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I will bring in Willie Coffey. We are running out of time, so I ask you to direct your questions to specific people. That would be fantastic.

Thank you. We will move to questions from Mark Griffin.

Will you expand a little on what you mean by “cost neutral”, as I am curious about that?

I am interested in the Government’s response to the City of Edinburgh Council’s view that the bill is not just reforming social care; it is reforming local government. You have a background in local government, so we would love to hear from you about that.

We have a number of questions to cover in the time that we have together. Therefore, I would appreciate members keeping their questions brief and the minister’s answers also being brief. We might cover the answers to some questions in answers to others.

At the start of the meeting, we agreed to take the next two items in private. As we have no more public business, I close the public part of the meeting.

That brings our evidence session to a close. I thank the witnesses very much for coming in this morning. Their responses have been very helpful to the committee’s work.

I will suspend the meeting to allow a change of witnesses.

For our second panel of witnesses, we are joined by Kevin Stewart, the Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care in the Scottish Government. Mr Stewart is joined by Ian Turner, deputy director for national care service programme design, engagement and legislation in the Scottish Government, and Anna Kynaston—I hope that I pronounced that right; you can correct me when you speak later. Anna is deputy director for national care service programme design, engagement and legislation, also in the Scottish Government. I warmly welcome the minister and his officials. Before we turn to questions, I invite Mr Stewart to make a brief opening statement.

Thank you. Before we move on to questions, I want to correct what I said about Ian Turner’s title. I believe that he is the deputy director for adult social care workforce and fair work. Apologies for mistitling you at the beginning, Ian.

I will open up the session to questions. I appreciate your statement, minister, and I think that we will dig a bit deeper into some of the issues that you touched on. Focusing first on the broad role of local government, what are your views on the purpose of local government? Furthermore, what determines which services should be delivered by local government, and are there other services that could be reformed in such a way?

We move to our colleagues who are joining us online, starting with questions from Marie McNair.