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It could have huge impacts on the way that people think about care.

We have the ability to create a profession that can attract people. I should expand on the career progression aspect. Sometimes, we do not make it easy for people to change, swap and be flexible in their careers. Sometimes, it is not easy to move from care to social work or the health service. From talking to young folk who are working in care, I am aware that that is a frustration for them especially. Getting that right, building opportunities and attracting younger folk to the care profession could bring about a real change in the thinking about care and in its culture. That is one impact.

There is a great opportunity to change the way of thinking about care beyond that, which we are trying to do. Many people feel that they are seen as a burden because they require care. That should not be the case. The investment that we are making in care is for the greater good of our society as a whole.

I will give you a language example. I do not like the term “respite” much. That is why we are talking about short-term breaks, and it is one of the reasons why the right to short-term breaks is part of the bill.

There are many changes that can take place with the bill, as is always the case with such bills. Discussions about big pieces of work such as the bill often get folks thinking differently.

It would be daft of me to commit to a timeline on any aspect of the bill for the simple reason, which I have highlighted, that we want to have the voices of people with lived experience and stakeholders at the very heart of all this. Co-design work canna go on forever but, at the same time, we have to enable people to feel that the time that they are taking is right.

It would also be wrong of me to give any indication of timelines for secondary legislation, because those are a matter for Parliament rather than for me. However, I will say that I want to give folks, including those in the Parliament, the ultimate opportunity to scrutinise what we are doing in order to get the secondary legislation right. I know that parliamentary processes can sometimes be onerous, but it is not up to me to decide those timelines.

If the committee wants to discuss some more technical aspects of the process, I will be happy for Ms Kynaston to come in. However, it would be daft of me to commit to timelines, many of which I would have no say over anyway.

Self-directed support is a big bugbear for me, I have to say. It is probably also a bugbear for many of the folk around the table. The legislation on that had cross-party support. It was all done for the best of intentions and all in primary legislation. Unfortunately, folk out there have not stuck with the spirit of the legislation but have tried to find flaws and loopholes in it to deny people their right to self-directed support. Again, there is a postcode lottery across the country in folks’ ability to access self-directed support. That is not good enough.

I have had folk working for a lengthy period on changing the guidance on self-directed support. I think that we will publish the new guidance in the next couple of weeks. That will be helpful in teasing out some of the difficulties that exist, but it will not do everything.

That is one of the reasons why a lot of what we are doing with secondary legislation is important. It means that we can be flexible and adaptable if we do not get the legislation quite right, whereas the legislative vehicle to change a piece of primary legislation is often lacking and it takes a long time. Flexibility and adaptability are the key points on that.

I am not—at all—ruling out putting the right to independent living in the bill, but I want to listen to the Jim Elder-Woodwards of this world about what is required and what we actually need to achieve. Is that best done through primary legislation or through secondary legislation, which has more flexibility and adaptability? I assured Ms Duncan-Glancy that we will look at and listen to what we get from lots of folks like Jim and we will move accordingly.

In taking up this post, after the First Minister asked me to take on the role, I began to do what I always do, which is to listen to the voices of lived experience, and accountability featured strongly in what people said—much more strongly than I expected. Often, when people have a difficulty, they feel that accountability is lacking.

I will give an example. Many times, my officials and I have heard people tell us their stories in which things have not gone right for them and they have gone to the health and social care partnership and been told that the matter is not the HSCP’s responsibility but the council’s responsibility or the NHS’s responsibility. That is not acceptable.

People—including MSPs at points—cannot understand that I and the Scottish Government have no accountability in any of that. We set policy direction but we are not responsible for delivering the services. Many members write to me regularly, asking me to resolve problems that they encounter with constituents.

People believe that there should be ministerial accountability. They believe that the local accountability must be more robust. For all of us who regularly deal with casework, there is nothing more frustrating than somebody coming to you with a problem—sometimes an easy thing to resolve—that has not been dealt with.

It is a bit of a surprise for me how high up the agenda accountability was for people but it is very high indeed.

Yes, in short. We are introducing the new duties to prevent homelessness, including the new duties on public bodies to act to prevent homelessness. Those have to be embedded in the NCS. We need to ensure that interventions are made much earlier than they often are at present, and that there is case co-ordination in order to get it right for folks. We need to do that across services as a whole, not just in the national care service. I am sure that Ms Roddick and the committee are aware that the new duties will be guided by the shared principles of public responsibility to prevent homelessness.

Work has been done over the past few years. I was previously involved in it, and the fact that I have changed jobs does not mean that I do not have a deep interest in ensuring that we get it right on homelessness. The lessons that we have learned from the homelessness and rough sleeping action group and the lived experience panels that we put in place give us, as a Government, and Ms Robison the right information to ensure that our current work leads to real change across the board.

We will look at all of that as we move forward. I have had a fair amount of discussion with Ms Robison, and officials are working together on all aspects of that.

I know that your emphasis is on homelessness prevention, but we also have to look at how care and housing already intersect. I am very proud of the way in which we have moved forward in Scotland with the housing first approach. I do not have the most up-to-date figures, so you will have to excuse me if I get this slightly wrong, but figures from a while back showed that, under the housing first approach, the tenancy retention rate for folks was 90 per cent. Most folk never thought that that would be achievable, so why has it happened? It is about not just the housing aspect but ensuring that care, addiction and mental health services all match up.

In order to prevent homelessness and ensure that we do our level best for people overall, there has to be continued co-operation across the piece to ensure that we do the right thing by each person.

I thank Mr McLennan for that question, which is very important, particularly given what we have gone through over the past two years—not only the pandemic, but the current cost of living crisis and the on-going war in Ukraine.

For many things, we do not have to wait for the national care service to be established, and the Government is working with others at this moment to make improvements. I will give you some examples. There are a lot of things that we can do in the here and now to make improvements and we are taking action to do so. We have committed to increasing spend on social care by 25 per cent by the end of the parliamentary session. That helps lay the groundwork for the national care service. In April, as you know, we set the minimum hourly rate for providing direct adult social care at £10.50 an hour, which was the second pay rise in a year. The Government has also transferred £200 million to local government to support investment in social care, which includes delivery of that uplift.

We are also working with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to progress fair work in the sector. The fair work in social care group has developed a set of recommendations for minimum standards for terms and conditions, which reflect those fair work principles and will look at things such as improving the rates of maternity, paternity and sick pay. Of course, we are doing a lot with partners to assist in recruitment and retention. A lot of things are going on.

I agree with those folks who say that we cannot afford to wait for a national care service in order to make movement in some of those areas, and we will not wait. We will continue to make the right investments to build our social care system in Scotland and do our level best for the social care profession.

I do not have any responsibility for service delivery. You are right that ministers have responsibility for policy direction and resourcing, but we do not direct local government or health and social care partnerships. We have removed ring fencing from the local government landscape to a huge degree, which local government asked for.

Some things are my responsibility—I know that—but I am not accountable for service delivery. The public finds it hard to believe that ministers are not responsible for that, so one of the reasons for the change is to ensure that ministers are accountable for service delivery and that we get accountability right at the local level as well, because people do not necessarily feel that the way that that is done at the moment is right either.

Sectoral bargaining is extremely important. It does not need to be in the bill, but we are working closely with stakeholders and unions on how we move all of that in future, and I want to push the boundaries. The Parliament does not have powers over employment, but we must ensure that we get that right, and bargaining is one of the key elements to doing so. Again, we need to engage with and listen to colleagues who are on the front line and trade unions. I hope that local government will also come to the table, and I am sure that the third sector will. We need to get that right.

I have always talked about care as a profession. Long before I got this job, in speechifying that I made from the back benches, I talked about care as a profession. However, many folk do not see it that way, for the simple reason that, traditionally, it is an area of work that has attracted low pay and poor conditions. We have to change that. We have to build the workforce for the future, and I want the profession to become attractive to young people because, if it does not, it will not be sustainable. We must get all of the elements absolutely right.

There are a number of complex issues there. We are fully committed to fair work, and I have a strong desire to ensure that we get all this right. I should probably declare an interest in that I have two nieces who work in social care, one of whom is on maternity leave and very nearly did not get maternity pay. I will not go into the detail, but that is unacceptable in the 21st century. I want to make sure that we get it right for the workforce, the majority of whom are women. We need to move now on things such as maternity pay and paternity pay with the co-operation of COSLA and others. However, the NCS gives us a huge opportunity on the other pay and conditions aspects.

On your question about how we handle human rights, interdepartmental working and making sure that legislation connects, we constantly talk across Government about how we get those things right. To ensure that human rights are at the very heart of the process, we need to continue to listen to folks about where they think that their rights and needs are not being met. Again, the co-design process gives us the ability to ensure that everything that we do covers as many bases as possible—if not all bases—and does our level best for folks. Human rights are extremely important in all this; they are at the heart of what we are doing. As I said, we need to continue to listen to folk on what we need to do on that front.

Have I missed something? I have a feeling that I missed something.

We are absolutely committed to using the learning from the pandemic to ensure that people are supported to see and spend time with the folks who are important to them. I know that Mr McLennan has had a lot of dealings with members of the care home relatives group, as have I, over the piece. Some of the stories, which we have all heard, are very harrowing indeed. That is why Anne’s law is included in the bill, in order to support the rights of people who are living in adult care homes to remain connected even during outbreak situations.

We have done a lot of work on that over the piece, and the committee will note that I have already changed regulations in that regard. From talking to the Care Inspectorate yesterday—I speak to that organisation every month or so—I know that there have been no complaints since its last report regarding folks not being able to see relatives, and long may that continue. That shows that the change in regulation has helped dramatically.

Nevertheless, that is one of the areas that we need to get right in primary legislation. The bill will give ministers the right to issue visiting directions to care home providers and ensure that they comply with those directions. I am quite sure that this is one of the areas of the bill in which the public at large will have a great interest, particularly all the folks from the care home relatives group, with whom I know that Mr McLennan and others have been engaging, as have I.