Seòmar agus comataidhean

I covered some of the primary legislation that Mr Dey has alluded to in answer to Mr Marra’s earlier question. The pieces of primary legislation in question, which are all listed in schedule 3 to the bill, relate to local authority social work functions and duties. We are in the process of identifying all the relevant Scottish statutory instruments that might be affected if those functions were to be transferred, and much of that work has already been done. Where adjustments to SSIs are needed to further reflect the transfer of functions, that can be done through the ancillary powers in section 45 of the bill. I hope that that will reassure Mr Dey a bit.

I am afraid, though, that I will have to ask him to repeat the second part of his question. I must apologise for not scribbling it down.

Good morning, and thank you for the committee’s invitation to be here.

Mr Stewart has spoken about what we hope to achieve with this reform of Scotland’s community health and social care system. I will speak about the impact that the national care service will have on services for children and young people.

The national care service will provide support for adults, including children’s parents, grandparents and adult siblings. The most important structure around children is their family and services must wrap around the family. Children become adults and transition between services, which is often a difficult process.

The current landscape is complex, with 31 integration authorities taking a variety of approaches to the integration of children’s services with adult, community health and justice services. We must ask ourselves whether the best way to help children is for those services to be together or apart. To answer that question, we have commissioned independent research to consider how children’s services are currently delivered across Scotland.

Making no change is not an option, so it would be too risky not to consider including children’s services now. However, I reiterate Mr Stewart’s point that no decision has yet been made about whether children’s services will be included in the national care service. The bill therefore provides a mechanism to include children’s services in the NCS by secondary legislation, if we ultimately decide that that is what is best for children, young people and families. The full detail of any proposal to include children’s services in the NCS will be available for scrutiny, consideration and consultation.

The independent care review told us that significant change is needed to improve the care and support that children and young people receive. All of us here, and across all the organisations that work with children and families, are committed to delivering the Promise. Building on our approach to getting it right for every child, we are continuing to make the improvements that we need to see in children’s services. That work will not pause because of the national care service. Strong links with other services that support children, such as education and early learning and childcare, must be maintained and strengthened, whatever the decision is.

I also recognise the challenges and demands that those working with children and families face every day. If we transfer children’s services to the national care service, that must improve the experience of the workforce.

We want to carefully consider whether it would be best to include services that support children and young people in the national care service. Meanwhile, we will make sure that the needs of children and young people are a key consideration in the development of the national care service.

To follow on from what my colleague has said, the independent review into adult social care made recommendations that are equally applicable to children’s services: fairness and equity; the removal of variation in eligibility in charging and commissioning; and removing unwanted variation across services, local authorities and integration joint boards.

Given the change that the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill will bring, if it is passed, it would be too risky not to consider the inclusion of children in the national care service. None of us would want to think of children as an afterthought. The interface between services for adults and children has been a critical consideration regarding the impact that the NCS could have on children’s services. As Mr Stewart and Iona Colvin mentioned in their evidence, we cannot view children in isolation. Children live as part of families; they do not live in silos, and their needs are not singular.

We are considering services in the round. The public consultation in 2021, which Mr Stewart mentioned, included questions on children’s social work and social care services. The responses to that consultation were mixed, and key stakeholders highlighted the need for more evidence, which is what we have set out to address.

As a minimum, the charter will set out the rights and responsibilities in relation to the NCS so that people who are accessing support have information on the complaints and redress system, which will provide recourse if rights in the charter are not met, and information on how to access information, advice and advocacy services, which was one of the points that Miss Callaghan made. That is the basic minimum but, as Mr Stewart said, we are consulting, including with children and young people, on exactly what the charter should include.

I think that there will be an opportunity to address that if children’s services are transferred into the national care service. I am aware of the history of kinship care allowances and of different local authorities paying different rates and allowances.

Kinship care might be transferred into the national care service, with ministers having accountability. We envisage that the NCS will set standards and that national frameworks should be implemented at a local level by directly funded care boards. One key aim of the NCS is to end postcode lotteries across a number of areas, as we have spoken about today. That will bring consistency in areas where there should be consistency, such as financial assistance for kinship carers.

The short answer to your question is yes. We think that the proposals should help to ensure consistency in care allowances across the piece, rather than having the current situation in which different local authorities pay different rates. I appreciate that that can cause frustration.

I am very familiar with that narrative. The bill gives us the opportunity to get consistency across the country. We have worked closely with kinship carers and have heard their concerns. This is one area in which we would have an opportunity to have national consistency for carers.

Children and young people are right at the heart of co-designing the service. It is really important that their voices are at the table, and we have been doing a lot of work with children and young people in that respect. We have been hearing from a lot of hard-to-reach voices, disability organisations, children’s disability representatives and so on to ensure that those voices are right at the heart of the co-design. That is important, no matter whether children’s services are included in the national care service, and the voices of the parents and carers of those children need to be heard, too.

It runs almost counter to some of the arguments that I have heard that we should not be looking at children’s services when we have not decided whether they should be in the national care service, but the fact is that we have to design a national care service that will be able to provide such services for children if that decision is taken, to ensure that they are not an afterthought and that we are not doing things retrospectively. As I have said, their voices must be very much at the table.

There are difficulties with recruitment and retention in adult social care services and, indeed, in children’s services, but those difficulties are not unique to Scotland. There are multifaceted reasons why people leave adult and children’s social care services. Some people have returned home after Brexit. It has been difficult to recruit and retain those staff, but we continue to support social care services to ensure that we have the staff.

I can give some examples of the work that we are doing to support recruitment across social care services—

Mr Stewart has already talked about the phased approach to the NCS, and the approach to children’s services will be similar if they are to be included.

We need to maintain strong links right across all the services that work with children, whether they be within or outwith the national care service. I touched on that a little when, in answer to Mr Greer’s question about education and early learning and childcare, I said that we needed to ensure that such links were built strongly. However, we already have the underpinning of our getting it right for every child policy, which committee members will be familiar with. Everyday working for our health, social care and education staff is well embedded in all those services and gives a good, strong foundation for working across disciplines and services in the best interests of each child.

Our current work will help inform us as we move forward, regardless of whether children’s services form part of the national care service. Included in that work are the research that CELCIS is carrying out and our engagement with children and young people on what they need from a national care service, what they have asked us for, what they have told us is not working well for them and how they would like services to work better for them—which is essentially what this process is about.

We all recognise that improvements have to be made right across children’s services. As with adult services, they experience postcode lotteries, and they also encounter difficulties when they cross local authority boundaries, because one local authority might provide service X while the other does not. We will endeavour to continue our work to improve children’s services; indeed, we have already done a lot of work in that respect. For example, we have introduced the Promise, which Iona Colvin referred to; we have established the whole family wellbeing fund; and, just a short while ago, we launched the new GIRFEC practice guidance.

In short, a lot of work has been done, but we are not standing still, regardless of whether children’s services will be included in the NCS.

If the decision is to move children’s services to the national care service, those services will move, too. If you—

I cannot give you an exact figure just now.