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The committee can be assured that this will not become a bureaucratic nightmare. This is about improving services for people across the country. As we have already said, we are doing the groundwork that Ms Haughey outlined, to look at whether it is right to include children’s services in the national care service.

I know that some people are not in favour of that change. However, during the discussions that we have had over the past 18 months, the voices of lived experience have highlighted to us some of the difficulties that they experience in accessing care and support.

One example of things that are key for people is transition phases. The movement from children’s services to adult services is not smooth for a lot of people in our country at this moment. The scenarios are much better in some parts of the country than in other parts. Again, if you talk to the voices of lived experience, they will make quite clear their views about where that works best. In my opinion, things work best in areas where greater integration has occurred, and the scenario is one in which integration joint boards have been delegated various functions, including children’s social work, social care services and children’s health services. I would say that, without doubt, that is the view of many folks.

We are lucky enough to have Iona Colvin as our chief social work adviser. Before she came to work in Government, she had a vast range of experiences in life. She was the chief officer of North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership, where there is a greater degree of integration. It might be an idea, convener, to hear from Ms Colvin about her previous experiences in that.

Absolutely. The week before last, I was at the carers parliament and a large amount of the questioning from the floor was about why money that had been allocated to areas was not being spent on carers.

As folk around the table know, the Government has said that it will not ring fence large elements of money that it gives to local authorities. Obviously, local authorities make choices, but there is a real difficulty in some respects for folks who care for people when they cannot access services and they know that the money that is being sent for carers is not going to carers.

Off the top of my head, I think that the Government is now sending £84 million or £85 million per year to ensure that the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 is lived up to. I have talked to some folk out there, including a man from Shetland who was at the carers parliament. He has requested information on what Shetland is doing through freedom of information legislation, but he canna get it. I am checking up on that, because such an allegation has to be checked up on. We have to ensure that that money is actually going to carers.

Another very important element in the bill for carers is that it will enshrine in law the right to short-term breaks. That is essential.

In all of this, we will have to look at the national social work agency proposals and come up with a co-design in that respect. I will bring in Ms Colvin in a minute, but I must make the following points.

At the moment, there is no single national body that is tasked with oversight of or with leading on social workers’ professional development, education or improvement. We have disparate pay and conditions across the country, which is leading to difficulties with recruitment and retention in many areas. Those issues have been highlighted by social workers over the piece, and we have to ensure that we get those things right.

Moreover, there is at the moment no mechanism for securing the placements that are required for future social work planning. Although several organisations advocate, deliver and advise on social work education, it has not been possible to scale up best practice. As a result, for there to be improvement in all of this, we need to look at change, and a lot of people believe that the right thing to do is to establish a national organisation for the training, development, recruitment and retention of adult social care support, including a specific social work agency for oversight of professional development.

I get the point that some organisations want a pause. However, if you asked them, I think that they would say that they want to be at the heart of co-designing the elements of a national social work agency and how we get that right.

I will maybe pass over to Ms Colvin, convener.

Some of the early co-design work that we are doing is on the charter of rights and responsibilities. I was pleased to be able to attend a virtual event last week, or the week before last, on how we build that charter, when I faced a fair number of challenging questions from stakeholders about how we get that right. That is what needs to happen—we need to be challenged in all such regards.

We want to make sure that the co-design process is as inclusive as possible. We absolutely need to hear from a myriad of voices about how we get this right, because many people have previously been failed by the system. We have already garnered a lot of views, but there are missing voices, and we must do better in ensuring that those people, too, are at the table when it comes to helping us to create the charter.

You mentioned young people with disabilities. Many disabled folks have been excluded from helping to shape such things previously; we want them to be at the table. We have had some criticism, which I think is fair, from some ethnic minority groups, who say that they have been excluded from some of the design processes in the past. Again, we are going out of our way to try to get folks from those communities involved.

I will bring in Iona Colvin for a brief bit, and then I might come back in.

Convener—[Interruption.]

I am sorry—does Clare Haughey want to go first?

There are significant pressures across budgets, and last week’s United Kingdom Government budget did not help in that regard. That is why—

There are a number of important elements here. As I have previously told one committee—I forget which of them I have been to now—there need not be a wholesale transfer of staff to the national care service. I have explained that in terms of social care. In terms of social work, our ambition is to create a national social work agency, but that might not lead to a wholesale transfer of staff, either. We need to work our way through that.

As far as social work is concerned, what we definitely need to do is ensure that, no matter what, we look at pay and conditions and other aspects—

If I can just finish, convener, because it is extremely important—

There are certainly a number of things in that regard. Again, I will talk about what folks have said to us, and I will give the committee a good example from not so long ago. We talked with, and listened to, someone who currently has 15 different interventions in their life from a number of folks in social work and social care. It would be fair to say that that person felt that it would be much better if there was a much more joined-up approach rather than the current fragmented approach, in which someone deals with each individual element of what is a very complex case. I will not go into the elements of that complexity, because that could identify the individual, and I do not want to do that.

From a person-centred perspective, the NCS gives us the ability, without a doubt, to listen to what folks’ needs are and to actually make things better, rather than our doing certain things to folk that do not help them in any way, shape or form.

I do not know whether that answer is helpful to Ms Maguire.

I will come back briefly. In some respects, one of the simple things to look at is self-directed support, so let us go back to that. In some parts of Scotland, children and young people are not able to access self-directed support—it is as simple as that. If you talk to some of the stakeholders again, many of them will point out that the joining up of services for young people who have similar care needs can be very different from one area to the next. There can be top-quality service in one area, which ensures that all the linkages are there, and next to nothing in the next.