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.

Mr Balfour has heard me being questioned about such issues at other committees as well. As always, in any legislation in which I have been involved, I want to ensure that there is full collaboration, co-operation and communication at every stage. I will have an open door in terms of listening to what MSPs have to say and, of course, listening to what stakeholders and other people have to say about the bill.

I will outline the co-design stages, which I think are extremely important. There is understanding co-design, sense making, agreeing, drafting the regulations and consultation on those regulations. We have said that we want folk to be involved at every stage, and they will be. I am very sincere about all of that and, as I said, my door is always open in that regard.

I should say that the national health service was dealt with in exactly the same way at its inception—there was a framework bill with regulations.

As Mr Balfour is aware—I will probably bore him by repeating myself from other committees here—the reason for doing it that way and using secondary legislation for a number of areas is so that we have the ability to change legislation much more quickly. One thing that we have found over the years in relation to our social care integration journey is that although—as I have said previously—we have put in place good legislation, we have been unable to amend that legislation when we have found out that there are flaws or loopholes that have not been right for service delivery. This approach will give us the ability to be much more flexible in making those amendments when we require to.

The use of secondary legislation is not quite as black and white as Mr Balfour said. As members of this committee well know, there are other alternatives when it comes to secondary legislation. As I have said to others, I am more than willing to consider how we approach that secondary legislation.

No, I do not. I am not so chuffed that Mr Mundell is trying to get me out the door at the very start of the new year.

We will not go there, convener.

The national care service is all about people. We will be guided by people and by stakeholders through that co-design. I am sure that all of us around the table, regardless of whether we are supportive of the national care service proposal, recognise that people need to be at the very heart of it. We need to do something a little bit different here and put our trust and faith in people themselves.

One of the reasons why social care integration has not been the best that it possibly can be thus far is implementation gaps. Through co-design and with people’s help, I am absolutely convinced that we can get those implementation gaps filled, and do it right.

Beyond that, as I said earlier, it is much better to put some things into secondary rather than primary legislation so that we can be flexible and put things right at a far greater pace. Even so, as I have said at previous committees, I am more than willing to listen to others from across the parliamentary chamber on stage 2 amendments that might work. However, I appeal to members of the committee—as I have appealed to members of other committees—to listen to the voices of lived experience and hear what they have to say about where things have worked for them and where they have not. That might change the views of some folk about using secondary legislation in order to be much more adaptable in meeting the needs of folk out there.

Some folk want to see everything in the bill—they see that as the way forward. However, people out there do not see that as the best way because, as I explained earlier, when everything is in the bill—in primary legislation—it is not so easy to change it. One of the examples that I have given to other committees is about the Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013. The legislation was supported by all, but the implementation has not been so easy in some regards. I recently changed the guidance on self-directed support, again, to provide more clarity on people’s rights and the responsibilities of public services. However, loopholes have been used to ensure that folk have not been able to access all the rights that the act was intended to give them, in terms of freedom over and responsibility for their own care.

If many pieces of that act had been in secondary legislation, it would have been much easier to change them and to put it right, but that is not the case. Therefore, we want to use secondary legislation with regard to the delivery aspects of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill, to allow that flexibility as we move forward if we find flaws or that things are not working appropriately for people. That is a good way to go, although it is different to the approach for many other bills that have been passed here in recent years. However, I come back to the point that the framework bill method was used to form the national health service, and I think that we can all agree that that has been a bit of a success.

My officials will speak to the clerks about that offline—that is probably the best way to deal with the issue in the first instance. I do not really know what you are asking of me, but if you are asking me to write to the committee about parliamentary processes, I do not see that as my job.