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The national care service should go hand in hand with that review, should it not?

Therefore the statutory duty would remain with local authorities.

That leaves Aberdeen City Council and Scottish Borders Council as the only two authorities that use an ALEO to provide care services. Could that model continue or would it have to be changed?

So there is only one left.

Is the aim for the new national care service to take ownership of those assets or would the local authority still be a provider to the service? Is that still to be worked out? It may not be known yet.

As we go through the business cases, there will, as you say, potentially be additional capital costs to the Scottish Government in buying assets from local government where authorities have chosen to pull out of providing the service and leave it up to the national care service.

This is my last point. The Scottish Government desires to reduce its estate and offices and have more people co-locating. From the financial memorandum, it looks like there will be new offices as the extra level is created. Does that not go against what the Scottish Government is doing in trying to rationalise?

I thought that the whole idea was to provide consistency across Scotland. If different boards are doing things differently, we lose that consistency.

We might potentially still have a postcode lottery, in which the kind of service that someone receives depends on where they live.

Following on from your mention of the local governance review, has there been any more work on that? You are right that, if social care is no longer under local government’s responsibility, there would be a huge impact on that review.