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The questions that Mr Briggs has raised are important ones that we obviously considered in the award process. The VoiceAbility delivery model is built around home-based staff and an existing network of more than 100 accessible co-location venues in local communities across the country. VoiceAbility has already been engaged in such work, and it will continue to engage in it as it delivers the contract.

The organisation used that approach before Covid-19, so it was ahead of the game with its move to digital and accessibility in communities. That has allowed it to be flexible and responsive to fluctuating demand and to have a clear presence in all health boards at launch. As a result, the geographical presence that Mr Briggs rightly asked about will be there.

As you would expect, the organisation is very committed to creating that presence and working in collaboration with others. I look forward to seeing that happen, and I am sure that the committee, too, will look forward to engaging with it as it expands into Scotland from a strong position of delivering in the rest of the United Kingdom. With its Scottish base and bespoke training centre in Glasgow, the organisation will ensure that advocates and volunteers are equipped with the knowledge and skills that we have talked about to deliver the service to a high standard, as set out in the standards that we are discussing.

It is also important to point out that the organisation will scale up in line with demand. We do not necessarily know what the demand will be—in fact, we will see that only when the service is rolled out.

As far as I can recall, I made this point in my letter, but I should emphasise that there will be a working group that the service will engage with, which will include not only key stakeholders, who will be able to have an input to and to engage with VoiceAbility, but, crucially, people with lived experiences, to ensure that we have a connection between the new service and those who use it.

We are excited about what the organisation is going to do and how it will perform under the contract, and we look forward to working with it as it rolls things out. Of course, as I have emphasised to members, any such advocacy will be independent.

On the issue of costs, I do not have those figures just now, but I undertake to come back to the committee on that.

That is correct.

I thank colleagues for their comments. I respect and appreciate the points that Jeremy Balfour has made, but I do not believe that the review and reporting obligations that would be imposed by the amendments in the group are required, and I will set out why.

The Scottish Government has recently published evaluations on the carers allowance supplement and the young carer grant, as Maggie Chapman alluded to a few moments ago. The evaluation shows that the supplement has gone some way towards meeting its overall aims, which are to improve outcomes for carers by providing extra financial support and to provide greater recognition of the essential societal contribution that carers make. The majority of young carer grant recipients felt that it helped to make a difference to their lives, gave them access to more opportunities and improved their mental wellbeing.

We have undertaken all of that, and we are progressing our work to deliver Scottish carers assistance, including the commitment to an additional payment for those with multiple caring roles. I cannot support the amendments in the group, because meeting the additional reporting requirements that they would create would require reallocation of resources internally in the Scottish Government, away from our work to develop Scottish carers assistance and away from on-going work to consider improvements to the young carer grant.

The funding is new. As I said, it is an investment of £20 million in a new service to fulfil the obligations in the 2018 act. We will make that investment over four years.

We will work with VoiceAbility on raising awareness. I will be pleased to keep the committee updated on our engagement with the charity as it develops its presence in Scotland and creates the networks that are needed to deliver its service effectively. That will involve working with a range of partners, which is what VoiceAbility has done in other parts of the United Kingdom, to raise awareness of the service. As part of the 2018 act, there is an obligation on us in that regard. As ministers, we are focused on raising awareness of what social security support in the round is available to people, as are Social Security Scotland and the wider Government.

On the point about the service being exclusive, when people request advocacy support with devolved benefits that are delivered by Social Security Scotland, that will be delivered exclusively by VoiceAbility. However, if people want advice, they will still be able to go to a citizens advice bureau or through other organisations.

Of course, the distinction between advocacy and advice is important. Mr Balfour will recall that we discussed it at length during the progress of the 2018 act.

Ruari Sutherland might want to come in.

To Parliament, do you mean?

The milestones in the contract relate to assessing performance and provision. As for outcomes, the Government and the Parliament will be watching to ensure that the standards are being met and the service is being effective for people, and that will happen in due course.

The fact that VoiceAbility will be present in all health boards is an illustration of its comprehensive geographical engagement across the country. There are wider considerations, such as collaboration with different organisations and the wider engagement on awareness that Jeremy Balfour rightly highlighted, and local government will need to be kept informed about and included in the awareness-raising process. We will, of course, engage on that. However, I highlighted the issue of a presence in all health boards as part of the considerations around the contract to illustrate the geographical availability and the fact that there will be a comprehensive service throughout Scotland.

I will let Ruari Sutherland talk about engagement with VoiceAbility on that matter, but I can say that it is committed to providing an accessible service, as it has done previously.

The Government is committed to providing accessibility in general when it comes to social security. Indeed, we have introduced local delivery teams in Social Security Scotland to help and encourage people to apply for benefits, and the same considerations, as you would expect, have been an important aspect of what we are doing here.

First, I want to emphasise that the Government absolutely values the role played by unpaid carers. We are the Government that introduced the carers allowance supplement in 2018 to ensure that carers no longer receive what Emma Roddick has rightly pointed out is the lowest of benefits, and we introduced the young carer grant. Both benefits are unique in the UK and are two of seven brand new benefits that we have introduced to provide, as Evelyn Tweed rightly made clear, more financial support for the people of our country.

Through our social security powers, we now invest more than £350 million a year in supporting carers through carers allowance, carers allowance supplement and the young carer grant. That is a significant investment. Since September 2018, around 574,000 carers allowance supplement payments totalling £149.4 million have been made to around 120,000 carers. Carers continuously in receipt of carers allowance and carers allowance supplement will have received over £2,270 more than carers in the rest of the UK.

Like members round the table, I would like carers to receive more support. That is what we are working towards together. Like Emma Roddick and Marie McNair, I encourage the UK Government to increase the rate of carers allowance. That would mean more than 900,000 carers across Great Britain receiving increased support and mean that our supplement would go further.

We recognise—this is an important point—that, as Pam Duncan-Glancy emphasised, the pandemic has identified a need for greater flexibility in how we support carers when society faces significant changes in circumstances. That is why, last year, we used emergency coronavirus legislation to introduce an additional payment and why we are introducing such a payment again this year. That is what the bill is all about. To prevent the need for primary legislation in the future, the bill includes a power to enable ministers to introduce regulations that increase the amount of the carers allowance supplement. That is an important enabling power that we put into the bill.

In this financial year, we have secured the resource for a doubling of the December carers allowance supplement, which is why we prioritised introducing the bill. I thank the committee for its work on the expedited process for the bill, which is the first one of the parliamentary session to get to stage 2. We have done it at that pace to focus on ensuring that we get the resource to carers in December.

I appreciate members’ ambition and desire to provide more assistance. Today and on Tuesday, Mr Balfour talked about political choices. We have political choices to make, just as we have financial ones, and the Government chooses to make a difference where it can. We chose to mitigate the low value of the carers allowance through the supplement to the cost of around £40 million a year since 2018. We did that because we want to make a difference. We chose to mitigate the bedroom tax at a cost of £70 million a year. We chose to introduce the Scottish child payment and bridging payments to support thousands of children and put £130 million into the pockets of families in this financial year.

Those are the political and financial choices that the Government makes every year within its fixed budget. The important point is that we have a fixed budget. Last year and this year, we chose to pay an additional carers allowance supplement of more than £230. We might be able to make that choice in the future, depending on our budget and what else we do with Scottish carers assistance as it develops into a replacement benefit for carers.

We have choices ahead. Through the development of Scottish carers assistance, we are considering options for the longer term that will increase our support for carers through our social security system. We will begin our consultation this winter on proposals for the delivery of Scottish carers assistance. That will require us carefully to consider the balance to be struck between extending eligibility for, and increasing the amount of, Scottish carers assistance.

As I said in the stage 1 debate, future increases will be considered in the context of the circumstances faced by carers and the financial constraints that we face. If we were to commit over future years the resource that the amendments ask for, we could not utilise it, potentially, to support carers in other ways. That is why we need to consider the issues in the round, and is why I cannot support either amendment and urge committee members to reject them.

Currently, advocacy services and advice services—of course, there is a distinction between them—provide advocacy and advice on a range of social security benefits, many of which are reserved. If people are looking for support with reserved or other benefits, some of those services will still be available to them if funding choices are made in that regard.

I must emphasise that we went through a regulated procurement process. Bidders were encouraged, as you will appreciate and as was appropriate. We have gone through the process and that is the outcome.

There is a need to avoid double funding. That is a question of prudence in public finance that the Government always has to consider.