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To Parliament, do you mean?

The milestones in the contract relate to assessing performance and provision. As for outcomes, the Government and the Parliament will be watching to ensure that the standards are being met and the service is being effective for people, and that will happen in due course.

The fact that VoiceAbility will be present in all health boards is an illustration of its comprehensive geographical engagement across the country. There are wider considerations, such as collaboration with different organisations and the wider engagement on awareness that Jeremy Balfour rightly highlighted, and local government will need to be kept informed about and included in the awareness-raising process. We will, of course, engage on that. However, I highlighted the issue of a presence in all health boards as part of the considerations around the contract to illustrate the geographical availability and the fact that there will be a comprehensive service throughout Scotland.

I will let Ruari Sutherland talk about engagement with VoiceAbility on that matter, but I can say that it is committed to providing an accessible service, as it has done previously.

The Government is committed to providing accessibility in general when it comes to social security. Indeed, we have introduced local delivery teams in Social Security Scotland to help and encourage people to apply for benefits, and the same considerations, as you would expect, have been an important aspect of what we are doing here.

First, I want to emphasise that the Government absolutely values the role played by unpaid carers. We are the Government that introduced the carers allowance supplement in 2018 to ensure that carers no longer receive what Emma Roddick has rightly pointed out is the lowest of benefits, and we introduced the young carer grant. Both benefits are unique in the UK and are two of seven brand new benefits that we have introduced to provide, as Evelyn Tweed rightly made clear, more financial support for the people of our country.

Through our social security powers, we now invest more than £350 million a year in supporting carers through carers allowance, carers allowance supplement and the young carer grant. That is a significant investment. Since September 2018, around 574,000 carers allowance supplement payments totalling £149.4 million have been made to around 120,000 carers. Carers continuously in receipt of carers allowance and carers allowance supplement will have received over £2,270 more than carers in the rest of the UK.

Like members round the table, I would like carers to receive more support. That is what we are working towards together. Like Emma Roddick and Marie McNair, I encourage the UK Government to increase the rate of carers allowance. That would mean more than 900,000 carers across Great Britain receiving increased support and mean that our supplement would go further.

We recognise—this is an important point—that, as Pam Duncan-Glancy emphasised, the pandemic has identified a need for greater flexibility in how we support carers when society faces significant changes in circumstances. That is why, last year, we used emergency coronavirus legislation to introduce an additional payment and why we are introducing such a payment again this year. That is what the bill is all about. To prevent the need for primary legislation in the future, the bill includes a power to enable ministers to introduce regulations that increase the amount of the carers allowance supplement. That is an important enabling power that we put into the bill.

In this financial year, we have secured the resource for a doubling of the December carers allowance supplement, which is why we prioritised introducing the bill. I thank the committee for its work on the expedited process for the bill, which is the first one of the parliamentary session to get to stage 2. We have done it at that pace to focus on ensuring that we get the resource to carers in December.

I appreciate members’ ambition and desire to provide more assistance. Today and on Tuesday, Mr Balfour talked about political choices. We have political choices to make, just as we have financial ones, and the Government chooses to make a difference where it can. We chose to mitigate the low value of the carers allowance through the supplement to the cost of around £40 million a year since 2018. We did that because we want to make a difference. We chose to mitigate the bedroom tax at a cost of £70 million a year. We chose to introduce the Scottish child payment and bridging payments to support thousands of children and put £130 million into the pockets of families in this financial year.

Those are the political and financial choices that the Government makes every year within its fixed budget. The important point is that we have a fixed budget. Last year and this year, we chose to pay an additional carers allowance supplement of more than £230. We might be able to make that choice in the future, depending on our budget and what else we do with Scottish carers assistance as it develops into a replacement benefit for carers.

We have choices ahead. Through the development of Scottish carers assistance, we are considering options for the longer term that will increase our support for carers through our social security system. We will begin our consultation this winter on proposals for the delivery of Scottish carers assistance. That will require us carefully to consider the balance to be struck between extending eligibility for, and increasing the amount of, Scottish carers assistance.

As I said in the stage 1 debate, future increases will be considered in the context of the circumstances faced by carers and the financial constraints that we face. If we were to commit over future years the resource that the amendments ask for, we could not utilise it, potentially, to support carers in other ways. That is why we need to consider the issues in the round, and is why I cannot support either amendment and urge committee members to reject them.

Currently, advocacy services and advice services—of course, there is a distinction between them—provide advocacy and advice on a range of social security benefits, many of which are reserved. If people are looking for support with reserved or other benefits, some of those services will still be available to them if funding choices are made in that regard.

I must emphasise that we went through a regulated procurement process. Bidders were encouraged, as you will appreciate and as was appropriate. We have gone through the process and that is the outcome.

There is a need to avoid double funding. That is a question of prudence in public finance that the Government always has to consider.

Pam Duncan-Glancy makes an important set of points, which we took seriously throughout the consideration of the process. In a moment, I will bring in Ruari Sutherland, who has had a lot of engagement with VoiceAbility in the lead-up to, and since, the award of the contract. Those are important considerations, which VoiceAbility has included in its service delivery elsewhere in the UK, and they are important considerations for the organisation now as it builds the service in Scotland.

Ruari, can you say more on that?

As I said, we have recently published evaluations on the carers allowance supplement and the young carer grant, and we will continue to do that as appropriate and in due course. However, the obligations that the amendments would place on us would take resources away from our development of Scottish carers assistance and the on-going work to consider improvements to the young carer grant, which is where our focus should be.

To respond directly to Miles Briggs, I note that, if the amendments are not agreed to, there is no intention to bring them back at stage 3, but I can commit to continuing to explore options outside the bill. I have talked about what we have done in terms of evaluation in recent times.

I am grateful to Maggie Chapman for the discussions that I have had with her in recent days, and for not moving amendment 4. As Jeremy Balfour has moved it, I will say that, although I am grateful for the debate that we have had, I urge members to reject all the amendments on reporting requirements, because they would detract from our work on developing the new Scottish carers assistance.

I have already mentioned the 100 co-location venues, full accessibility and a presence in all health boards, and the combination of utilising those venues, being present in those health boards and the collaboration that will arise means that support will be available to people, no matter their geographical location in Scotland.

On your last question, the answer is yes. I will bring in Colin Armstrong to speak about the procurement process. The procurement process was undertaken twice—once in 2019-20, when an award was not made because of the pandemic, and then again more recently. Throughout the process, Scottish Government officials engaged with current providers to give them all the awareness and information that they would need if they wanted to, for example, make a collective bid. However, that was not undertaken.

I will let Colin Armstrong come in on that.