Seòmar agus comataidhean

You are right that the data is weak, and more work needs to be done to improve that. In the health service, we found that there was a huge data gap until the pandemic, when we started to administer vaccines and collect data on the ethnicity of people who were receiving vaccines. It is quite a new thing to collect equalities data in our public health services and in our public services in general, and it is really important that we do that.

I spoke about the different experiences of the learning disability community and of people with autism in terms of gender-based violence. One of the challenges is that many autistic people do not identify as disabled, so they do not say that they have a disability, and that data is not collected in many cases.

There are real challenges in among all this. I remember that, when we started to collect data on the ethnicity of people who were receiving vaccines, there was a lot of concern about why we were collecting that data and what we were doing with it. If we have a new data strategy, we need to carefully communicate that the data will be safe, that there is a reason for collecting it and that we understand how the data will be used to develop better and more responsive services in the future.

Another example where there has been a lot of controversy comes from school questionnaires that are used to understand the behaviour and lives of our children and young people. There has been a lot of political interest and concern about why we ask young people some questions. The answer is that we want to develop better public services that more closely meet their needs.

I agree that we need to be better at data collection. That will enable us to develop better and more responsive and targeted services for people in the future.

It absolutely has not stopped—no. The work on the bill is continuing, which is the first thing that we intend to do. It has had to necessarily slow down, but that work is progressing. There is also a whole suite of work on many other areas that we are determined to carry out.

I hear loudly and clearly from the population that we must make a tangible difference. I am keen to connect them into that feedback loop, so that we are able to say to them, “You told us that this area needs work. This is what we have done, and this is the difference that we have made”.

That is one of the reasons why I think that legislation is needed. We need some statutory underpinning to some of the work that we have done. We have done it on a voluntary basis up until now, and we need to give it some teeth in order to effect change.

We are not alone, in Scotland, in many ways. If we look globally, we see that cultural change is required all over the world.

It is a hard thing to do. I am questioned regularly on the coming home work, and I am very frustrated at the slow progress on that. People ask me, “Why have we not made progress?” It is hard to do. There are complex reasons why we are in the situation that we are in, so it requires a whole-system approach in order to effect change. There is not a single magic answer that can make the difference. I guess that that is why the proposed LDAN bill would see work across a range of areas, in a range of different ways, in order to try to effect that change.

We are doing a lot of work with local systems. As you know, it is down to local health boards to provide a service that meets the needs of the local population. That is how we deliver healthcare in this country. Government sets the strategy and local delivery is down to local health boards.

We recognise that there is a challenge because of the increased demand. There is also a global shortage of psychiatrists. We are looking at ways to support and develop services that could more adequately and efficiently meet local needs, perhaps by working on a regional basis. We have developed standards for neurodevelopmental assessment and have done pathfinders across the country, so we have a lot of good ideas on how we can step up and improve the situation, but it is proving challenging in the face of rising need.

I hear a lot of concerns about children in education. As I always say when I talk about the matter, the getting it right for every child approach means that our children’s needs and rights should be upheld regardless of a diagnosis. The diagnosis is helpful, but the child should be assessed on the basis of need and their right to education upheld within the system because of our GIRFEC approach.

We are looking at it.

We agree that we need to make progress on some of that work, and we are going to work closely with the LEAP. I have a meeting with the panel—in the next couple of days, I think—to discuss the programmes of work that we will try to put in place between now and when we legislate. Although the legislation is important, and I think that we have done sufficient work to establish that legislation is needed, it is not the whole answer. We need to make progress on other areas.

We will be talking about the bill work and what it is that we want to do, and there will be some work on drafting the provisions for the legislation between now and then, but there will be a lot of other work on things that we know are not sufficient at the moment, such as data collection and progress on the annual health checks, and there is work that can be done in education. There is a whole suite of work that we can progress that does not require legislation, and we will certainly be looking to come up with a schedule on how we intend to make progress on those issues.

We decided to slow down and take a more cautious and considered approach for several reasons, one of which was to do with questions about the scope of the bill and who should be included in it and who should not. Another area of disagreement related to the issue of how to ensure that there is accountability. There are varying views on the question of whether to have a commission or a commissioner. As you know, the Parliament is going through a period of reflection on whether the commissioner landscape is too cluttered at the moment. Although I agree that there were a lot of areas on which there was a good level of consensus, there were some big questions that were unresolved.

There are other issues that we have to take into account when we are considering how to make progress with our legislative programme, such as the number of bills going through the Parliament, the Parliament’s capacity to undertake scrutiny of legislation and budgetary considerations, although the budgetary situation was not a particular consideration in this case, because the costs of the bill were not expected to be particularly high. It is a relatively small, low-cost bill compared with bills such as the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill.

We have to take into account all the different considerations, especially the issue of how to ensure that there is accountability. That has been a particular sticking point and a challenge. We need to take a bit more time.

First, I would say that I am sorry. I am disappointed, too, that we have not been able to make progress at the pace that we wanted to. That is thoroughly disappointing.

I came to the conclusion, however, that it was absolutely necessary to pause the bill and spend a little longer working on it, because it was clear that in a number of areas we did not have a settled way forward and, particularly, because of the Parliament raising concerns over whether commissioners are effective and whether the commissioner landscape is saturated. It is important that we have taken time to reflect on those things before deciding on the way forward in order to build accountability into the bill.

I agree that it is disappointing. However, I do not think that it is fair to say that we have made no progress at all. I think that we have made some progress. We have heard directly from people. Today, the committee has discussed the concerns that have been raised around the process of consultation, but we have heard people’s voices. We have considered some really complex solutions to complex problems and, for much of what we consulted on, we have a signal on the way forward. We will crack on with that work.

There will be work on developing the provisions of the bill and, in the meantime, we will put other work in place. I will work closely with the stakeholder group and the LEAP—indeed, with all three panels—to ensure that they know the impact that their work is having on the progress that we are making.

My officials might want to add something to that.

Absolutely. Part of the reason for having this discussion is that we make sure that members of the committee understand that there are things that we can do by different means. There are subtle differences in how we can achieve things.

Take Anne’s law, for example. Relatives of care home residents were initially very keen on the idea of that being achieved through primary legislation. One reason for wishing to use primary legislation is that it cannot be changed so easily. Were we to face another pandemic, changing primary legislation would require a level of scrutiny from Parliament that changing secondary regulations would not require: the latter do not attract the same level of scrutiny.

There are definitely different ways to achieve the same thing. I need to spend time listening to stakeholders and to political parties in Parliament, then I will need to navigate a way forward. It is really important that I work closely with stakeholders. I am content to come back to you with a clearer idea and a proposal. In my letter, when I asked for a pause, I said that I would like to set out in the new year what I think the next steps are likely to be.

You are absolutely correct—there are real challenges. There are some structural reasons why the social care workforce is disempowered compared to other workforces. First, caring is not generally valued in society. That is not my view, but care is regarded as a drain on society rather than as an investment in society globally. We need to shift that narrative.

It is a largely female workforce; I think that more than 80 per cent of the workforce is female, and we know that, even 50 years or so after the equal pay legislation came in, women are not paid equally in society.

The workforce is also largely non-unionised. Less than 20 per cent of the workforce is unionised—I think that the figure is just about 19 per cent .The workers who are unionised are largely those who work for local authorities. Social care workers in the private sector tend not to be unionised. I think that many of us around the table would have concerns about that and would recognise that unionisation would be a way of strengthening the workforce’s hand and ensuring that they were empowered and recognised within the system.

I regularly talk to unions about that—I say, “I’m not sure if you think I’m an unusual sort of Government minister, but I would be far more comfortable if this workforce were more unionised”. I cannot introduce unionisation to the workforce; in lieu of that, I can work with the unions to take away some of the barriers. We are working carefully on sectoral bargaining. We think that that is very close to being ready and that it will deliver an improvement in pay and conditions for the sector. Sectoral bargaining has been really challenging to deliver, and the unions were very helpful to us in recommending academics who could help us to unlock some of the barriers. The challenge is that there are more than 1,000 different employers and we in Government are not part of the negotiations, but I think that we have managed to make really substantial progress, so I am pleased about that.

We need to try and give effective voice to the workers in the sector. I should make it clear that when I talk about lived experience, I am talking about the lived experience of people who access social care—people who use social care, their carers, the people whose loved ones use social care, and the people who work in social care. To me, those are the voices of lived experience, and they need to have representation. My idea for the national care service board was that people working in social care would have representation on the board as well.

There are things that we can do. We will work with the UK legislation that is being introduced. Many of the barriers to progressing fair work in Scotland are because employment law is reserved, so we do not have the power to tackle many of the issues. We try to get around that through procurement and commissioning.

We now have a different Government in the UK and the legislation that it has introduced is interesting. We are significantly further ahead in Scotland in delivering fair work in social care, and I am keen to work with the UK Government on the issue. Of course, I want it to devolve powers to the Scottish Government because we are much further on, and the social care situation in Scotland is sufficiently different from that of England to warrant it. We will work together however we can to ensure that we make a difference to the people who work in social care.

The other thing that we do regularly is talk up social care. I am not sure how much difference that makes, but I do that because I see social care as a massive investment in society. I think that I have spoken to the committee previously about attending a national forum at the Glasgow Science Centre and seeing on the wall there a quote from Stephen Hawking, who made an incredible global contribution to our understanding of the world and the universe that we live in. He would not have been able to make that contribution if he did not have social care. Social care is absolutely vital to the individuals who access it and their families, and it is vital to our communities and our society. It makes a profound difference to our society, and we must all say that loudly and clearly as often as possible.