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There are three distinct phases to the national care service collaborative design. Understanding is about building a shared understanding of the current challenges. Sense making is about what and how we can deliver improvement. Agreement is about whether the proposed changes address the issues that people raise. Those are the standard clear phases to what we are proposing with the national care service.

In addition, once we have reached that consensus point at which we understand how things work and what needs to change, and we have an agreed way forward on changing, then there will be the drafting of regulations and more operational detail on how we will do things differently.

That has to be within a legal framework, which is a slightly tricky aspect of co-design. Things have to be developed within our legal competence. There is then a review: we come back to make sure that we have co-designed aligns with what our aims and intentions were.

Co-production cannot happen in all areas, because it requires collective decision making on changes that require the Parliament to decide. That is slightly tricky. Co-design is more about agreeing arrangements, whereas co-production is the collective development of the idea. Anna Kynaston, does that make sense? Do you want to say more?

I had not until you asked me. I am certainly willing to go away and reflect on that.

I think that it is really important that the committee is involved. It is quite a different way of doing things, and I want to be sure that the committee understands what is happening in those events and understands the power that participants have to shape a service that meets their needs.

I am happy to reflect on whether there are conflicts of interest and to listen to the committee’s thoughts on that if it has concerns about it. I think that it would be valuable for members of the committee to come and see what we are doing, but we can reflect on whether they should be participants or observers. Observing would take away any concern around conflicts of interest. I am more than happy to consider that.

I suppose that, as a committee, you will have a formal role to come back to us and say that you think that things should be done in a certain way or that you have concerns about a particular area. Being observers of the events rather than participants would take away any concern about that. We will have a think about that.

Absolutely. As you said, I am a Highland MSP. I represent the northernmost constituency on the mainland of Scotland, and I live in the rural west Highlands. If anybody in the Parliament knows that one size will not fit all, it is me. I know how important it is for people to be able to remain in their own communities. That is a strong priority for me.

Even within Highland, things happen differently. Care looks different on the rural west coast from how it looks in Inverness. That is necessary, and it is dictated by geography and by the available workforce and estate.

We are keen to reduce unnecessary variation. Around Scotland, things are done very differently among the 32 local authority areas. For example, for the social work profession, there are often very different contracts, pay, conditions and offers of continuing professional development. There is no real need for such variation. Things could be standardised and supported nationally.

That would help us with some of the challenges in local authority areas. In one local authority area, a starting social worker is paid £5,000 a year less than they would be in the neighbouring area—and, of course, that local authority has real problems with recruitment and retention. Taking a more national approach, standardising what is required and expected from that profession and what rewards and values will be placed around it would be a very sensible way forward.

It is important to understand that. I will never advocate for everything to be dictated from Edinburgh, but everybody could acknowledge that there are advantages to doing things nationally as well as times at which we really have to make sure that the operational detail is down to local authorities.

Yes, we absolutely need to improve pay and conditions urgently. That is a really high priority. However, that is not the only challenge for the workforce. In my part of the country, Brexit has devastated our rural communities. Far fewer people are coming to live in the rural Highlands, and I suppose that we have lost a tranche of that workforce. People have moved from social care into other roles or have left the country.

We are short of labour across the board, and it is particularly difficult to attract people into social care. We are asking people to do a really tough skilled job, and we want them to deliver care with compassion. The job needs to be competitive against jobs in retail and in hospitality, which is a big competitor up my way. Furthermore, there needs to be security and a chance of career development. We need to do more than just pay.

As I said, the issue is a high priority, and things will only deteriorate further if we do not stabilise the situation now.

Certainly. The officials might want to say a little more about that.

People were undoubtedly keen for us to put a little more meat on the bones, but we have committed to co-design. We are keen for the people who access the services and work in the services to be part of the process. That is why we went for a framework bill in the first place.

The pause offers us an opportunity to put a little more meat on the bones so that people can better understand the ambition of the bill, what the detail around that ambition will be, and how the service will look. This is such a different way of doing things that it has been a little hard for everybody to get their heads around it—I will admit that it has been a little hard for me to get my head around it in my new portfolio. The pause offers an opportunity to give a bit more detail, clarity and understanding.

One thing that I am very clear about is that the national care service has to deliver the ambition, and we must be able to articulate that well to the country. There are many times when I think, “The national care service would enable us to do that,” or “The national care service is the answer to the problem that you’re raising,” but that understanding is not out there among our citizens and partners. I need to do a better job of articulating the case and explaining that the national care service is the answer to many of the social care concerns that are raised and articulated. I hope that the next few months will give us an opportunity to be clearer about the benefits that the national care service will bring.

I do not think that my officials have anything to add.

I am certainly more than happy to speak about that. I had some brief discussions with representatives from Unison at the parliamentary event that happened a couple of weeks ago. I am very keen to hear from it and other unions that operate in the sector and represent staff who work in the sector about their concerns, and I want us to understand each other’s perspectives on what advantages or disadvantages a national care service and the approach that we propose could bring.

Most of the concern on pensions appears to be around the possibility that people who are employed by local authorities would have their employment transferred to the national care service. There is no plan for that to happen wholesale or automatically or anything like that. Those will be individual decisions for local care boards to make, if they feel that employment needs to transfer. There would then be a process of ensuring that pay and conditions are transferred over.

The landscape is complex. The biggest employers in social care in Scotland, by quite a long chalk, are private care companies; then we have the local authorities and direct employees, and the third sector is the smallest. Is that the order? Yes. Less than 20 per cent of the staff are unionised, and it is largely local authority employees who are unionised.

In general, there is a concern that the social care workforce is disempowered and does not have a clear voice in negotiations on pay and conditions. There is definitely agreement across the board—even across the board politically—that pay and conditions need to be better. There is a real opportunity for us all, including the unions, to work together to try to improve that situation.

I do not have strong feelings about the ideology of who should be allowed to be contracted to deliver care. I want that contract to deliver a high quality and high standard of care to the individual who is receiving it. I know that there are private businesses out there who are delivering excellent quality care, and I want to make sure that everyone who is delivering social care that has been contracted with public money is providing a high standard and that their staff have reasonable pay and conditions.

That built-in standardisation of the contract, the procurement and the ethical commissioning is part of the advantage of a national care service. There is an opportunity to talk about profiteering. There is an opportunity to build into those contracts constraints around how businesses operate, to ensure that they operate to a financial standard and with financial ethics that we would want to put public money into.

Many key stakeholders expressed concerns. I think that you missed my opening statement, but—

There is a tension there. We need to have clarity on who is responsible and we need to have clear lines of governance. However, we need to capture local delivery as well as providing accountability. We will engage in those conversations over the course of the next few months and beyond. We will be making decisions about the exact composition of care boards a little later.

You can see some of the challenge, but it is one that we are up for and we need to have that conversation about how best to make it work and how best we can reflect those different needs and different communities while still achieving a certain standard of care and a clarity over governance arrangements. Those are the things that we are really keen to do.

Anna, are you able to say where that is in the timetable?

Do you want to come in on that, Donna?