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I have never known Parliament to legislate for an IT system. As I am sure that every member is aware, an FM covers what is covered in the bill—that is what is covered by the financial memorandum.

No decision has been made on those things—they are on the table as part of the co-design process. I repeat what I said earlier to Mr Mason: we also have to take cognisance of where there is already good service delivery. Why would we make a change for change’s sake if there is already good service delivery?

We will keep an eye on this as we move forward, but I cannot reiterate enough that the statutory responsibility still rests with local government and that no decision has been taken by the Parliament to make any changes to that position. As the bill progresses, local government will remain statutorily responsible. I hope that, for reasons of good governance and stewardship and to ensure that people get things right for their citizens, local authorities will continue to recognise their statutory duty and to do their best in relation to service delivery for their constituents.

You are right to point out that this is not a new approach. We have used it previously and with some success for Social Security Scotland.

We have launched the co-design panels, and we are looking for partners to promote the sign-up of front-line staff to the lived experienced experts panel. To support that, the NCS programme will shortly advertise introductory seminars, which people will be able to sign up to online. There will also be co-designed training, which will be associated with a number of specific themes that we will send you more detail on.

With regard to timelines, we will write to you, convener. However, work will be on-going. We have got to get this right, and we have to continue to consult and co-design.

As for balancing the views of competing interests, we managed to do that fairly well with Social Security Scotland. Some of the folk whom we involved in co-designing that organisation are at the forefront of helping us with the national care co-design. I will put all that in more detail in writing to the committee. I have pages of notes before me, convener, but I am quite sure that you do not want to sit and listen to me for another hour.

My response is that, as I have said today, we will continue to update forecasts, business cases and everything else as we move forward. I reiterate the point that I have made again and again today: the financial memorandum covers what is in the bill. CIPFA, COSLA, SOLACE and others want answers to things that are not contained within the bill; they will get those answers, but they will have them after the co-design and when the business cases have been built up. I think that there is a big difference between what they want the financial memorandum to address and what is actually in the bill. As I have said, the financial memorandum covers what is in the bill.

I do not see that at all, but, again, we are going through a co-design process. I do not see there being more. The national aspect of this is not about national commissioning. What has been made very clear to us by the public at large, and by many stakeholders in the third sector and elsewhere, is that there should be national accountability. That came out very clearly in the recommendations from Derek Feeley’s independent review. People feel that that accountability is sadly lacking, so this is about strengthening local accountability and having national accountability for the first time.

Many colleagues around the committee table and in the Parliament as a whole do not quite understand that we, as ministers, are not already accountable for some of the services that we are discussing. A huge amount of the correspondence that I get concerns the delivery of care services. We try to resolve those concerns for members, but I have no national accountability, and ministers have no accountability, which the public and many members find difficult to understand. The public want that to change, and that is the reason for our direction of travel.

The financial memorandum provides the estimated cost of establishing the NCS. It should be noted that that does not represent a budgetary commitment; instead, it is an indicative cost that will be further refined as the co-design work progresses and uncertainties are clarified. Folks are saying that all of that should be in the financial memorandum, but the Parliament’s standing orders are clear that the financial memorandum should cover only what is in the bill.

We are doing other refining work and will continue, as always, to report to Parliament—including committees such as yours, convener—on the expected costs coming from some of the co-design work. If we were to make assumptions on some of those issues at this moment, we would be accused—perhaps rightly so—of having already made our minds up about certain aspects of what we want to do as we move forward. That is not what we are about. The co-design approach is not lip service. We want stakeholders—the voices of lived experience, local authorities, public bodies, the third sector, carers and others—to be involved in that process.

The Fraser of Allander Institute, which you mentioned, said that it could not fully understand the financial memorandum until it got more information from the Government. The financial memorandum supports the detail provided in the bill, as I have said, and further detail will be available in future business cases. There were discussions between officials and the Fraser of Allander Institute to explain the financial memorandum more, but that was not new information, as some folk have said it was. As the co-design work has still to take place, it would be wrong of us to make lots of assumptions about the outcomes of it.

Let us take the last example that you gave, about the transfer of assets and staffing from local government, which is one of the things that some folk have cottoned on to. We have taken no decisions about the transfer of assets or the transfer of staffing. That will all form part of the co-design. I have gone on record on a number of occasions saying that there is already good delivery of high-quality care in many places by local government, so why would we need the transfer of those staff to take place? That is part of the co-design process.

Among the other areas that you touched on, VAT is an area that we are exploring in great depth. We have sought independent professional advice on the VAT implications of the options that are available for the structural set-up of the national care service. Of course, as you would expect, we are actively engaging with the Treasury to make early progress with obtaining a VAT-neutral position. It would chuff me to bits if we could get a prompt response from the Treasury on those kinds of issues. However, as the committee is aware, the Treasury sometimes takes some time to come to decisions about such things.

Decisions on funding are still to be determined. However, the intention is for there to be no detriment to local government finances. Any funding that is transferred would be directly associated with a similar transfer of costs to ensure an overall neutral impact.

We recognise that, in establishing a national care service, including any transfer of accountabilities and associated financial resources from local authorities, we must take into consideration the impact on those local authorities and on their ability to resource and deliver other public services.

As you rightly point out, convener, those scenarios might be more challenging for smaller authorities, such as Clackmannanshire, and for island authorities, so we will continue to engage and have those discussions. However, we want the impact to be neutral overall. As I said at the very beginning, decisions about funding have yet to be made.

I will go first and then bring in Ms Bennett.

I think that you will understand that there are various unknowns that could result in large cost differentials, including the transfer of staff and their associated pay terms and conditions and other things such as the digital improvements that we might need. At all times we have tried to be as transparent as we can in our approach and to highlight the potential costs that might be incurred if the bill were to be passed, so as not to either underestimate or overestimate the reality of the situation.

As I have stated throughout, these estimates will have to be refined, because times have changed since the financial memorandum was written. We will provide updates on all of that as soon as we can, and will do so again if there is any other material change.

There are some assumptions that I do not think we can make. If we make assumptions around some of the areas of work that are subject to the co-design process, folks will think that we have already made up our minds about how we should move forward. I do not want that to be the case, because I need everybody at the table with open minds, and, obviously, there will be parameters around the co-design. In those circumstances, I again pledge to the committee and to Parliament that, as we develop all of that, we will be open and transparent about the expected financial costs of all of that work.

Ms Bennett is the expert on the financial memorandum. She wrote it, and she is probably sick of and fed up with my questioning on all of this. However, I ask her to cover some of the other aspects around this, some of which is in the FM itself.