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Jude, do your members know what is happening? Do they know that pensions are not included in TUPE regulations arrangements—there is no clarity on that—and that they could be moving employer to a completely new body with no indication of what might happen?

Thank you.

Allow me to interrupt—I am sorry; I do not mean to be rude, but it is challenging to intervene when someone is online.

The list of proposed activities includes dealing with issues of fostering, whole-family support, kinship care relating to children, early intervention work through partnering with education services and so on. Those are not things that you currently do, are they?

I suppose that what I am getting at is that your members will be under pressure to close cases. Indeed, they are regularly under that pressure, because managers keep saying that there are too many cases and that they need to reduce the case load. Is there a risk that what we are talking about will accelerate that process? After all, Martin Crewe has described it as the Cinderella service.

According to the figures that we can see, the set-up cost for the national care service is currently looking like it will be £1.3 billion. That money will not be spent on your services; it is just for set-up costs. Yesterday, the STUC and trade unions called for the whole programme to be stopped. That is the situation that your members, Jude, and your service deliverers, Martin, would be walking into. It just feels like a big risk to what you are doing right now.

It just strikes me that I cannot see the Government doing the same thing to doctors. It would not say to an entire profession, “We’re going to change your employment rights, put in place a bill that allows us to do that and then pass it.” However, the Government is prepared to do it to social workers.

I am interested in the area that both Jude Currie and Martin Crewe have just talked about. Should the organising principle of a national care service not be the provision of care? However, the sort of thing that you have described to the committee this morning is about keeping young people away from care. Is there not a culture risk in trying to integrate what you do with an adult national care service?

That was very useful. Is it the case that, because of reducing resource and a lack of partners to refer on to, prevention has become much more difficult and that the work of your members is being taken up with permanence issues, referrals to care and child protection issues?

I know that individual social workers whom you employ will have particular roles in areas such as throughcare and aftercare, but other social workers cover a wide range of issues. Therefore, am I correct in thinking that those social workers who deal with care issues can also deal with the other issues?

However, do you recognise that your colleagues in Dundee City Council are completely and resolutely opposed to the proposed change? The chief social workers and all the people who do that work think that it is completely untenable.

Do you think that there is a risk of a culture clash, Jude Currie?