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The National Care Service (Scotland) Bill will allow the Scottish ministers to exercise powers, under section 78 of the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, to require care home service providers to comply with any directions that are issued by ministers.

The key issues that you have talked about as having been raised by stakeholders are that our proposed approach to delivering Anne’s law through such directions does not go far enough and that Anne’s law should be extended beyond adult care homes to cover additional settings. We have talked to others about that, and there is dubiety about it.

Stakeholders have also talked about the importance that is placed on local decision making and, understandably, the importance of human rights and a person-centred approach. In the recent parliamentary consultation, some respondents indicated concern about whether our approach of using directions is the right one. It is absolutely the right approach.

The most challenging issue has been in how to balance the use of the directions with the views of some—in the main, Public Health Scotland—who endorse the occasional need for restrictions on health grounds. Although the directions envisage continuous visiting during outbreaks, we expect that formal advice from Public Health Scotland will highlight that that is a risk to outbreak management. At the moment, therefore, a piece of additional work is looking at every aspect of that. However, as a minister, I want to ensure that people have access to their loved ones. There will have to be a balance, but that is my expectation.

Rightly, people will always be concerned. At the back of their minds, they will be thinking about what went on during that Covid period. We do not want that to happen again. That is why we are doing all the work that we can to ensure that we get this right for relatives, families and loved ones.

Absolutely. The Care Inspectorate should be their first port of call. Actually, the care home should be their first port of call. They should ask why a change to access has been made and why they are being denied access. If they do not get the right answer or they do not get access, they should go to the Care Inspectorate. The number of complaints has gone down dramatically, but we will provide you with information for your reassurance.

That would be the case if there was service failure. Let me give you an example of a provider of last resort scenario.

It might well be that a care home in a particular place collapses because the company goes out of business. In some circumstances, the local authority might, as the provider of last resort, move in and take the home over to ensure continuity of care for people. Unfortunately, such things happen fairly regularly—not only with care homes, but with care-at-home provision and so on.

Ms Callaghan is, I think, enticing me to be naughty, which I am not going to be. I am not going to name things that are necessarily good or things that are necessarily bad.

It is clear that areas where there is increased delegation to IJBs and to health and social care partnerships, and where there are budget flexibilities, tend to perform better.

However, there are other aspects to consider, such as the scrutiny agenda. I do not know how many members around the table are as anorakish as I am, but at times I have gone out of my way to dig a little bit deeper, which I am always prone to doing. When I look at some IJB agendas and minutes, I can see quite clearly that they are taking their scrutiny responsibilities very seriously and are making key decisions.

Frustratingly, however, the other side of the coin is that in some IJBs, often agenda items that are pretty serious are for noting only, and it disna look like there is the level of scrutiny or decision making that there should be. Members do not need to take my word for that—they can go and look at the documents themselves. We need to get to a position in which local care boards are scrutinising and taking decisions, and being accountable to the populace as a whole for those decisions.

I have heard the suggestion about a national care board, but I am not entirely convinced. It might just become another bureaucratic layer, and I am not one for bureaucracy, as the committee well knows. Nevertheless, my ears are still open on that one.

For transparency, in the letter that I write to the committee, I will give full details of everything that I have outlined already, and I will also outline how we are running public workshops on co-design—information on that is available on the Scottish Government website. There are two registers promoting this heavily, as I have outlined already. All registrants will have detailed training around co-design.

I am more than willing to be as open and transparent as possible. I know that co-design is new for many folk. Some folk see it as being very brave; I see it as being necessary in terms of our getting it right. In our letter to the committee, we will outline all that we are doing.

As I have said, we intend to establish local care boards and the co-design and delivery of those care boards will be worked on with the voices of lived experience, front-line staff and stakeholders in order to get it right.

There is a huge amount of learning to be garnered from what has happened in health and social care partnerships. Mr O’Kane represented East Renfrewshire Council on the health and social care partnership that achieved a great deal. I come back to the point that I made earlier about areas where more services have been devolved as seeming to work better. I want to ensure that the learning and good practice from health and social care partnerships, such as the one in East Renfrewshire, are captured in delivery of our future services. I also want to look at those places where that is not working so well and learn lessons from that, too.

That is a huge question, which might take a long time to answer. I will be as brief as I can, and I will fill in some of the other detail in writing to the committee.

With regard to the care boards themselves and the design work regarding who is around the table and all the rest, that is, as I have already said this morning, part of the co-design process.

It has been thrown at me that the bill itself means that I or my successors could appoint and discard care board members at will. That is not the case—many of the powers that we are talking about in the bill are for NHS boards, and such powers are used extremely sparingly indeed.

However, I probably need to tease out even more detail on that area for the committee, so if the convener agrees, I will follow up on that in writing. I will also provide the committee with some of the comparisons that I have made with other bodies, if that would suit you.

There might be other reasons why staff transfer to a care board. For example, it might well be that a care board puts in some specialist provision in relation to the flexibilities that it is allowed in its area, and it might want to transfer staff to fill those positions. Of course, that would still have to come with the agreement of all in that regard.

I come back to the question of why we would transfer huge swathes of staff if the current employer is a good one and is delivering good high-quality social care. I have made no bones about that point during the course of these discussions. There are folk out there who continue to say that I want to grab and transfer 74,000 people to the national care service as part of a bit of empire building. That is not the case. I hope that local authorities across the country will continue to be good prime delivery partners that serve people in their communities. That is the ambition.

As I have said at other committees, alongside the draft bill, there is a suite of documents, which includes the policy memorandum. Paragraph 48 of the policy memorandum spells all of that out. I direct the committee to that paragraph and suggest that it looks at it in depth. I also ask others to look not only at the draft bill but at the policy memorandum and the rest of the suite of documents that we have published.

Beyond that, in respect of all of those issues, I continue to, and will always, listen to what folks have to say. I want to allay fears and concerns. I want to ensure that people are enthused by what we are trying to achieve here. The key thing for me—I declare an interest as a trade unionist and a member of Unison—is that I want to ensure that we have a workforce that is bolstered by fair work and that has ethical procurement guarding its back in terms of fair work and pay and conditions.

Structural change is important but it is not the be-all and end-all of what we aim to achieve here. We have to make sure that we have a service that works for people. There are quite a few arguments about structural change out there, but the focus of all that we do here has to be on people.

The committee will have heard some of the comments that I have made to the other committees that I have appeared in front of about the purpose of care boards, some of which I will go over again. I think that I spoke about some of that in an earlier answer to Emma Harper.

The national care service will balance the need for local flexibility by having the care boards plan and commission care while providing national consistency through ministers being ultimately accountable. Although local boards will have their own budgets and staff, they will be directly accountable to Scottish ministers. That will ensure that the standards that we have talked about are maintained across the country so that high quality services are in place that reflect local circumstances as they are delivered.

I have had lots of questions, and I am sure that Mr O’Kane will follow up on some on them, about the number and composition of care boards, and so on, so I will go through some of that just now.

Care board membership will be examined in detail as part of the co-design process, as will the number of care boards. Based on consultation responses, we are looking at how membership will include people with lived experience. The one point that I am adamant about, as I said earlier, is that lived experience is at the very heart of decision-making. For some folk, that has been controversial. Some people have suggested to me that folks with lived experience on care boards will have vested interests so they should not be there. The same argument is often used for local authority members and various other things, and we declare interests and sometimes leave if we have an interest. I do not see that as a problem.

Through the co-design, we will also consider how we might include carers, other professionals and service providers, and local authority elected members in local care boards. We are committed to ensuring that all who are on care boards will have full voting rights.

The other aspect might be the number of care boards. That is another matter for co-design. However, we need to be honest here. I have heard it suggested that there should be 250 local care boards. I do not think that that is possible, and we have to be honest about some of the parameters in the co-design.