Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thank you, convener, and thanks to the committee for asking me to give evidence today. Happy new year to all.

It is fair to say that the national care service represents one of the most ambitious reforms of public services. It will end the postcode lottery of care provision across Scotland and ensure that people who need it have access to consistent, high-quality care and support to enable them to live full lives wherever they are.

People who have experience of receiving and providing social care are clear that significant reform is needed, despite the changes that have been made over the past 20 years. We have excellent legislation and policies, but when it comes to putting them into practice, there is a gap.

The NCS bill sets out a framework for the changes that we want to make and allows scope for further decisions to be made in collaboration with the people who will be most affected by them. That flexibility will enable the NCS to develop, to adapt and to respond to new circumstances over time.

It is important that we start by establishing the principle of transferring accountability for social care to the Scottish ministers. The new system will be person centred, to ensure that the NCS is delivered in a way that respects, protects and fulfils the human rights of people who access care and support, as well as associated people such as carers.

We are fully committed to improving the experience of staff in the social care sector, too, because we recognise and value the work that they do.

Our co-design process will ensure that the national care service is built with the people whom it serves and those who deliver it at its very heart.

Some committees have suggested that we could have done it the other way round, by having the co-design process first. My response is that that would have impinged on the folk who would have been involved in the co-design. The co-design work might have gone to waste, in people’s eyes, if Parliament then changed far too much of what the folks who helped us with the design wanted in place.

Therefore, I think that it is right to have the framework bill and its principles in place before we move it on through collaboration and co-operation with people in order to co-design that extremely important change to our public service delivery.

As I said, we are already at the beginning of the process. We have already done the workshops that I spoke about, and we will move forward and bring folk with us to get that right.

What guarantees do folk have that they will be listened to? They will be listened to. However, the committee will understand that not every single person will get what they want. We have to weigh up what is brought forward. That said, we must listen to stakeholders and to the voices of lived experience, and we must listen to staff.

Over the past year and a half or so since I have been in this job, I have spent a lot of time listening to front-line staff. I do not think that anybody on the committee would say that we do not value, or have not valued, front-line social work and social care staff in the way that we should over the piece. That is why fair work is at the very heart of this bill, which is about not only pay but conditions.

Another aspect is the things that we do not necessarily think about unless we listen to those on the front line. For example, we do not attract enough young people to work in social care; they do not see it as an attractive opportunity. That is not necessarily only about pay and conditions. A number of them have told me that it is also because they do not see career pathways. We therefore have work going on looking at what career pathways we can put in place to ensure that we attract folk for the future, and make it easier for folk to move from social care to social work or from social care to the NHS or the other way round, which is often quite an arduous process. As I said, by listening, we are coming up with new ways forward in order to get this right.

In order to have the social care system that we need for the future, there is absolutely no doubt that we have to make changes. We have to make changes on pay and conditions, career pathways and ethical procurement, and we have to value front-line staff more than we have done over the past few decades.

There are other processes beyond affirmative and negative instruments. The clerks are in a better position to explain those than I am.

A number of organisations have been sceptical about aspects of the bill. That surprises me not. As I have said in other committees, some organisations have a vested interest.

Let me spell it out: the principles made clear how the Scottish Government and Scottish ministers must act—it could not be clearer. We will put human rights at the very heart of all that we do. We want to embed fair work practices, and we want to ensure that ethical commissioning is in place. All that is about improving people’s health and wellbeing. That is what the bill is about.

I have not named them and I am not saying that they necessarily have vested interests. However we know that there are vested interests—

That is a matter that you will have to bring up with them. I cannot answer for the Faculty of Advocates or anyone else.

This is not about trusting ministers; it is about trusting people. That is why we are doing things differently. It is about putting our faith in the people to help us to get it absolutely right and fill the implementation gaps. It is different from how we normally do things, but it is the right thing to do when it comes to major public service reform, because, as I explained, during our integration journey we have not done well when it comes to filling the implementation gaps.

To get that right, end the postcode lottery and ensure that we get service delivery right for folks, we need people’s help.

The bill is clear and accessible. It was introduced into the Parliament alongside a suite of accompanying documents, including the policy memorandum, which gives a huge amount of detail about our ambitions and vision. It is unfortunate that not everyone reads the policy memorandum; I urge folks out there to do so. I urge all members to do so, as well.

On how we got to this place, which I think is what you are driving at, we wanted to hear from as many folks as possible during the consultation period. We especially wanted to hear from folks who are in receipt of care and who access care, their carers and front-line staff.

We have had a huge number of events connected to the national care service consultation. We have had over 100 engagement events and meetings, speaking to—and, more importantly, listening to—around 3,000 folks from right across the country, including our remote rural and island communities, which I know are of interest to Ms Minto.

We published the independent consultation on all those findings in February of last year. Along with other discussions, that all helped us to build to the bill, the policy memorandum documents and the other suite of documents.

At every single stage, we have listened to folks. We have built on the recommendations in Derek Feeley’s independent review of adult social care and I think that we have done all that we can to engage with as many folk as possible. We will continue to do that right the way through the process.

As we have said all along, we want to ensure that the national care service is the best that it can be. To do that, we need people to be involved in the co-design of the service. In my opening remarks, I talked about the implementation gap that exists. We have done a lot of good work in recent years, and we have been on a journey over the past two decades, when it comes to social care integration. There has been a lot of good legislation and a lot of good policy, but we have always been left with an implementation gap. To fill that gap, we need co-design, to ensure that folks who are in receipt of care, folks who work in care and folks who are carers are at the heart of helping us to design the future national care service.

To ensure that there is effective co-design, we have to ensure that the principles of the bill are in place, so that the folks who co-design with us know that their work will lead to actions.