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The independent review of adult social care recommended the establishment of a national organisation for training, development, recruitment and retention of adult social care support, including that specific social work agency for the oversight of professional development. Again, the policy memorandum outlines the intention to establish the agency.

A number of folk have come to me with comments about the social work aspect of the bill, and we will continue to listen to what folk are suggesting. We feel from our perspective that it should be part of a national care service but, as we have gone along, we have listened to people, and we will flex, if need be, on that front. If someone can convince me of the advantages of the agency being entirely separate from Government, I will listen to them. However, we have to remember the huge linkages between community health, social work and social care, and we do not want to create any further fragmentation in that respect.

As the committee will imagine, I have had a fair amount of meetings over the piece with various social work bodies—at this point, I should apologise for missing one such meeting last week, because I was unwell—but we will continue to do that and listen to people’s voices as we move forward. As I have said, though, I have to be cognisant of the linkages and whether a different approach will cause fragmentation—and, if so, what that will mean for service delivery to people, which, after all, is the number 1 issue.

I am sorry that I did not quite get it.

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.

On the last point in your question—the independence of this one, that one and the other—we will have to work some of those questions through. It has to be part of the co-design process. We have to consider the accountability aspects, too.

Some of that will be worked through in the co-design but we hope that we will have a skeleton—a draft—of it all by next summer. That is ambitious but I am sure that, with the co-operation of the folk who are helping us to develop the service, it is achievable.

One of the key barriers is that, as I said, there are 1,200 disparate employers that are working to contracts that the Government has no control over.

I say again that the two wage rises, which I and everybody here wanted in order to put money into people’s pockets and purses as quickly as possible, were not the easiest things to achieve. We do our level best here, but there are things that we rely on others doing, which often makes things not as easy as they might seem.

Absolutely. This is not about moving the deck chairs—I am not into that kind of game. We need to take cognisance of the views that we have heard from those who are in receipt of care and support, from their carers and from front-line staff about the improvements that are required.

I return to a point that I made in my opening statement: we canna just tinker about at the edges, here. We have a changing demography in Scotland and we need to expand the social care workforce, as I also said earlier. We need to make a real change and, of course, people have to be at the very heart of our doing that.

Folk in the consultation said that they wanted Scottish ministers to have control and accountability over this.

Because of the work that we had done on adult social care, we were well aware that we had a huge amount of information. A huge amount of consultation has been carried out. We have undertaken to do similarly for children’s services and criminal justice social work. Work is on-going in looking at all of that. We will continue to consult and to listen to people on those fronts.

I reiterate that the Government has taken no decision on transferring children’s services or criminal justice social work to the national care service.

As you have just done, we recognise that caring roles vary in nature and intensity. We also recognise that some folk feel more able to access certain things than others do.

One of the key aspects, which comes up time and again, is the eligibility criteria. In removing some of the eligibility criteria for those unable to access sufficient breaks, the bill aims to shift the balance to enable more carers to access preventative short-break support. That might need to be different from what is currently on offer in particular places.

The key aspect is to understand better what a sufficient break is and to recognise what the differences are in terms of the nature and intensity of the care. The stakeholder group has been established to work our way through that, including on reaching a definition of “sufficient breaks”.

I think that we have a long way to go on data. I will have a look at the English, Welsh and Northern Irish situations. There is some data that I would like to get my hands on that is not easy to obtain, and we have to do better on that front. We must also do better in terms of individuals’ data. That is why the national health and care record is important. Depending on the data sharing agreements that are associated with that, we will be able to get much more accurate data about what is going on.

I get your point about the consistency and quality of data. You will know, having seen it at this committee, that, often, data is caveated, sometimes quite heavily, so it does not necessarily give us the true picture. Mr O’Kane talked about comparing apples to oranges; I often feel that that is what we are doing, when we look at comparative data. We absolutely need to get better at that. The national health and care record will go a long way in helping us on that front. Again, even before the NCS, we must continue to refine what data we collect, how we collect it and the impacts of that on people.