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I am confident that I have enough oversight to be certain that NHS Ayrshire and Arran is well prepared for the opening of the hospital, and I am confident that it is able to identify the right staff mix and that any training needs can be met through internal training, courses that are available through NES and informal networking.

I am confident that I have enough oversight that the building will be successful in opening. It has been many years in planning, and for many years it has been identified as a need for Scotland. Generally, aside from some construction constraints, we are motoring towards opening it healthily.

I am keen to proceed with the regulations. I am more than happy to conduct a CRWIA and to keep the committee informed of the outcome of that. I am more than happy to take on board Ms Harper’s suggestion of getting more operational detail from NHS Ayrshire and Arran but, fundamentally, the regulations would not change. Much of what members seek assurance on is operational detail, on which I can, by liaising with NHS Ayrshire and Arran, reassure them. Those concerns would not fundamentally change the legislation, so I am happy to proceed.

That is absolutely correct. The application of the safety and security measurements are to help to protect the safety of children and young people who require to be detained in Foxgrove in conditions of medium security. The measures will be applied only when necessary and will be proportionate to the potential risk.

As we said in a number of previous answers, the service will absolutely be UNCRC compliant. The child will be at the centre and the child’s wellbeing will be core to all the facility’s work. Family links will be maintained and all those important pieces will be in place. It will be a child-centred service first, as well as being a medium-secure service.

I am very confident that it will be fully and appropriately staffed. As I said, the service has been many years in development and we recognise that particular care needs to be taken of children and young people who find themselves in that situation.

It is a specialist in-patient service that we have not had previously, but we have expertise in forensic CAMHS in Scotland—for example, we have Dr Blower. We can look to examples from the secure care estate and at how the estate operates in England to learn what might be required in terms of training and operational procedures for the unit to work well.

We operate CAMHS in a way that has the child or young person at the centre of their care. The care plan is developed in line with GIRFEC, and trauma-informed practice is an important part of that jigsaw. Our aim is that our entire public services workforce will be trauma informed. For CAMHS, it is absolutely crucial that staff are trauma informed and that that training is available to them. Most of them will already be trauma-informed practitioners.

I do not know whether Dr Blower wants to say more about the workforce.

Yes, we do think that it was sufficient. Although there were only nine responses received, they were from key bodies that were charged with upholding the human rights of children in Scotland.

Subsequent to receiving the responses to the consultation, my officials met each of the respondents to ensure that we captured any concerns that they had about the legislation. Therefore, I think that, in addition to the formal consultation, there has been a good level of engagement with people who are charged with scrutinising the process in this situation.

They have been built in as safety and security measures that seek to protect rights while also protecting safety. There are conditions for how measures can be used. There are record-keeping requirements and, importantly, there is oversight and scrutiny by the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland. All of those provisions act as safeguards for the rights of children and young people who might be detained in Foxgrove, while enabling the necessary measures to be taken to ensure that they are safe.

Foxgrove will be working to the secure care standards, so in its consideration of how it will operate once the regulations are in place, it is looking carefully at the secure care standards. It is a slightly different environment, but there is a lot of learning to be had from looking at how the secure care environment operates. It also looked at national standards that apply in England to pick up on good practice points. Therefore, to reassure you, Foxgrove will operate to the secure care standards.

The opening is now scheduled to be in mid-March 2024. There have been some building challenges, as is often the case, in the completion of the construction projects, which have meant that there is a slight delay. The building is now expected to be completed and operational in mid-March next year.

The committee can have confidence that the health board—as in all the sites that it operates—is capable of identifying the staffing requirements for, and the training needs of, the people who are going to work in the unit.

As we have said, the recruitment process has already begun. As the service is completely new, we would expect that that process would need to begin early to enable the opportunity for any shadowing or networking that might be required on other sites. We do not have anything like that in Scotland yet, so we would expect that the process would begin early and that there would be a slightly longer lead-in time than there would be if we were just building a hospital like what we already have in Scotland.

As far as I know, that commitment still stands.

How we improve access will be crucial to the success of the delivery. We all pore over the delayed discharge figures, particularly coming into winter. We are less good at capturing the level of unmet need that we know is in the community for people who seek care packages and have been assessed, but are not able to get them, which is equally important. We know that accessibility at every step is a challenge.

One challenge that we face is that there are different levels of integration around the country. As I have said, that makes it difficult to know where services are falling between cracks. We think that services sometimes fall between cracks because of the accountability in different models of design.

I see the national care service as the natural next step in integration. This is about further integration. We see different models of integration around the country. In some parts of the country, mental health is included; in other parts, it is not. As I have said, that gives rise to some of the postcode lottery and some of the challenge in taking steps to improve accessibility. We will look at whether that serves the nation well. The issue is probably improving integration in every part of the country.

The national social work agency will produce national standards. That will be an important part of improving delivery and ensuring that everywhere operates to the same national standard. I think that that will give protection to individual social workers, who will know what they need to do at each step of the way in their jobs. That is really important.

As I have said, I am determined that the national board will have teeth, so it will not be there just for decoration. It will absolutely be there to take an overview and to take action if there is service delivery failure in any part of the country. Where problems arise, the national care board will be able to take action to correct them.

One thing that will be really important—I think that we spoke about this when I was last at the committee—is the review of independent inspection and scrutiny that has just reported. We as a Government still have to reflect on and respond to that, but I think that that will provide us with another lever to pull to improve the situation and the standards nationally. Getting the inspection and scrutiny process right is a really important part of the process. One of the aims is to shift from what is perceived to be a punitive system in which there is reputational damage if things fall short to a more supportive system in which there is an ethos of continuous improvement and support is easily available to try to improve standards where they are found to fall short.