changes to culture. I certainly want to ensure that all of that hard work continues to bear fruit. Without doubt, that means that there has to be an interconnection of services. I recognise, as we all do, how valuable the interfaces between the national care service and housing and homelessness services will be.

We are working closely with stakeholders through the development of the national care service to make sure that all of those links are in place. We have already held our first round-table meeting with the homelessness prevention and strategy group, which I used to chair, and we will continue to engage regularly and meaningfully with the sector. I have met people, as you would expect. No matter what is in or out of the national care service, we have to make sure that those linkages with all services are there. I do not want any difficulties with transition phases such as we have seen before.

In my work with colleagues across Government, we are clear that we have to get all those linkages absolutely right; that is why there is a lot of work going on in the background. Some may argue that that involves diverting resource to deal with the NCS rather than the here and now, but a huge amount of that work needs to be done anyway in order to improve linkages and prevent difficult transitions. I am well aware of where there could be blips, and we are doing everything possible to ensure that those connections are there.

We can easily do that. We can keep the committee and Parliament up to date about how we are getting on.

There have been 400 registrations for the lived experience experts panel so far. I want that number to be much higher and we will do all that we can to boost that. There is also the stakeholder register that I mentioned already. I want as many people as possible to play a role.

Beyond the lived experience panel and stakeholder groups, I will continue doing what I have always done, which is to go out and about and listen. That is the essential element in all of this. Sometimes, when you go out, you find that folk have come up with a simple solution that has never been tried before or that happens in one place but not in another. We must export the best practice that exists. This is quite a small country, but we have sometimes not done that particularly well. The NCS gives us an opportunity to do that better, but that does not mean that we should not be doing that in the here and now.

The purpose of the charter is to ensure that everyone knows and understands their rights and responsibilities and what to expect from the future national care service. In addition, the charter will provide information on the process for upholding those rights.

The forthcoming Scottish human rights bill will underpin in statute human rights in Scotland, and we are working across Government to ensure that the co-design work which is taking place will reflect the contents of that future bill. The intention is to include information on the NCS complaints and redress system, which will provide the necessary recourse if the rights in the charter are breached. That will provide a clear pathway to empower people to claim their care-specific rights, through raising awareness of those rights and informing people about how to bring a complaint should those rights not be met.

Obviously, there will be a shift of resources in ensuring that we get care delivery right. Some local authorities have expressed concerns that that may impact on other services. As we move forward, we are trying to reach a cost-neutral position, so that those impacts are not there. One of the main reasons why I want to ensure that COSLA, local authorities, SOLACE and others take part in the co-design process is so that we get it absolutely right.

There are huge opportunities here for all of us. As I have stated, this is about a change of accountability, but local services still need to be designed and delivered locally, and local government can and should still play a part in all of that. In that regard, I think that there is not much difference.

The difficulty that some folk foresee is with that change in accountability, but accountability has changed dramatically over the past years anyway, with integration joint boards and other things.

I should point out that the bill itself does not have a direct impact on local authorities, as it is a framework bill. Instead, it sets out the powers to transfer services from local authorities, and any regulations that are developed on the basis of those powers will be subject to further impact assessment, as I have said elsewhere.

As we are still co-designing the national care service and how it will work in practice, we do not yet have the full details that are necessary to evaluate all of the impacts. Parliament will have the opportunity to scrutinise those impacts once they are known. I again say that a huge amount of what we are doing will be subject to the co-design process and that I want local government to be involved in that all the way through.

Some of the same things were said just before we moved to integration joint boards. It was said at that point that many folk might choose not to stand for local government. I have no evidence of that, and it would be difficult for me to judge the position in other parties. Even with those changes, from the perspective of my party in my neck of the woods, more people have come forward to stand for election. Of course, that means that there will be much more choice as we move forward.

I have no evidence that the removal of social care from councils would be a barrier to people standing for local office. The same things were said previously, and I have seen no change. In fact, the opposite is the case.

With regard to your previous question about the charter, I have found the relevant bit of my notes. As you can imagine, I have piles of documents in front of me. The national care service proposals are fully compatible with the articles of the European Charter of Local Self-Government. The charter clearly states that, when responsibility is allocated to another authority, the extent and nature of the tasks concerned and the requirements with regard to efficiency and economy should be weighed up. As the committee is well aware, the independent review of adult social care was clear about the need for a national care service, given the extent and nature of social care. I hope that that is helpful.

I disagree completely and utterly because we are not setting up a quango; we are setting up a national care service for the good of the people of Scotland. I return to my earlier points around and about the huge opportunities that we have to get delivery right for the people of Scotland. The main reason for doing this is to ensure that we have a care system that is person centred and has human rights at its very heart. We need national high-quality standards, as I have said before.

We also need to sort out the accountability aspect. It has come out loud and clear from people that that is not right and that, in many cases, we are not serving them well. We need to deal with that.

From a union perspective—I declare an interest as a member of Unison—this is the greatest opportunity that there has ever been to get it right for the social care and social work professions, because of the opportunity for national sectoral bargaining to put right pay and conditions and, as I said previously, to create the right career pathways for folk. That will attract young people to the profession, which is not easy to do. One of the biggest takeaways that I have had from the young people in front-line social care and social work whom I have spoken to is that they want to see career pathways.

It has not yet been mentioned this morning, but this gives us the opportunity to embed ethical procurement in all that we do and to put fair work at the heart of it. I recognise that some people see negatives in what we are doing. There are always vested interests, but I ask that we balance that out with the needs of the people. I ask not only that we listen to the folks who are giving negative evidence—although it is not wholly negative, because almost everybody says that we need a national care service and that we need change—but that we look at the positives in all this and, in particular, listen to the voices of lived experience.

If anyone was transferred in relation to the aspects that I laid out earlier, the local care board would be the employer. I do not think that the setting up of the national care service is a leap of faith at all. I think that it is the greatest opportunity for the social care and social work workforce that there has been for many years. It gives us the opportunity for national sectoral bargaining, which does not currently exist. It gives us the opportunity to drive up pay and conditions and to put in place career pathways that many young folk in social care and social work do not think exist at the moment.

When change is proposed, we are always likely to get the negatives first. However, from a workforce point of view, the national care service probably represents the greatest opportunity that has existed for the profession for a very long time, if not ever.

As I said earlier about the local government workforce, I do not envisage there being a huge transfer of staff from local authorities to local care boards. Obviously, there will be discussions about that in the co-design process, but I see no reason for that to happen—unless, of course, a local authority chooses not to deliver care any more, which I cannot see happening. I do not envisage the transfer of a huge number of staff from the third sector to local care boards, either. I want to be very clear about that.

I say to Mr Briggs and others that, as part of my job, I see it as being absolutely at the top of the agenda to listen to the voices of lived experience, but also to speak to front-line staff. I have been open with front-line staff about their ability to speak to me and officials directly, and I have gone out of my way to hear views. At a recent meeting of the cross-party group on social work, for example, I made it clear that social workers should be telling us what they need, what change they want to see and what would make their jobs better. That is the way that we intend to proceed and that is the way that we will continue to operate as we move forward on that front.