Seòmar agus comataidhean

At no point today have I used the term “standardisation”, and I never will.

I do not like folk putting words in my mouth: I have not, at any point today, indicated that there are likely to be fewer care boards. I have not said that at all. I have said that everything is subject to co-design. As regards personalisation, the person-centred approach will be at very the heart of all that we do. We have moved in the direction of personalisation, which has made advances in some ways, but not in others. We want to ensure that people have as much autonomy and freedom as they can have regarding some of the services that they require.

Let me give the committee an example. One frustration for me concerns self-directed support. The Parliament passed the Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013, which was very good in its intention. Folk have found loopholes in some of the primary legislation and in many places they have not gone with the spirit of the act. We are currently changing the guidance again, so as to change the position, but we need to go further to allow people the autonomy and freedom to commission their own care if that is what they want to do, giving them the options that were laid out in the 2013 act, many of which are not available in certain local authority areas.

Beyond that, we should listen to people about where the legislation has worked for them and where it has failed. There are examples of local flexibilities that have been put in place and which have been absolute game changers in some people’s lives, yet other people in other parts of the country have not had access to the same services—services that would make their lives much better.

The scenario that I have highlighted concerns the personalisation of services to a greater degree, putting human rights at the very heart of things. In some places, we have not done very well on that front.

I will not pluck figures out of my head. That is one of the reasons why we have said that we will come back to the committee with business cases for other aspects of the bill. We must have a general stock take of what we have at the moment and whether we are able to use current systems and enable them to talk to one another.

Having been involved in public service for a fair amount of time, I am aware that there have been some IT difficulties in the past, some of which Mr Johnson has highlighted. I was involved in a project in which we replaced a system, which, to be frank, was the wrong thing to do because the existing system could and should have been adapted.

We need to have a stock take of all that. We need to see what is required and put forward the right business case. I assure the committee that, because I am well aware of IT cost overruns from a past life, I will keep a close eye on every aspect of the delivery of an IT system if it is required.

First, I do not recognise the figure of £7 billion being spent on social care that Mr Johnson mentioned. [Interruption.] I am just being corrected. That is the assumption for 2026-27.

As to whether I expect there to be a recouping of investment, again, I will not give an answer off the top of my head. I refer back to what I said earlier. At the moment, data collection is not easy. There is a clunkiness out there—there is a lack of connection. It is almost inevitable that that lack of data will lead to some wrong decision making at various points, which always costs money. That lack of data means that, at times, we do not have the ability to shape services in the way that we should in order to future proof them and make them sustainable.

If the question is whether, in the long term, that data collection will lead to savings, the answer is undoubtedly yes, but it would be foolish of me to make assumptions now about what those savings are likely to be.

As I have said on numerous occasions today, the financial memorandum covers the bill. As far as other aspects are concerned, without going along the same lines as Mr Johnson has done, we have said that, in order to get this right, we are allowing a process of co-design to take place. We will come back with business cases for every aspect that comes out of that, which will show costs as well as savings that are likely to be accrued through those investments. We will show how we can save by eradicating the implementation gap that we know exists between policy and delivery. We will do all that openly and transparently.

However, as I have said, today we are here to talk about the financial memorandum to the bill, and many of the things that Daniel Johnson has asked about are not part of the bill. That is not to say that we will not come back to Parliament—we will probably do so again and again—with the business cases, which the committee will rightly expect to be able to scrutinise to ensure that we are on the right track when it comes to the delivery of social care for the people of Scotland.

Mr Lumsden, I can just imagine that if we had done it the other way round, you would have been one of the people who would have said that we should have done it this way round and that the most important thing would have been to put primary legislation in place first before the co-design process.

In relation to that particular statement, I would say that we have made no decisions whatsoever about moving staff or assets from local government to the national care service. I have made that clear today. We want to make sure that folks are involved in the co-design process so that we make the right decisions as we move forward. Without doubt, some folk will want to see those transfers of staff and assets, and others will not. We need to do that co-design process together to discuss those particular issues.

The other aspect from a trade union point of view—I should probably declare an interest as a member of Unison—is that what we are embarking on provides a huge opportunity in relation to national bargaining, pay and conditions, and ensuring that we have the right career pathways for the future. There are huge opportunities there.

In relation to the statement that there will be wholesale transfer, we have not made any decisions about that.

I canna make myself any clearer on this: IT is not in the bill and the financial memorandum covers the bill. As I have said clearly and repeatedly today, as soon as the other work that needs to be done in relation to co-design and service delivery is completed, we will bring the business case back to Parliament and folk will have the opportunity to scrutinise that—just as they will have the opportunity to scrutinise every aspect of secondary legislation.

The standing orders are very clear about providing a financial memorandum covering the aspects in the bill. That is what we have done.

We do not recognise them. We are more than happy to talk through the numbers with COSLA, but there is no doubt about this: that number is not attached to the bill. If COSLA wants to speak to us about how it arrived at that figure, we will have those conversations, ask it how it did so and listen to what it says. I hope that we will get some co-operation on that front.

We constantly have conversations around about—