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To be more charitable, perhaps, than I was in the tone of my original question, I will come at the topic from a different direction. From a number of things that have been said today, there is sense of recognition on all your parts that we can do this better. If the proposals for including children’s services in a national care service involved an opportunity for you all to bring to bear your experience of the past 10 years or so—to look at what has and has not worked well, what cultural changes are required to be made and how the barriers that you identified could be overcome—so that you could bring your experience as front-line professionals to the table to develop a national system that reflected that experience, would that present an opportunity to make genuine and worthwhile improvement?

With respect, though, their lived reality in too many places is that a locally delivered, designed and constructed system—however we want to frame it—does not work for them. I fully accept that there will be good examples, but what we currently have does not work for everyone.

We heard earlier that, after 10 years of effort, we are still nowhere near where we would all want to be. Is this not the one opportunity that we have to get there? Whatever your reservations about the approach, if the service is taken forward from this point in the way that I have articulated, is that not the best chance that we have to get this right for children and young people in the future?

I listened to the views that were expressed earlier, and I thank you for your candour. One could not help but conclude that the sector is undergoing great change, either culturally or practically. After 10 years of integration joint boards, we are still not there yet—at least in some localities. Is that not an indictment of the existing approach, at least in some parts of the country, and a reason to make the proposed changes, because they are the only way to deliver a system that is consistent for young people, wherever they live in Scotland?

On the subject of transition, is it not the case that better co-ordination, planning and co-operation can be achieved only through the sort of approach that is being proposed? Does it not offer the best chance to have better integration of whole-family support?

In responding to those questions, could you reflect not only on your own local experience but on the situation as you know it to be in other parts of the country? I am trying to get a feel for the overall picture. I appreciate that your experience is based on your locality, but you will also know other people and what the position is in the rest of the country.

Perhaps Vicky Irons can start us off.

I will pick up on Martin Crewe’s earlier comments. I attended an event in Parliament last night in relation to the proposed Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill. The member in charge of that bill has taken the approach of having a panel of highly experienced medical professionals put together a set of proposals that they believe would ensure that the legislation would work in practice.

I cannot help but draw a parallel between that approach and the approach that could be taken to this framework legislation, accepting the reservations that you have about it. I do not think that it is in anyone’s interest to have some sort of bolt-on to a national care system further down the line. If we are going to do this, there is a logic to having young people’s services included. If, during the period of research and consultation, there was very full and genuine engagement with the sector—which included listening to people who can highlight what has and has not worked and what the barriers are, and asking them, if they had a blank sheet of paper, how they would design a care system—would there, on that basis, be merit in the proposal?

Looking at it from the other side, however, do you have confidence that what is in place now, as it is currently structured, and given the approach that is deployed in multiple locations, will address those issues?

I have two further questions, one of which is probably for Cameron-Wong McDermott. What specific details what the service look like in reality would you require in order to be more comfortable about the approach that has been proposed? Going back to something that Iain Nisbet rightly alluded to, there will be considerable interaction with other pieces of primary legislation through the framework approach. Iain has already talked about scale. Will witnesses talk about some specifics of those interactions and, if we take this approach, how they might present challenges in getting everything right?

However, that has not happened everywhere.

Those are all valid points, but the problem predates the pandemic.

Mike Burns talked earlier about an evolution taking place in the delivery of services and rights. The Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 required the provision of short breaks for carers, yet, six years on, we are being told that only 3 per cent of unpaid carers receive statutory support for breaks from caring. Section 38 of the bill has the potential to address that for carers in general, and for young carers specifically. Given the rate of progress so far, is that not essential to support a group of young people who, by and large, have a pretty tough time of it?

But the practical implications of doing it the other way are quite obvious as well.