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I disagree with SOLACE on that point. I have seen estimates of possible costs from others, with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities itself estimating that the costs will be in excess of £1.5 billion, which it says outstrips the pledge of £840 million of investment. I am not sure where COSLA and others have got these estimates from. I am more than happy to go through those estimates with them in depth, but we have not had sight of them and I would be happy to take an overview in that respect.

The other aspect that I should highlight is that the recommendations in the independent review are pretty wide ranging and include not only the national care service but changes to other policies that are not necessary covered in the NCS. For example, the review has a great deal to say about charging policies and other supports for carers. I reiterate that each individual recommendation in the review has been and will continue to be subject to further policy work and financial assessment as well as economic appraisal, which I know the committee will be interested in, too.

The numbers in the financial memorandum are not compatible with COSLA’s calculations, but I am more than willing for COSLA to explain its workings to me. Equally, we will explain our workings to it and see where we can come to an agreement on some of these issues.

No, I do not necessarily agree with that. One of the things that the Government and, I am sure, the committee have spoken about on numerous occasions—Parliament has certainly discussed this at length over time—is shared services, co-operation and collaboration as a means of doing our best in delivering for the public, which is, ultimately, what we are all about.

I recognise—I have heard first hand—that certain quarters have concerns about the aspects that you have described. The other week, Ms Bell and I were in Shetland for a huge conversation on the national care service and the impact on Shetland. We will continue to listen and we will we do all that we can to ensure that there is no detriment.

You are right to point out the challenges. The scenario that you raise could lead to a huge number of opportunities for shared services and ensure that we are doing our level best to deliver for the public of Scotland.

Convener, I have said to many committees before that I am a man who does not like unintended consequences, and that is why we will dig deep into all of this.

I have great respect for the alliance and its views. However, I am unable at the moment to quantify how much it costs to collect data, which is often quite disparate and can be very difficult in some regards. We need to get better at that, and one of our ambitions is to streamline data collection and make it better.

In all this, in order to support data improvement and to benefit from data, one of our main planks in the bill is investment in the workforce so that we get this right as we move on. Again, I am more than happy to speak to the alliance where it thinks there might be difficulties but, equally, we would have to go back and say that some of the cumbersome processes that have grown probably take a lot more time than a streamlined system of data collection would.

An average that was based on the forecasts that were available was used when the financial memorandum was written. We understand that more recent Scottish Fiscal Commission forecasts are now available, and estimates will use the updated profile. We have seen a massive change in inflation in a very short period of time, which many of us could never have predicted. As we all know, inflation is very volatile at present and has moved markedly since the estimates in the financial memorandum. Our financial modelling will continue to reflect the most recent inflation rates, and we will update accordingly as we move forward. With that, I will bring in Fiona Bennett.

Let me assure you that we will update the financial memorandum and that, as we move forward with the formulation of the business cases, we will continue to take account of the current financial and economic circumstances, including inflation.

The committee is well aware that the financial memorandum and the business cases are not in themselves budgets. Budgetary decisions on spend will have to take place in the normal way in this Parliament, as you would expect.

I will come in on that. Some of the areas that you have highlighted are outlined in the policy memorandum as ones that require further detailed development, including those costings. We should perhaps have communicated with folk a little bit better around the fact that the documentation that we have produced forms a suite of complementary information to support transparency in all of this. Some stakeholders have picked that up a little better than others. In that suite of documents, we have been open and transparent not only about the work that we have done and the financial memorandum as it pertains to the bill but about the other work that needs to be done and how we go about doing it.

No, I do not. The financial memorandum covers the bill—that is the estimated cost of establishing a national care service as per the bill. What some other folk want at the moment is the detail around aspects of the costs of service delivery and other aspects that we have said will be subject to the co-design process. As I said to other members, it would be wrong to make assumptions about those costs, because the people who we want to be involved in the co-design process would say that we had made up our minds about how we would progress because we had already attached a financial cost to it.

In my responses to the convener and Ms Thomson earlier, I said that that co-design work will be subject to individual business cases, and I am more than happy for the committee and Parliament to scrutinise all that as we move forward. We will be open and transparent about everything, but we will not make assumptions before that co-design work is completed. I reiterate that the financial memorandum provides the estimated cost as per the bill.

I have already mentioned people from the Fraser of Allander Institute approaching civil servants on the financial memorandum. I will bring Ms Bennett in, because she will have featured in those discussions. As I said, my understanding is that they got no new information in that regard but were pointed in the right direction in relation to what is in the financial memorandum.

No, I do not accept that, because some of the folks you mentioned want information and assumptions around some of the things that we have said will be subject to co-design. I canna reiterate this point enough: if we come out now with financial assumptions on some of the aspects of the work that we want to achieve through co-design, people will think that co-design is a sham. I want folk to be involved in that co-design process to ensure that we have good law that leads to good implementation and that bridges the gulf in relation to the implementation gap.

I know that some folks out there—I know this because I speak to them—want to have detail about every aspect of service delivery as we move forward, but we cannot give that at this moment in time, because that would breach our pledge to co-design with the voices of lived experience, stakeholders and others.

The bill is there, and the financial memorandum covers the bill. We will come back again and again with the business cases for what comes out of the co-design process to allow further scrutiny, but I will not be bounced into making assumptions about what some aspects of the co-design work will cost, because folk out there would think that we had already made up our minds about how to move forward.

I do not think that it is a daft laddie question at all. It is a ducks-in-a-row situation. What we need to do is progress with the primary legislation and then move on to the co-design process for the secondary legislation and the service delivery. If we had done it the other way round, folk could equally have asked, “Why did you not deal with the primary legislation—the framework—first before moving on to the co-designing of secondary legislation and services?”