Seòmar agus comataidhean

It would be daft of me to commit to a timeline on any aspect of the bill for the simple reason, which I have highlighted, that we want to have the voices of people with lived experience and stakeholders at the very heart of all this. Co-design work canna go on forever but, at the same time, we have to enable people to feel that the time that they are taking is right.

It would also be wrong of me to give any indication of timelines for secondary legislation, because those are a matter for Parliament rather than for me. However, I will say that I want to give folks, including those in the Parliament, the ultimate opportunity to scrutinise what we are doing in order to get the secondary legislation right. I know that parliamentary processes can sometimes be onerous, but it is not up to me to decide those timelines.

If the committee wants to discuss some more technical aspects of the process, I will be happy for Ms Kynaston to come in. However, it would be daft of me to commit to timelines, many of which I would have no say over anyway.

Self-directed support is a big bugbear for me, I have to say. It is probably also a bugbear for many of the folk around the table. The legislation on that had cross-party support. It was all done for the best of intentions and all in primary legislation. Unfortunately, folk out there have not stuck with the spirit of the legislation but have tried to find flaws and loopholes in it to deny people their right to self-directed support. Again, there is a postcode lottery across the country in folks’ ability to access self-directed support. That is not good enough.

I have had folk working for a lengthy period on changing the guidance on self-directed support. I think that we will publish the new guidance in the next couple of weeks. That will be helpful in teasing out some of the difficulties that exist, but it will not do everything.

That is one of the reasons why a lot of what we are doing with secondary legislation is important. It means that we can be flexible and adaptable if we do not get the legislation quite right, whereas the legislative vehicle to change a piece of primary legislation is often lacking and it takes a long time. Flexibility and adaptability are the key points on that.

I am not—at all—ruling out putting the right to independent living in the bill, but I want to listen to the Jim Elder-Woodwards of this world about what is required and what we actually need to achieve. Is that best done through primary legislation or through secondary legislation, which has more flexibility and adaptability? I assured Ms Duncan-Glancy that we will look at and listen to what we get from lots of folks like Jim and we will move accordingly.

Yes, in short. We are introducing the new duties to prevent homelessness, including the new duties on public bodies to act to prevent homelessness. Those have to be embedded in the NCS. We need to ensure that interventions are made much earlier than they often are at present, and that there is case co-ordination in order to get it right for folks. We need to do that across services as a whole, not just in the national care service. I am sure that Ms Roddick and the committee are aware that the new duties will be guided by the shared principles of public responsibility to prevent homelessness.

Work has been done over the past few years. I was previously involved in it, and the fact that I have changed jobs does not mean that I do not have a deep interest in ensuring that we get it right on homelessness. The lessons that we have learned from the homelessness and rough sleeping action group and the lived experience panels that we put in place give us, as a Government, and Ms Robison the right information to ensure that our current work leads to real change across the board.

We will look at all of that as we move forward. I have had a fair amount of discussion with Ms Robison, and officials are working together on all aspects of that.

I know that your emphasis is on homelessness prevention, but we also have to look at how care and housing already intersect. I am very proud of the way in which we have moved forward in Scotland with the housing first approach. I do not have the most up-to-date figures, so you will have to excuse me if I get this slightly wrong, but figures from a while back showed that, under the housing first approach, the tenancy retention rate for folks was 90 per cent. Most folk never thought that that would be achievable, so why has it happened? It is about not just the housing aspect but ensuring that care, addiction and mental health services all match up.

In order to prevent homelessness and ensure that we do our level best for people overall, there has to be continued co-operation across the piece to ensure that we do the right thing by each person.

I thank Mr McLennan for that question, which is very important, particularly given what we have gone through over the past two years—not only the pandemic, but the current cost of living crisis and the on-going war in Ukraine.

For many things, we do not have to wait for the national care service to be established, and the Government is working with others at this moment to make improvements. I will give you some examples. There are a lot of things that we can do in the here and now to make improvements and we are taking action to do so. We have committed to increasing spend on social care by 25 per cent by the end of the parliamentary session. That helps lay the groundwork for the national care service. In April, as you know, we set the minimum hourly rate for providing direct adult social care at £10.50 an hour, which was the second pay rise in a year. The Government has also transferred £200 million to local government to support investment in social care, which includes delivery of that uplift.

We are also working with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to progress fair work in the sector. The fair work in social care group has developed a set of recommendations for minimum standards for terms and conditions, which reflect those fair work principles and will look at things such as improving the rates of maternity, paternity and sick pay. Of course, we are doing a lot with partners to assist in recruitment and retention. A lot of things are going on.

I agree with those folks who say that we cannot afford to wait for a national care service in order to make movement in some of those areas, and we will not wait. We will continue to make the right investments to build our social care system in Scotland and do our level best for the social care profession.

There are other ways in which folk can get redress. The complaints and redress system is really important for people and we need to ensure that we listen to people on that front too. We will listen to folk during the co-design work in order to ensure that we get that right.

People feel that some aspects of the complaints and redress system work well, but others do not. We need to look at how we make a change from the bottom up so that people feel that they are actually being listened to, that their complaints are being dealt with appropriately and that the right redress is available.

Again, I say to Mr Balfour and to the committee that we will listen to what folks have to say about the pitfalls and where the system has gone wrong for them in the past, and we will build a system that works for all.

As we move forward with incremental change, we have to continue to listen to organisations. I am pleased that you have already had a number of organisations here this morning, so that you could hear at first hand some of the things that they want to see. Their voices are required for that co-design. I have talked about the expertise of those with lived experience, but there is also the expertise of those folks who work on the third sector’s front line for many groups, including those disabled persons organisations that I mentioned earlier. We pledge to listen as we go along.

Let us be honest about the fact that co-design will have to be done within parameters. However, people understand that and they also understand that certain things might not be achievable. I have faith in people bringing their views to the table and helping us to make the right decisions as we move forward.

This may sound a bit flippant—perhaps Dr Jim Elder-Woodward will have a pop at me later—but I have no option whatsoever but to listen to Jim, and I will always consider whatever he puts forward. As the committee may or may not be aware, Dr Elder-Woodward serves on the social covenant steering group, and he has been a very strong voice for disabled people’s rights for a very long time. I give the commitment to Ms Duncan-Glancy that we will consider whatever Jim puts forward—I do not have the option not to.

In taking up this post, after the First Minister asked me to take on the role, I began to do what I always do, which is to listen to the voices of lived experience, and accountability featured strongly in what people said—much more strongly than I expected. Often, when people have a difficulty, they feel that accountability is lacking.

I will give an example. Many times, my officials and I have heard people tell us their stories in which things have not gone right for them and they have gone to the health and social care partnership and been told that the matter is not the HSCP’s responsibility but the council’s responsibility or the NHS’s responsibility. That is not acceptable.

People—including MSPs at points—cannot understand that I and the Scottish Government have no accountability in any of that. We set policy direction but we are not responsible for delivering the services. Many members write to me regularly, asking me to resolve problems that they encounter with constituents.

People believe that there should be ministerial accountability. They believe that the local accountability must be more robust. For all of us who regularly deal with casework, there is nothing more frustrating than somebody coming to you with a problem—sometimes an easy thing to resolve—that has not been dealt with.

It is a bit of a surprise for me how high up the agenda accountability was for people but it is very high indeed.

As far as I am concerned, improved carer support is one of the core objectives of the national care service. I was at the carers parliament, and I heard some stories that were galling, to say the least. The Government has put substantial resources into carers support, and over the last period, in recognition of what folks had gone through with Covid, we provided additional moneys to allow for more short-term breaks.

However, I know from talking to folk at the carers parliament—members will also hear this in their constituencies—that that money often does not get to the people to whom it should. We have to do much better in that regard, and that is why, in the bill, we have enshrined the right to short-term breaks. We obviously have work to do on that—again, we need to listen. It is essential that we get that element absolutely right.

A man from Shetland, Jim Guyan—I will name him because I saw his name in the papers, so I hope that I winna get into trouble—said that he asked Shetland health and social care partnership and others where money for carers support is going, but he is unable to get that information. Folk should not have difficulty in getting information on where money is going.

There were discussions at the carers parliament about whether the Government should ring fence elements of carers support, but that is not popular with local government, as we all know, and it is often not popular with some of you folks who are round the table. There is a level of frustration among many carers that they are not getting the deal that they should be, but the bill will enhance those rights.