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I will come in on that. Some of the areas that you have highlighted are outlined in the policy memorandum as ones that require further detailed development, including those costings. We should perhaps have communicated with folk a little bit better around the fact that the documentation that we have produced forms a suite of complementary information to support transparency in all of this. Some stakeholders have picked that up a little better than others. In that suite of documents, we have been open and transparent not only about the work that we have done and the financial memorandum as it pertains to the bill but about the other work that needs to be done and how we go about doing it.

No, I do not. The financial memorandum covers the bill—that is the estimated cost of establishing a national care service as per the bill. What some other folk want at the moment is the detail around aspects of the costs of service delivery and other aspects that we have said will be subject to the co-design process. As I said to other members, it would be wrong to make assumptions about those costs, because the people who we want to be involved in the co-design process would say that we had made up our minds about how we would progress because we had already attached a financial cost to it.

In my responses to the convener and Ms Thomson earlier, I said that that co-design work will be subject to individual business cases, and I am more than happy for the committee and Parliament to scrutinise all that as we move forward. We will be open and transparent about everything, but we will not make assumptions before that co-design work is completed. I reiterate that the financial memorandum provides the estimated cost as per the bill.

I have already mentioned people from the Fraser of Allander Institute approaching civil servants on the financial memorandum. I will bring Ms Bennett in, because she will have featured in those discussions. As I said, my understanding is that they got no new information in that regard but were pointed in the right direction in relation to what is in the financial memorandum.

No, I do not accept that, because some of the folks you mentioned want information and assumptions around some of the things that we have said will be subject to co-design. I canna reiterate this point enough: if we come out now with financial assumptions on some of the aspects of the work that we want to achieve through co-design, people will think that co-design is a sham. I want folk to be involved in that co-design process to ensure that we have good law that leads to good implementation and that bridges the gulf in relation to the implementation gap.

I know that some folks out there—I know this because I speak to them—want to have detail about every aspect of service delivery as we move forward, but we cannot give that at this moment in time, because that would breach our pledge to co-design with the voices of lived experience, stakeholders and others.

The bill is there, and the financial memorandum covers the bill. We will come back again and again with the business cases for what comes out of the co-design process to allow further scrutiny, but I will not be bounced into making assumptions about what some aspects of the co-design work will cost, because folk out there would think that we had already made up our minds about how to move forward.

I do not think that it is a daft laddie question at all. It is a ducks-in-a-row situation. What we need to do is progress with the primary legislation and then move on to the co-design process for the secondary legislation and the service delivery. If we had done it the other way round, folk could equally have asked, “Why did you not deal with the primary legislation—the framework—first before moving on to the co-designing of secondary legislation and services?”

Ms Bennett will respond to that question.

I do not see that at all, but, again, we are going through a co-design process. I do not see there being more. The national aspect of this is not about national commissioning. What has been made very clear to us by the public at large, and by many stakeholders in the third sector and elsewhere, is that there should be national accountability. That came out very clearly in the recommendations from Derek Feeley’s independent review. People feel that that accountability is sadly lacking, so this is about strengthening local accountability and having national accountability for the first time.

Many colleagues around the committee table and in the Parliament as a whole do not quite understand that we, as ministers, are not already accountable for some of the services that we are discussing. A huge amount of the correspondence that I get concerns the delivery of care services. We try to resolve those concerns for members, but I have no national accountability, and ministers have no accountability, which the public and many members find difficult to understand. The public want that to change, and that is the reason for our direction of travel.

The financial memorandum provides the estimated cost of establishing the NCS. It should be noted that that does not represent a budgetary commitment; instead, it is an indicative cost that will be further refined as the co-design work progresses and uncertainties are clarified. Folks are saying that all of that should be in the financial memorandum, but the Parliament’s standing orders are clear that the financial memorandum should cover only what is in the bill.

We are doing other refining work and will continue, as always, to report to Parliament—including committees such as yours, convener—on the expected costs coming from some of the co-design work. If we were to make assumptions on some of those issues at this moment, we would be accused—perhaps rightly so—of having already made our minds up about certain aspects of what we want to do as we move forward. That is not what we are about. The co-design approach is not lip service. We want stakeholders—the voices of lived experience, local authorities, public bodies, the third sector, carers and others—to be involved in that process.

The Fraser of Allander Institute, which you mentioned, said that it could not fully understand the financial memorandum until it got more information from the Government. The financial memorandum supports the detail provided in the bill, as I have said, and further detail will be available in future business cases. There were discussions between officials and the Fraser of Allander Institute to explain the financial memorandum more, but that was not new information, as some folk have said it was. As the co-design work has still to take place, it would be wrong of us to make lots of assumptions about the outcomes of it.

Let us take the last example that you gave, about the transfer of assets and staffing from local government, which is one of the things that some folk have cottoned on to. We have taken no decisions about the transfer of assets or the transfer of staffing. That will all form part of the co-design. I have gone on record on a number of occasions saying that there is already good delivery of high-quality care in many places by local government, so why would we need the transfer of those staff to take place? That is part of the co-design process.

Among the other areas that you touched on, VAT is an area that we are exploring in great depth. We have sought independent professional advice on the VAT implications of the options that are available for the structural set-up of the national care service. Of course, as you would expect, we are actively engaging with the Treasury to make early progress with obtaining a VAT-neutral position. It would chuff me to bits if we could get a prompt response from the Treasury on those kinds of issues. However, as the committee is aware, the Treasury sometimes takes some time to come to decisions about such things.

Decisions on funding are still to be determined. However, the intention is for there to be no detriment to local government finances. Any funding that is transferred would be directly associated with a similar transfer of costs to ensure an overall neutral impact.

We recognise that, in establishing a national care service, including any transfer of accountabilities and associated financial resources from local authorities, we must take into consideration the impact on those local authorities and on their ability to resource and deliver other public services.

As you rightly point out, convener, those scenarios might be more challenging for smaller authorities, such as Clackmannanshire, and for island authorities, so we will continue to engage and have those discussions. However, we want the impact to be neutral overall. As I said at the very beginning, decisions about funding have yet to be made.