Good morning, and welcome to the 27th meeting in 2022 of the Local Government Housing and Planning Committee. I would ask all members and witnesses to ensure that their mobile phones are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take items 3, 4 and 5 in private. Are members agreed? We're all agreed. We now turn to agenda item 2, which is to take evidence on the national care service bill at stage 1 as a secondary committee, and we're joined today by three panels. Our first panel this morning will be exploring local authority governance and structural issues, and joining us we have Andrew Burns, who is from the member of the accounts commission, Carol Calder, who is the interim audit director from Audit Scotland, Eddie Fallon, who is the chief health and social care officer, and Eddie Fraser, who is a representative from Solace Scotland, and also Derek Ewell, a council member from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, otherwise known as SIPFA. I thank all our witnesses for joining us and I'd like to begin with some initial questions. This is about focusing public expectations following the Covid pandemic and I'm going to open this out to everybody, but just to say that we only have an hour and so my colleagues and at times I might focus on our questions to one person, it might be questions that are just relevant to your work. A general question for everyone, do you agree with the Feely review that the Covid pandemic, quote, demonstrated clearly that the Scottish public expect national accountability for audit social adult social care support and to look to Scottish ministers to provide that accountability, so do you agree with that? Anyone want to pick that up? I'm here representing the institute, I appreciate there's been a couple of groups that are affiliated with SIPFA, the professional organisation of directors of finance, but I'm here representing SIPFA itself. I think it's a difficult one to answer because obviously the immediate focus is on the impact of the pandemic. I think we would look further than that at the wider implications of how social care is provided in this country and I think in a response we've highlighted some advantages and disadvantages of a national system. Overall SIPFA has pushed for a local democracy and it's a knowledge that proponents of subjectivity and place-based decision making and I think you'll probably hear from other submissions that there's a lot of benefits to be had from looking at local solutions for particular issues because Scotland faces a lot of challenges that are different in different parts of the country and I think that that is the challenge if you look at national decisions, national conditions and putting forward proposals on that basis. I say there are advantages and disadvantages from both models. Add Eddie. No, you don't have to do anything. Sorry, I'm just getting everybody confused. Just to come out from a slightly different angle, there's no doubt that the pandemic has had a huge impact on the social care system as it stands and clearly we know for instance that providers currently are under a huge amount of pressure, financial pressure at the cost of living crisis has added to that and from a cosily perspective we were very clear, we agree with many of the things in Feely and if you look at, we've got a joint statement of intent with Government where we're looking at things like improving pay, fair work terms and conditions and then to residential charging, so there's a lot in that that we agree with, unpaid breaks for carers and stuff, but what we never agreed with was the centralisation of services and the transfer of staff and assets and functions to a national body because our view on that really was that was that actually going to add to the kind of reform of social care, we didn't think so, but I think just to kind of add to that, you know, the bill as it stands at the moment is a framework bill, so it's really difficult for us to kind of take a view on what the impact of that will be. So I think there's a, I should really press on the point, there's a lot of work going on at the moment that we're doing with local authorities are doing with Government and a whole range of areas that Feely touched on, but that point, just that point about the shift of staff and accountability to ministers is the one bit where we're a bit stuck. Okay, thanks for that. Andrew, and then Eddie from Solace. Thanks, give you that. I mean, just to build on some of the points that Eddie and Derek have already made, I mean, in the quote you read out from Feely, there's a lot to agree with in that and from the commission's perspective, from a local government perspective, that, you know, we've not argued against what Feely recommends, but as Eddie's just indicated, this is a framework bill. We don't have any details of the secondary legislation. The financial memorandum is now many, many months old and a lot has happened in the last few months in terms of energy prices and inflation that has significant impacts on what's even in the framework legislation at the moment, let alone the secondary legislation which is yet to come. So, whilst there's a lot to welcome and to agree with in what Feely recommended and said, as you quoted a convener, there's also lots of questions and there's a real concern that we have is the commission that the urgent requirement for reforming social care right now is distracted from by months, if not years and years, of bureaucratic reorganisation and I think there's a real significant danger in that and we've evidenced in our joint submission with the Auditor General some previous examples of how national organisations such as Police and Fire have had challenges and I think the Government and the Parliament needs to be really, really mindful of the lessons that have hopefully been learned from those reorganisations. Okay, thanks very much, I think that's very helpful. I think that the point about the financial memorandum being old and a lot has happened is something to be aware of. I'm just going to move on now. I'm sorry, yes, Eddie. Okay, thank you. I think that the committee members will see in the solid submission, you know, we recognise that there is a role for Scottish ministers in terms of a national care service and we've never argued against a national care service but what we say is what's the role of that national care service, what's the role in terms of setting national standards and assurance, some of that around national workforce planning, you know, some of the developments around ethical commission and procurement. I think who we differ, you know, then is about, you know, then moving towards more engagement and taking away from localism and people knowing their local system and doing things to meet that local system. So again, what others have said, you know, is a short statement but it's quite complicated and I think it's complicated is because we think there is a role for a national care service to set the overall framework and standards but when you actually get down to how you deliver that on a local level, then local people and local systems know how to deliver that on a local level and so I think it's, we need to get both into account. Okay, thanks for that, Carol. I would agree with that. I think that your original question was about accountability, national accountability. I think that there has to be national and local accountability and I would ask to what extent a national care service would fit with other policy objectives around community empowerment, local governance, the European charter of local self-government and I guess, as Andrew said, the case hasn't been proven yet. We don't have enough information to say whether or not a national care service will deliver better outcomes so I guess my question would be how is it going to deliver better outcomes? What is the evidence base to show that this structural change will improve outcomes, will shift to a preventative agenda, early intervention? How will it be better for people locally? I think that that's something that may be more apparent when we see the business plan but at this point it's not clear how it will deliver better. Okay, thanks very much for that. I'm going to move on to the role of local authorities specifically and do you think care services should continue to be delivered by local authorities and if so, could you expand on what the benefits are and what the challenges are with the system as it is currently and I'd be interested to hear if anyone's got any experience on rural and island local authorities as well? Eddie Fraser. I should first of all say that my background is in social work and social care for the past 35 years. First of all, my plan is in social care services and is a social worker, chief social worker. Social work and social care is not delivered only by the social work department or the health and social care partnerships. We're absolutely engaged in terms of what I would call everything from wellbeing through social care, community health and on and to other health services and that engagement is really important in local communities. If I think I'm on local communities in East Ayrshire, in rural areas we tend to find the vast majority of our social care workers are employed by the local authority. That gives a level of consistency. It's also in terms of economic growth, something that we do so again it's engaging across a whole community planning partnership in terms of what we do there. Remember this bill is not only about social care, it's also about social work and in terms of social work, again both directly in the solace, in return and in the return across chief officers groups in terms of public protection. We have had some concerns around the removal of the responsibility of social work from a local authority level to a national level. Again, one of my roles as a chief executive councillor is to chair the public protection chief officers group. This is not just about changes to social care, this is about changes to child protection, adult protection, MAPA, violence against women. Those are all within this bill about removing from a local context into a national context. Again, we are set out to papers where we think there are significant risks about changing that accountability. Thanks for that. Anybody else? Andrew and then Eddie Fallon. Thanks, convener. Maybe just to broaden it out, I wouldn't comment in detail on the policy per se that the Government is putting forward. The Government is entirely within its rights to put forward whatever policy it wants to and it's up to the Parliament through its committees to scrutinise that legislation, which is what you're doing. In terms of the wider implications for local Government from a commission perspective, Eddie's outline will have significant ramifications for the local government family across all 32 local authorities. In our joint submission, we make it clear that, because it's a framework bill, because we don't have the secondary legislation, we can't be absolutely certain of the full ramifications yet, but they will definitely be significant. There's probably going to be a gearing effect on smaller local authorities, just given the nature of the size of some of the smaller local authorities. If you think about the fact that I'm correct in saying that at Audit Scotland's annual review of local government just released a couple of weeks ago, it indicated that just shy of 24 per cent of local government funding is now ring-fenced. That's compared to 18 per cent just 18 months ago. That's a 30 per cent increase in less than two years, so 24 per cent of local government funding is already ring-fenced. If this national care service goes through along the lines of what's in the framework bill, a lot to be decided through the secondary legislation, it could have major, almost existential impact on, in particular, small local authorities. I think that the Parliament needs to look long and hard at that, and Carol has already made the point about how does it fit in with other elements of what the Government is proposing, the local government's review, for example. Who did I call on next? Eddie Fallon, yes. I think that just the bill on both what Andrew and Eddie have said, one of the, where we've got the kind of, there's a lack of clarity in the bill about the role that local authorities will have in being either a commissioned service or a commissioners-off service. Now, if it's going to be, you know, and I think, I reckon the bill saying it'll be, it would be commissioned to provide services, if we're removing, you know, the 75,000 staff, if Spice have said, and potentially the assets from local authorities, there's no real, doesn't it really create an incentive for them to be a provider of social care services, unequally? You know, if they were, they're not really, they're not really on a level playing field because the terms and conditions in local government for staff providing social care, and we are working on this through fair work, are better than they are in the private sector and in the third sector as well. So that's no real level playing field in which to be a provider of services, and there's a real risk there that local authorities, and I think the legislation provides the fact that they can choose to be a provider of services, you know, they don't need to be a provider of services, and the risk is that they choose not to be, you know, if we remove the core assets from local government. And if they choose not to be, then you have to ask yourself the question, who is going to provide social care in Scotland? You know, the private sector in Scotland and the third sector in Scotland do a great job, you know, and we work in partnership with them, you know, but the capacity of those sectors to provide the social care that we need is going to be grossly impacted, potentially grossly impacted by the legislation as it stands at the moment, and that's a real concern for us, a real concern, particularly given the pressures that are on the system at the moment. Thanks for that, and Carol, I think that you wanted, did you want to come in? Yeah, just to say that something does need to change, and as Andrew said, we wouldn't make a comment on what the policy about what that change is, that's for the Parliament to decide, but the current issues that face the sector right now need action right now. Now, a big structural reform when services are in a stable position is difficult enough, and all reports have shown that, and sometimes reform doesn't necessarily deliver the expected benefit, certainly not in the short term, but the sector at the minute is really struggling. I think that there's an element of picking up on other comments about the linkages with the other social determinants of health and the other services that councils provide. How will those linkages with housing and education, and you mentioned MAPR, that all those other services that are important to health and social care, how will that be maintained? I suppose that my point really is that structural reform isn't necessarily going to be the solution. The solution is going to be sustainable funding. It's about meeting on that need. It's about developing the workforce that can deliver that, whatever structure you happen to have. Good morning, convener. In that very comment, there is really the question that I had in mind for you, Carol. The Audit Scotland social care briefing did identify a number of issues in most of which were urgent in requiring attention. How does that then sit alongside the plans to implement the national care service? Can they both run in parallel? Clearly, the national care service is going to be a longer-term change, but you've identified in the report that there's some urgent action required. Could you just expand a little bit on what the concerns may be to tackle some of the more urgent pressing needs that we need to look at? I think that the Auditor General said that he described the services in a precarious position right now. Funding is a big issue, workforce is a big issue. Running that alongside developing a national care service, I have a cost implication. There's double running, there's transitional costs. Have they been built in? We also know that, from the EBR, the national care service is going to be refazed and 400 million from that budget is going to cover a 7 per cent increase in the pay, which has not been agreed, so that might get bigger. How are we going to tackle the here and now issues that people are experiencing with the service alongside double running, the structural change, the transition, uncertainty for workforce and for local government in terms of their planning, the financial planning, recruitment, all of that is an enormously complicated thing to do. As I said, with stable services reform is never easy, but nobody is stable at the minute. Are they really? Everything is difficult just now. It will take resources and it's not clear from, and I recognise it as a framework, but it's not clear from the bill what costings have been put around that, keeping the services going, improving them now, and shifting towards a prevention agenda as well. That doesn't happen overnight. How is that going to work? I think that we just need to see more detail of the business plan of how this is going to improve services. It's not just about improving services, it's about improving terms and conditions. It's about making a change in the way services are delivered as well. It's very difficult to do all of that alongside delivering the services just now, particularly with the pressures that they're under. Perhaps on the flip side of this question, I think, for Cosla and Solace, the Audit Scotland report did identify that a huge amount of money is spent, public money is spent and social care, and we know that. Progress in moving to a more preventative approach to delivering social care has been limited. Those are the words from the Audit Scotland report, so what would your views of that be, both Eddys, in fact, to make a comment on that, perhaps? I think about integration in the broadest sense here as well. We've been through a pandemic, and we're now in a cost-of-living crisis. Progress has been limited, but a lot of that is down to investment, and the amount of investment that needs to go in. Even at the moment, we're working around fair work. The difficulty with fair work and the improvement in terms of conditions is the complexity that lies within it, and that's what's taken time. I know that colleagues from trade unions and elsewhere genuinely get frustrated and totally understand that frustration in terms of how we deliver on those. Even if we look at just one element of fair work, if we were to raise wages in terms of conditions in one area—social care—that has a knock-on effect in other areas, and the example that we would often use is early years in childcare, where there's a kind of equivalence in terms of the workforce. Progress has been, but there are things that we're working on at the moment that we need to progress, and we do need to progress them quicker. We need to think about non-residential charging and what we do about that. For us at COSLA, all this work is going on in the background, but the debate around the national care service has taken away from that. We've got that focus on structural change. A good example is the recruitment and retention. We've got a huge recruitment crisis in social care at the moment, and sometimes it almost feels intractable, but we know that we're working, we're Government, we're looking at things like overseas recruitment, we're looking at how we can make that profession in that area work more attractive. Again, that links heavily to terms and conditions and pay. Those are really sticky and complex issues, and that's what takes the time. That and the fact that we've also got a fairly tight fiscal environment in which we're working at the moment. I think that both the bill and the policy memorandum says repeatedly that there isn't capacity to show improvement in the current system. I mentioned earlier how long I've worked in the current system and I've worked in the current system when care at home was home helps, from 9am to 1pm Monday to Friday. If you did a significant learning disability or mental health problem, you lived in an institution. We're not speaking up how progressive our social care system is in Scotland, our social care system in Scotland predominantly. People live at home and are supported at home, and we've seen huge progress. Our work around self-directed support is, again, some of the best in the world. I accept that there is an implementation gap between the policy intent and what's happening there, but the issues, instead of us looking at why is that, and how can we improve that, seems to be getting lost in terms of looking at structural reform, instead of looking at the improvement that we need to do there. I also think that when you start to link different bits together, and I spoke before about wellbeing in our local area, how much we're investing in wellbeing. We're seeing more investment in wellbeing and peer support in alcohol and drug services to make a difference, because traditional things haven't worked for us, so things can change in terms of how we do that. At the core of it is also about valuing social care. If people see social care as only a means to support a health service, they are not valuing it for what it is, and valuing it for supporting people in their own local communities to be as independent as they possibly can be. When we value it and we can recruit people into that, then we have capacity and care that people need to move about the system and transfer from hospitals to community, then there's a capacity for it. If you get a big waiting list in the community, then it becomes very difficult to do the transfers or care out of the hospital. The whole things are very linked, but it gets back down to when you first said about what's the capacity in terms of wellbeing, that preventative part. You need to be able to invest in that. You need to be able to invest in our tea dances, our learning disability awareness tap dancing, and all the things that you know that we do there, and the preventative end has to be done to prevent me from people needing the social care and therefore take the way off of the further up. Absolutely. One of the dangers that we see here is that if we separate off social care from wellbeing, where will be the incentives and systems under financial stress to cross-invest in those types of things? That would be one of the risks that we would see. Thank you very much for that. It's important to let all our colleagues come in this, but thank you for those responses. We're now going to move to questions from Paul MacLennan. Thank you, convener, and good morning, my panel. I suppose I'm coming from this with 15 years of experience as a council and also a previous council leader. The Deputy First Minister asserted that there are significant variations in performance between different local authorities, so how can witnesses account for disparity in performance, and how do they suggest that the Scottish Government and COSLA address those? I'll probably come to Eddie first of all. That's okay, Eddie Frazier. So I do think that there are differences, and when you look at different systems, there's not one reason why there would be differences. The reason there would be challenges in Highland would be different from the reasons there would be challenges in Edinburgh, so again, I'm back to their local systems. Within the current arrangements, the Public Bodies Act, there are means to hold integration joint boards to account, so if a health board and a council don't think that an integration joint board strategic plan is delivering what it is, it can be called back and has to be done again. If the Scottish Government doesn't think that a council or a health board are performing appropriately, it can hold them to account in terms of that. The arrangements can be there for accountability if the current arrangements wish to be applied in terms of that. I would see it a bit different, I suppose. I would want to work with local systems and see what the particular issues are and talk about focused improvement for systems, rather than we can get into accountability. That always becomes a punitive type of discussion. What are the issues in the local area and how do you support local areas with improvement plans to monitor improvement plans to see that? On that, how many improvement plans have there been in the past? I suppose it's plenty of a lot. How many have there been in the past and has that approach worked up until now? I appreciate the pressures that you mentioned about funding and other issues with Covid. How many have there been at this stage and has that approach worked up to this point in time? Improvement has been done in different ways. Improvement at times has been done by support coming from Scottish Government down to local levels. Improvement is done at a local level by adding an additional capacity, including linking COSL into that. When you get focused support, you see improvement. Sometimes the challenges are wider than that. If you reach a point of improvement where it has to really be different, where you need to somehow bring more workers into the system, you need to do things differently. Sustained improvement has been a challenge for a number of areas. If you look across the statistics over a number of years, you will see the same areas on the whole with the same challenges. I will bring in Karen Andrew just from an accounts commission in Audit Scotland. If you are just on that same point, there are reasons for the disparity. At the moment, what has gone on in the past? What lessons do we need to learn from that, without actually moving on to the national care services? It is really learning from the past on how we can look forward. I do not have Karen Andrew if you want to address that one. Thanks for your question. Despite two or three of us already have said that there are challenges in the fact that this is just a framework, Bill. We are not going to see the details until we get to the second legislation. I will contradict myself slightly by saying that there is an opportunity to respond to your point in that there is space within the development of the second legislation to go forward with the proper co-design and co-creation of the new service. Those words sound great. Do not they co-design and co-creation? Actually making them happen and involving stakeholders like Coslawn Solis and others is not always straightforward, and it has to be followed through. Absolutely crucially, the stakeholders have to, in the view of the Commission in Audit Scotland, include service users. To be positive about some aspects of what the Government has done in recent years, if you look at the delivery of Social Security Scotland, the involvement of service users has been exemplary in the design of that service. Things can be done well, but making the words of co-design and co-creation that are going to come forward as part of the second legislation that actually happened is difficult. However, as I have said, Social Security Scotland shows that it can be done well with very positive effects, and improvement can happen. However, it is fundamental from a local government perspective that stakeholders and service users are properly involved. I will see if anybody else wants to come in and then I want to try to move on. I agree with what Andrew McLean just said. With community engagement and co-creation, consistency is probably not something that you are going to achieve. Performance does not need to be the same. One size does not fit all. There are local priorities, and if they are agreed with local communities, we can understand performance at a local level and where the improvements are and what work is going on to make sure that those improvements happen, that does not mean that it is going to be the same as the next one. Variation is not always a bad thing. Variation can reflect the local community needs. I think that we need to be careful with the language. We hear postcode lottery inconsistency of provision, which suggests that there is good and bad. However, every area will be under different pressures for different reasons. We need to change that language to the language of support, and how can we support areas? In the education arena, there was a system there that we used where there was a consistent peer support that would go into areas and look at where things could improve. However, we need to be careful that we are not saying that inconsistency means that there is good and bad. Everybody has different pressures and faces different pressures financially and otherwise. If I could just support that comment, because that was the point that I was going to make, I think that it goes back to the first question that I answered about local decision making as opposed to national decision making. In terms of performance, you look at qualitative and quantitative measures and assessing that. At the moment, there are different pressures in different areas. Local decision making, where councils will determine their own priorities and determine how they will view social care compared to pressures in a whole range of other services. That is where you get that local decision making. If you take that away and provide a national service, that sets different challenges in terms of how that national and local interface works. Over the years, I have worked on a number of authorities. Social care is there in terms of all councils that face the greatest demand-led pressure. I have seen councils that I have worked in actually put more resource and support to protect the social care service at the expense of other services. I cannot say that that has happened across the whole of Scotland, but there are certainly a number of councils that I have worked in. That would be my experience. Local members have made decisions to protect the social care service at the expense of other services, just reflecting that local priority. I just want to move on. Can you touch on the Eddie Frazer? First of all, he mentioned obviously the IGBs. The IGBs have brought on, I suppose, its impact on local democracy and democratic accountability through the IGBs. Not every cancer, as you know, sits on the IGBs as a limit number, sits on there. Is there an influence for cancers who do not sit on it? First of all, on coming back to democratic accountability, how do you think that has worked over that period of time, the five or six years that it has been brought in? What is the role of the IGBs? Can you touch on your answer to the first question? I was a chief officer of the IGBs from 2015 to 2021. It is a structure that works very well in most places for that. Accountability is obviously with the health board and the council appointing members on to it. The council and the health board have also been responsible for approving the strategic plan of that IGB. Just now, as you know, the legal responsibility for providing social work, social care stays with the council, for health, stays with the health board and that gets delegated into the IGB and there are levels of accountability there. Clearly, that bill would remove both representation and accountability on to the IGBs. There is a significant change in terms of that. In terms of performance reports, every new role at the IGB provides performance reports back to the council and to the health board in terms of how they are performing. The structural links are there. At times, people misinterpret the difference between the IGB, which is a separate public body, and the health and social care partnership, which is the joint delivery body between the health board and the council. People who are chief officers are not only the chief officer of a separate public body, but they are also the joint director of health and social care. It is in that joint director role that they are able to do the delivery model of the integrated services. I was responsible for not only the local services of NHS Ayrshire Narn and the East Ayrshire Council within my patch but also primary care for the whole of Ayrshire Narn, if you know for the number of years. I was doing that in terms of that joint director role, not the chief officer role. I was responsible for both the chief executive of the East Ayrshire Council and the NHS Ayrshire Narn. The legislation has laid out and breaks that integration. It clearly says that the NHS staff will stay responsible to the NHS and the council that the staff is moving from there. You do not have that joint director post at this stage. I can see where the chief executive of the new board is and understand that. That is almost an equivalent of the chief officer role. However, that joint delivery in terms of integration, as it currently stands, there is no plan that we can see that delivers joint integrated services. Remember, integration of health and social care was supposed to be integration from the perspective of people who use services. It was not about structural integration. That is why it is okay that, in different places across Scotland, there are different ways of structural integration, because integration should make the perspective of the person who receives care. Localism and local democracy. There is access to local politicians more than there is to ministers. It is a really important point to make. If there are people in that community who need to get access to somebody who is accountable to them, that is much easier. Solace notes that the bill's financial memorandum describes savings or efficiencies through shared services. However, it argues that it does not acknowledge the corresponding loss of economies of scale for local government. Do panellists have any further insights into that? I will come to Eddie first, Eddie from Solace. If I can give a couple of examples, clearly in a council you have a legal team. A big part of that legal team's work is to support social workers getting in and out of a court. In a small council, you will not have a big legal team. If you take a few of them away, does it leave that very stable in terms of the legal team? The same goes for your HR teams and all sorts of other teams that they structural support around about you. It does reach the stage. I was giving an example to colleagues. We have moved down a line where our social workers on the whole go about in a fleet of electric cars. A big part of our garage services the electric cars. If you take the social care workforce away from the council, I am presuming that the transfer of assets you need to take the cars off the council as well, it leaves us with a garage that might not be sustainable. It is the size of the council. That economy is a scale that is mentioned in the financial memorandum that is a positive for the national care service. What we are trying to describe and all the support services around the council, it becomes a difficult day. On a wider basis, depending on what happens around capital debt, if you take a quarter or plus of the revenue of a council, the proportion of revenue to capital debt dramatically changes and becomes difficult. Also, as mentioned earlier, if we have ring-fenced moneys on the whole, a lot of that is around education. That stays ring-fenced, so suddenly you are going from 30 per cent ring-fenced to that being doubling. Almost 60 per cent of your budget becomes ring-fenced because you have taken the social work element away. The financial structural issues for the council are significant in terms of the way that is set out just now. On building on Eddie's point, in terms of assets and transfer assets, we are aware of some local authorities that are already reconsidering their investment plans as a result of the national care service. We have even, in discussion with all 32 council leaders, had real concerns about the actual viability of some councils to operate as a council when we are talking about taking potentially a third of the budget away. On assets, there is a disincentive to invest. A lot of services are co-located. We have locality models all over the country, where children services, housing and education are in the one place. This is a question that I have not got the answer to, but I will ask it. How do we extricate that? How do we disaggregate those assets and those staff from local authorities when, at the moment, as Eddie said earlier, they are integrated and working well in many respects across the country? I think that we need to think really carefully about that. I have heard from the finance committee that that would be done on an asset-by-asset basis. I am struggling to see how that would be done. It is a real concern, and we have heard that from all 32. I do not want to repeat what the two Eddie said, but I would entirely support what they have said. A couple of points. One thing that has not been spoken about at the economies of scale is the question of insurance. I do not see that mentioned anywhere in the memorandum. At the moment, it is an area where I believe that the Government would be advised to take external advice upon. A lot of insurance premiums are largely focused on staff costs or staff numbers to calculate the premium. The area of social care is an area where we tend not to have touchwood many cases, but those that do or rise tend to be quite high-value cases, and that can differ quite substantially from other council services, which tend to be a large number of cases, but have relatively small value. If you remove social care from local government, I think that there is a real challenge there to how insurers will view that in terms of ensuring the remaining services within local government. I think that there is also a question of insurance cover for social care and a national care service, which I do not see reflected in the financial memorandum at all. The other area that I was going to say is that a lot of the focus has been on expenditure. I do not think that you can ignore the income side of the equation as well. At the moment, councils are funded by grant, but there are also council tax and fees and charges. The relationship of those three could differ quite significantly if you remove social care from local government. Again, I do not think that that has been explored yet, and it is something that needs to be looked at before proposals are finalised, because I think that there are some potentially hidden difficulties there. I am conscious of the time. Thanks, Annie, for the question. I know that I have touched on this already, but I am really glad that you have brought your attention back to the financial memorandum, because I touched on the fact that if you look at the table 2, I think that it is where the Government put forward the projections for the five years up to 2067, when the care service is supposed to come into effect. The figures are very significant, but it is based on inflation plus 3 per cent. It does not actually say what the 3 per cent increase includes in its great detail. It just mentions pay and energy prices. Thinking about this globally, this was published in June 2022. Pay and energy prices in particular have rocketed since June 2022, literally in the past five or six months. I think that all the projections in table 2 of the financial memorandum need to be updated. It relates to the point that Carol was making earlier about the lack of a detailed business plan, which I know is potentially coming forward soon. All of that will have a massive gearing impact on local government. The increases that will undoubtedly come from a refresh of table 2 will have to come from somewhere. It will have, as I touched on earlier on, personally the commission feel a potentially more significant impact on smaller local authorities, just given the nature of the services that they deliver and other colleagues have touched on some specifics around that. No, thanks very much. I will just come back to something that Dave from Coddless touched on, about the assets as well. Are councils reluctant now to look at assets over the next 45 years, because they might lose in the next 45 years? Does anyone else have anything to say on that? What impact could that have on local councils? I turn your question around the other way, because I think that there is an impact on a national care service. If councils are not investing in properties for the reasons stated, that means that assets that are transferred are going to need a lot of investment, and where the money will come from, given all the pressures that have been spoken, I would totally support what the commission is saying. There needs to be a complete updating, not just to the financial memorandum of looking at the costs, but also the implications on the wider sense. The question of funding capital assets is one that I do not think has been answered either, because at the moment local authorities have the powers to borrow to finance capital expenditure. How that would operate under a national care service model is unclear as well. That is great. I think that people have answered the question, so thanks very much. Thanks very much, Annie. We are now going to move to questions from Miles Briggs. Thank you. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us this morning. I wanted to follow up some of the questions that were highlighted in the briefing from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance in the County City. Specifically, in your submission, the directors of finance argue that issues facing the current system are a product of underfunding by the Scottish Government. However, in the same submission, it states that councils now are spending around 20 per cent more on adult social care and children's services than they did 10 years previously. Audit Scotland's assessment is that the pace of change has been slow and the performance of current services is variable, and there are significant service areas that are not meeting expectations. In terms of those two statements, if you want to comment on the situation currently and the impact that the national care service is likely to have on that. Derek, as I said, I think that we have probably touched on this in some of the previous answers. First of all, it is an area of service under substantial pressure for the reasons that have been stated, particularly around the demographic changes and demand for services. It is an increasing cost pressure that has not been mirrored in the level of funding for local government, and that probably relates to a point that I made previously about how each individual council has managed that pressure and how it has prioritised resources for social care, potentially at the expense of other council services. As I said from my own experience, that is what I have seen happening. I cannot really say across the whole of Scotland, but that is the biggest challenge. Going forward, the financial memorandum talks about a 25 per cent additional investment in social care. It is not clear in my mind what is meant by that, whether it is additional financial resource to meet that growing demand for services or whether it is to invest in the preventative side. I think that we would certainly push the argument that you need to invest in prevention to actually see some of the changes that will need to happen in the wider care sector. I think that there is a difficulty looking at things in isolation because you have the pressure on the NHS as well. Our concern is that the Government has already stated a policy to protect the NHS. It is now contained within this bill proposal to increase investment in social care. To me, that raises a big question then, what happens to the rest of the public sector? Not just local government, but the wider public sector as well. Since June, we have seen the Scottish Government having an emergency budget to find half a billion pounds of savings. That has been followed up in the last couple of weeks by a further £615 million. That emphasises the challenge that the Scottish Government's own budget is facing. It is incredibly difficult to square that. That is why we have voiced concern about the financial memorandum, not understanding or having the objective to analyse what is behind the numbers that are there, but to challenge some of the assumptions that are in the paper about increasing costs over the next few years. That just emphasises to me the risk for the wider public sector of committing to that additional expense, which, as others have said, potentially is swallowed up by structural change rather than being directed to front-line service delivery. I agree with Derek, yes. It would be easier if you were all three called, Eddie. Apologies, Derek. It comes down to demand outstrips the funding because of the demographic change. If you look at local government overview reports that the commission produce every year, you will see how the funding is directed towards social care and education, and the smaller services, which I say, knowing that that term—I do not like that term because it diminishes the importance of all the other services that councils provide that are very important and have impacts on health and wellbeing, but those services have seen between 25 and 35 per cent cuts over the last few years. That goes to show how much funding is being channeled into social care alongside education, but it is not enough because of the demographic change. I will move on to my final question, which is about the fact that the national care service is going to be a huge top-down reform. We have seen that previously 10 years ago with Police Scotland and the fire service. What learnings have taken place within government from some of the mistakes that happened 10 years ago? Are we going to see those repeated in terms of this national centralised service? Who would like to start on that? I cannot comment miles on what learnings have been taken. That may be for you as Parmontanus to judge whether the Government has learned, but I have given some example in answer to Paul's earlier point about Social Security Scotland. That has been done well in terms of involvement of service users and stakeholders. Clearly, you can see from the work that Audit Scotland and the Commission has done over the past five, ten years, that clearly was not the case with some other national real organisations such as Police Scotland and the Fire Service without going into all the details. There are aspects of those real organisations that did not go as well as latter examples that I have just referenced, such as Social Security Scotland. That is potentially a positive that some lessons have been learned, but it is absolutely crucial given everything that everybody has said about the scale of what has been proposed here that that is done in the same way for the national care service bill if it goes ahead in its current form. If we have a repetition of what happened over other organisations, the consequences are really significant for hundreds of thousands of people right across the nation. I cannot answer your question about whether you are going to see the same again, but the types of things that we have been reporting on around reform are to have clearly set out what the benefits are for that reform, evidence-based decisions, realistic costings, robust and, by robust I mean comprehensive and reliable data, impact assessment about what might happen to local government in this case in terms of this reform, a route map to how you are going to get to where you want to go to and keeping people at the heart of designing those services and governance that is around outcomes, delivery of outcomes and prioritising that, longer-term financial piling, long-term workforce piling and accountability transparency. I support what Carol is saying, because I am not sure that that happened in the last time in terms of lessons, Len. I think that there is debate in those, and that is exactly the sort of analysis that we need to have. What I was going to say is that it is not really a case of lessons, Len, but I think that the financial memorandum highlights the same challenges that we experienced with police and fire that would be faced by a national care service, VATs, an obvious one. I think that the challenge around pensions is a bigger challenge than it was under police and fire for the simple reason that the staff in social care part of the local government pension scheme, police and fire, had their separate pension scheme, which was largely funded on a pay-as-you-go basis. The local government pension scheme is one that is self-enhanced. I think that, as we recommend in our submission, that needs professional advice to look at that, but I could not understate the significant challenges that that presents for pension funds in the current and that transition to a new organisation. I think that the big question mark would be the status of a national care body, what it would be. I think that, as the Government will be aware of what happened with police and fire, I think that it took four or five years with discussion, negotiation with the Office of National Statistics. I think that it is that determines the classification of the organisation and, in the meantime, costs that are currently offset, such as VATs being able to be recovered, that is potentially lost to the Scottish budget. Whether it is lessons, Len, but I can see us facing those same problems again, but I would stress that pensions, I think, is the big area where there is a difference from what happened under police and fire. I mean, I can't comment on lessons, Len, on what lessons have been learned in government, but I think that what I wanted to say though is that the uncertainty that the potential transfer of staff is creating is a big issue. From a causeless perspective, we have been very clear that we need to focus on the system now, rather than on that structural change, because the challenges that we face in the system that you have heard them hear today are significant. We have been lobbied quite hard by our trade union colleagues, as is the employer organisation, to take a particular approach around that. We agree with them that we do not want to see that transfer of staff. That will be different from police, because the workforce is so diverse in local government. It does not just include the workforce that actually works in social care or social work, but we have to think about the back office functions and all the support structures that are there as well and the instability that that can cause. That is just an important point of it again. Just before we move on to a question from Mark Griffin, I just want to say that we are almost at half-pass. I hope that it is okay that we go over about 10 minutes, because I think that this is really important information, and we have three more questions to ask you. Mark Griffin. I wanted to talk about the impact on essentially the council services that would be left behind after the national care service. There are synergies in place in local government services that work well together by having everyone all under one roof. What is going to be the impact on the services that are left with local government if that goes ahead? I am thinking specifically about housing and education. I do not know if I can come to the phrase of first in any form. As an example around housing, many councils have housing build programmes, and the housing build programmes are heavily focused on people with additional support needs. For older people, the unit cost of building the houses is significantly higher than building mainstream housing, but we do not recharge any of that money back to social care. We do not say that we build this type of housing. It actually reduces the cost on the social care budget, and therefore how do we cross-subsidise that? We do not do that at this stage. The issues for housing, even on that basic level of house building, are important. Once we get into some of the other areas of work that we work closely with housing, we need to be very clear about what happens in terms of housing adaptations that are currently delegated to IJBs, but we delegate them back again to the council in terms of how it works. More significantly, MAPA, multi-agency public protection arrangements, housing are working closely with social work and police in terms of how we manage people in the community and how we share information around all that.  It is hard to overemphasise how entwined and integrated services are within a council. The preventative services that are delivered out there, whether they be activity services, lunch clubs, et cetera, on the whole, in my experience, are no longer delivered by social work and social care. You will find that they will be delivered by leisure for us, we would call, a vibrant community. There is someone else out there delivering that preventative work that keeps people as independent as possible as they can in the local community, but also prevents spend on the social care budget. Education is the universal services for our young people, supported by our community health and our social work services. Again, our travel will work around even something as specific as the promise. We need to be clear that what we are doing here is not putting structural barriers in between things that just now are quite well knitted together. It sometimes comes across as if everything that comes up here in this bill were negative about. I think that just now I need to say that there is a number of things that we are actually quite positive about. There are a number of things here in terms of independent advocacy, support for carers and law. There is a range of things there that can actually be positive, but they can be progressed without the disruption in structural reform. It is not about saying that everything is perfect just now, it is not. Things need improvement and we need to work at improvement, but the structural reform has come in and causes a risk in terms of the local structural arrangements and a risk to our time and capacity for improvement in terms of what we are doing. I do not know if you are able to touch particularly on issues of child protection. I think that Eddie is probably better qualified on that in terms of a map. I think that we have certainly got concerns around the integration of children's services. I think that the promise is a really important aspect to that because every local authority now is working really hard to make sure that we implement the recommendations of the promise, but what the bill does is create an uncertainty because we do not know where children's services are going to lie. I know that it is in the interests of time, but we do not think that everything about the bill is wrong. It is just that structural change, but our officers are working really closely with the Scottish Government on things such as an slot, the charter and the right to break for carers because there are things in there that are good, but unfortunately we do get distracted by and the attention is given to that mass transfer of staff. I do not know if you wanted to add on to the protection. Again, within the policy memorandums, one of the things that seemed to be significantly missed was the role of the chief social work officer and the role that it takes overall in giving advice to council and to other partners around social work and social care. The role of myself now as chair of the chief officer's group is that I have taken that accountability for public protection along with my colleagues in health and the police because I have the levers to do things and to change things. I have that management responsibility to change things. What that would do would take away the levers for you to change things and support your chief social worker to do that. There are concerns that that will interfere with well-established public protection arrangements. If I can come to Carol, you said in your response that there is a risk of fragmentation of local services. I wonder if you will be able to expand on which specific areas the risk is greatest. I think that probably Erdie has made a place to be able to say which services, but I think that the general point is that, as others have said, a lot of services are delivered or integrated. People work across the service lines in local government and there are joint initiatives that will need to be disaggregated. There are joint services that need to be disaggregated. How will the national care service link in with housing services, with education employability, other services around youth work and addiction that has been mentioned, but mental health and leisure as well as the public protection services. All those councils get criticised—public sector gets criticised and council gets criticised for working in silos, but what we have seen over the years in local government is how they have broken down those silos. There are multi-service teams that are working in particular areas. That is where the risk is. In terms of pulling that away, it creates a gap, so how are we going to fill that gap and how are we going to ensure that those integrated services that are integrated around people and communities, that we do not lose that and end up with two separate institutions working not so closely at the local level? We are going to come to the final two questions from Marie McNair. Thank you. Good morning, panel. I have direct my first question to Eddie from Solace. What impact do you think of any of the development of the national care service could have on the so-called new deal between the Scottish Government and the local government as detailed in the recent programme for government? The process that we are going through towards the national care service is that it makes challenging relationships because local government sees that this is a diminishing of their role. It is making the relationship challenging there. That is not to say that we cannot put that aside and work for improvement. We are almost sitting in two different rooms at different times and trying to work towards improvement, but also as local government feeling threatened in terms of the national care service. I think that that is where we are there. I think that there also needs to be, as some of this develops on, because it is a framework bill, because there are uncertainties. That builds in like a trust because you do not know your direction of travel. I think that when we talk about the new deal of that, we have to see how we trust each other and what we are all doing. Again, in the submissions, we absolutely believe that what ministers want and what local government want in terms of improvement in social care is no different. We think that it is just outlined as a range of things within it that are actually really positive, but the part of its structural reform is that core part in the middle that we do not. That is the part that does put tensions in the relationship. Thank you. Do you want to add anything further? Just to reinforce that, I think that the relationship at the moment is challenging in that area. I think that when you have a bill that says that we are going to take that and you have heard the instability and issues that that causes, that will make for a difficult relationship, but just around that area. As Eddie said, even in the social care field, there are a whole series of conversations and joint working going on about improvement around all the stuff in the statement of tent about fair work and non-residential charging. That is all going on, but it casts a pretty shadow, let us put it that way. I am certainly aware of that.  Eddie, I will direct my next question, but in earlier responses to the questions, you have obviously spoken about the challenge, likely to rise in the transfer of the 75,000 local authority staff of the new care service. Is there anything that you would like to add, obviously, that you have covered for the benefit of the committee? That has become a focus of the discussions and the debate. In that sense, that is not helpful. However, this is about a workforce. Again, the uncertainty around how that will happen, when it will happen, if it will happen, in pensions, in pay, in terms and conditions—all that creates that uncertainty in a workforce. Those who are already stretched in the context of what we have been through in the past few years and what we are still going through. Our view, the causal view, is that we should take that away. That should not be happening. We should not do that. Then we work together to see what we can do here. I know that Eddie might have a view from a chief executive perspective on the impact of what that would mean for terms, conditions and pay, and for his workforce, so it is probably—if you are okay, I will hand that to Eddie. I was going to go over it anyway. Earlier, we spoke about a council that may choose not to become involved in the delivery of social care. As things stand, I would suggest that they would not be able to be involved in the delivery of social care. That is because, as we currently understand it, local authority social care services would have to compete against the private and independent sector. The terms and conditions of local authority social care workers are such that they get access to local government pensions scheme, etc., which means local government on top of the paid cost, adding at least another 20 per cent on top of that in terms of what we pay in. The unit costs are significantly higher. If you went out to the market to do that, you simply could not compete. From my perspective, when we talk about fair work, the solution to that is to make sure that there is enough resource in it so that the people who work in the care homes, etc., and the independent sector, also have access to good pension schemes, etc. In the third sector, the independent sector, that is what fair work would be about, so all social care workers, no matter which sector they worked in, had decent terms and conditions. At that stage, if you level it up, you can compete if you want to do that. However, it has always taken us back to where we were many years ago in terms of compulsory competitive tending for local authority to their internal markets, etc., but right now, unless our colleagues in the independent and third sector are able to get their terms and conditions up to the equivalence of local authority social care workers, which are just the same as every other local authority worker and health service colleagues in terms of their public sector, then, quite frankly, we could not compete in terms of the financial basis of it. Tadda, I am conscious of the time. Do not underestimate the scale of the challenge of transferring that number of employees. To me, there is a hidden cost in there, which, again, is not reflected in the financial memorandum, because, ultimately, you have to standardise terms and conditions, and that pushes the underlying cost up. I will leave it at that, but it is just a warning that there are additional costs that I do not think are reflected, and it is just the logistical challenge of doing that. That concludes all our questions. I want to say thank you all for coming today to speak with us and share your really important evidence and responding to our questions. I now suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a change of witnesses. We will now begin our second panel of witnesses this morning with a focus on local authorities. We are joined online by Douglas Henry, who is the Executive Director from Argyll and Bute Council. Welcome. In the room is Eddie Fraser, who is the Chief Executive of East Ayrshire Council. Michelle McGinty, who is the Head of Corporate Policy and Governance at Glasgow City Council. Paul McClay, who is the Head of Policy and Insight at Edinburgh City Council. Dr Don Roberts, who is the Chief Executive at Dumfries and Galloway Council. Welcome. I would be interested if panel members agree with the Feely review that the Covid pandemic demonstrated clearly that the Scottish public expects national accountability for adult social care support and to look to Scottish ministers to provide that accountability. I think that it is clear that the public look to ministers in terms of accountability, accountability for certain standards and assurance, that framework of how social care services are going to be delivered across the country. I think that they would expect ministers to make sure that there are programmes of improvement, where programmes of improvement were required. I also think that the public are used to local accountability and that they have access to accountability for local services through the local council and the local health board. There is a place for a national care service in terms of setting an overall framework of standards and assurance, but there is also definitely a place on a local basis for people with local knowledge about how they deliver against those standards. In terms of accountability, we saw through the pandemic the real benefit of local partners working together and the ability to flex and adapt to what the local situation was. There is real value in that local accountability, local democracy, the engagement of local members from their knowledge of local areas, the communities that they serve. However, I concur with Eddie's point about the role of a national body in relation to overall standards, accountability in terms of being able to hold aspects of the system to account and support and enable improvement and delivery in local areas. There is no doubt that there are some of the challenges that we all face in local government and it is certainly the case in my council that are common. Common challenges across local authorities and I think that the role of a national body in supporting, enabling improvement and enabling some of those challenges to be met in a different way is definitely of value. I think that ministers in terms of ministerial accountability, in terms of crisis moments, is perhaps a natural reaction, but I do not think that that implies an ongoing day-to-day aspiration for government accountability for all that social care does every day for ongoing years to come. I think that that might be a leap too far for me. I think that we need to value the connections that councillors have with their communities, as has just been said, the local knowledge that they have. When issues arise with the service, that ability to go to somebody who understands you, your place and the service providers is really critical. To be able to find that accountability on your doorstep with the day-to-day provision that you are receiving is the way in which we would see the future panning out. In terms of crisis, it is natural that the Government has a role to play. It has an ongoing role to play in supporting local authorities to continue to improve and address shared challenges, but that does not circumvent or need to replace local accountability. I support my colleagues' comments on that. I think that, in terms of developing a bit further the pandemic situation, a lot of what happened during the pandemic to support our most vulnerable communities was organic and local. The value of that has been absolutely enormous. We have learned a lot about service delivery as a result of that. We have started to change some of the ways that we deliver to our most vulnerable communities as a result. We are making structural change as a lesson learned from the way that support grew in our communities. To reiterate the point, I absolutely accept that ministers have a role and a support role to play, particularly in regulation and standards, supporting us in national pressures around recruitment, retention, procurement and all those things, where there can be a real added value. If you were to ask a member of the public in Glasgow where they go to expect their service to be delivered, it would be their local councillor. Thank you very much for that. Douglas Henry, would you like to come in on that? Thank you. I just start to agree with the comments made by colleagues. Yes, there certainly would be an expectation on the part of our communities that things do change and there is different accountability greater as you choose on the part of ministers. However, I also suggest very strongly that there is also an expectation that there is local accountability when it comes to communities. Thank you for that. I would be interested to hear from—again, I think that this is going to be for everyone. There will be questions coming that may be focused in specific areas. However, I would be interested to hear how much individual councils currently spend on social care and how that has changed over the past decade. If there have been changes in outcomes for community and service users as a result of increased or decreased spending, anyone wants to pick that up first? In East Asia, we have seen a significant change in how we spend money in social care over the years. What we have seen is a reduction in the number of people who are in care homes and an increase in the number of people who are supported in care at home. That is not a short-term fix. We took decisions as far back as 2005. As a council, we would come out of the care home market and focus our support in care at home and work in partnership with the independent sector that delivers all our care home services in East Asia. Those were long-term strategies on what we have done. We have seen a significant change in the number of people who are in care homes as opposed to the number of people supported in care at home in terms of doing that in a positive way. We see that again over the period. We have seen a significant change in the number of people with complex needs and how they are supported. We have seen them move through a range of things. Some people came out of institutions and were supported on a one-to-one basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That did not suit some people. People found that quite intense in terms of how that is, so again involving models in terms of how that is. We are working in partnership with housing about how we do that and we support people in terms of doing that so that they still get that independence but they are supported in a slightly different way in terms of being supported in housing models too. Right through to how we support our young people in the care system. Obviously, we now support our young people in the care system right up to 26 if they so wish. I do go back to it and I do not think that it is proud days looking back in terms of some of the social work and social care services when young people in the care system and some of them left as early as 16 that were on their own. That has changed now in terms of where we are. The spend in terms of how social work and social care has changed significantly and it has changed very much. The community models of delivering social work and social care to positive outcomes for the majority of people. I am looking at that picture of what is going on in East Ayrshire. Dawn, would you like to come in? Thank you. A similar picture for Dumfries and Galloway. In terms of the current budget position, just under £100 million is currently delegated to the health and social care partnership. We retain about another £28 million for care services that we deliver that are not delegated. That is about 30 per cent of the overall budget. What we need to take into account also is the cost of support services in terms of legal services, HR services, ICT services, property and asset services. The more direct cost, but there is a broader cost associated with the support that those other services provide. Over time, a similar pattern has been described for East Ayrshire in terms of increasing care at home, decreasing residential care. We have seen changing needs and increasing more complex needs that need to be supported. We have seen greater integration within the local authority services with services such as homelessness, housing, leisure and financial wellbeing. Those broader services that support people to be independent, healthy and well as they move through their years. That greater synergy and integration with those broader services and the development of more community-based models has been the direction of travel and is something that we would want to see progress further. As we move forward, there was a lot of learning from the pandemic in terms of more that we can do and certainly a focus in terms of how we continue to address need in the longer term. I guess a different model in Glasgow with some of the same emphasis on both policy change and the change in demand. Around half a billion of the council's budget is delegated to the HSCP services. Since we have around 12,000 staff in that HSCP, over the past 10, 15 years, there has been 100 million investment in new care homes, five to replace 16 and six new day care centres. A different approach in terms of providing facilities, but also a big emphasis now particularly since the formation of the HSCP on maximising independence and for our most vulnerable. We have directly provided day home residential care and also contracted health and social care providers. We also have a slightly different model in our HSCP that some services are delivered at a health board level, such as sexual services, for example. It is quite a different picture from some other parts of the country. The demand increases and the budgets decrease, although ring-fenced and protected, there is, of course, a lot of demand. We are seeing at the moment an increase in demand of around five to six per cent, along with inflationary pressures. That is obviously quite a significant pressure. We are also, as everybody is, seeing an older population and a real emphasis to need to change for the long term to deal with those different needs. In Edinburgh, 40 per cent of the council's budget is spent on social care services and 22 per cent of our workforce. We project, as well, a year-on-year 6 per cent increase in demand. However, as has been said by the panel, we see actual demand outstrip that. We see demographic pressures in the capital city. Where we have invested in improvements, sometimes they are challenged by moments in time, such as Covid, such as Brexit, such as Ukraine, that bring additional challenges to our systems. What we are now seeing is increased complexity of need that is very challenging to respond to. Outcomes are linked to money, but local authorities are also working extremely hard to remove silos between services and bring and integrate teams and make sure that we are taking as preventative approaches as we can. It is in that landscape of activity that is embedded throughout homelessness, family household support, poverty prevention. It is in those integrated teams that we are also trying to improve outcomes and prevent people from manifesting as needed within the system. There is a lot that Edinburgh is doing in that space through the IGB and through the council to improve things, but it is a mixed picture also because of the context that we are living through at the moment. Douglas, would you like to come in on that? Thank you. I am just broadly similar in the picture. Social work in the round has been for many years and continues to be the second-largest area of council spend after education. In our terms, the nature of our engagement with the IGB and the HSCP is that all social work functions are covered, the adult children and families justice, and we are in a similar ballpark to colleagues in terms of the proportion of the total spend of the council that social work accounts for. In terms of particular priorities, there are national trends that we recognise in the same way as everyone else does. We move away from residential or institutional care, the rise of more and more complex cases, and the need to address the significant numbers of those complex cases, particularly when they relate to young people on a non-silo basis, if I can put it like that, on a joined-up basis. It is across all social work, also involving education, housing and the other players in there. It is probably also fair to say that, in the context of rural and island areas, the authority like Argyll and Bute were over 40 per cent of our population living really remote in rural areas. There are particular challenges about delivering services to people who are distanced from the main centres of the population and access to the same volume and variety of services that other people can get to in the locale, if I can put it like that. Thank you so much for bringing in the rural island perspective and those challenges. Eddie, you spoke at length in the first panel there about how well you felt the integrated joint board arrangements were working in East Ayrshire. Is it fair to say that that is not consistent across Scotland? I wanted to explore with the panel why you think that is, and how do you think we get that consistency of provision unless we have a national approach to it that is perhaps outlined in the proposals in the bill? I think that what we will hear from colleagues is that, depending on local circumstances, we work towards positive outcomes for our local communities, but how that is delivered may be different in terms of local communities. I was speaking to a colleague who formerly worked with Douglas in Argyll and Bute, and his IJB had all services like East Ayrshire has, children, adults, justice and so on. However, moving to a larger authority where the structure is different was not the right thing to do. There is a reflection that you can reach the same outcomes but do things in a different way in terms of that. In terms of the delivery of the IJBs and the scope of the IJBs, as you know, each local area will have, through real consideration, of how things worked previously and then how you take things into that. That can work in a way that facilitates joint working across joint commission and internal commission and across in terms of how we deliver things for positive outcomes. The core part of me is that it will depend on local circumstances. In East Ayrshire, I spoke before about how we have vibrant communities, that is our community engagement. If other areas do not have that, they might do things differently and they might have their community services within the partnership. Financial inclusion teams that work within the partnership in East Ayrshire and other areas do not actually work as core council services. It goes back to that point about integration of health and social care. It is about integration from the perspective of the person that uses the services. How a local system nits that together to deliver it has to take into account all the local circumstances, whether there have been decisions about what you deliver directly or what you commission, whether there are decisions about rurality or urban. There is a whole range of different factors that people will play into that, but I go back to where I think that there is a role or a national basis for ministers to set down almost here. Here is the standards, here is the outcomes that we are looking for here. We want to hear from you how you are going to deliver against those standards. The local system then takes into account how to design that local system through the local standards that framework that has been set at national level. I am concerned about time, and we have quite a few questions to go through. What I would like to ask is going forward to build on something that has not been said or if your council runs differently, which I am sure we are going to hear now. Otherwise, we will not get through the questions in time that we have got allocated. Michelle, would you like to come in? In specific, for Glasgow, everywhere has their complex needs, not least Glasgow. It is fair to say that we believe through our performance frameworks that the HSCP is working extremely well. We would absolutely support a standards and inspection regime at a national level in terms of support. It is fair to expect HSCPs to be variable when they are young. The system is still bedding in. There has been a pandemic through some of it. That national oversight would be welcome. That is different to national delivery. To give a specific example of why commissioning and staffing in our view must be kept at local level is the different needs of the different areas. For example, homelessness is in our HSCP. Just as an example, to unknit that from everything else that is in the HSCP would be extremely disruptive and damaging to the service. Just by way of an example. Dumfries and Galloway is a different model to East Ayrshire just for your awareness. Adult social care is part of the integration arrangements. Justice and children's social work remains with the council. That decision was based on careful consideration of the local system, the local arrangements and what would work for Dumfries and Galloway. The IJB works in a way that reflects the local arrangements, local demand, local pressures, local delivery models, the strengths in the system, what we can build on and the extent of collaboration and the opportunities that exist. I want to make the point that seven years in existence, but we have had two years of a Covid pandemic and a year of, since the majority of that, a year of cost of living and that continues. The IJBs have not yet had the opportunity to fully demonstrate their worth and value in all places, but the building blocks are there and the confidence is there, certainly in the IJB to move forward positively in terms of delivery of local outcomes. Douglas, I will keep calling you in because I can imagine that it is hard to come in when you are the only person online. Do you want to come in now? I will go back to the comments that Eddie made in the first set under this particular question or point. It is probably fair to say that there is not a single clear articulation of what consistency of social care and social work services would be across the country, back to the basic point, after recognising that local solutions are needed to local situations. Again, in the Ergyll and Bute context, we have communities from urban to rural to island. It is a necessity to deliver services that are to an extent bespoke that fit the particular needs of the communities and what they want. That is a point that I would want to press. We have similar arrangements to Dumfries and Galloway, so I will not go over that. First, there is a difference in the consistency of outcome, which we absolutely would be committed to, and the consistency in evaluating outcomes so that we know what we are working towards. However, that is very different from requiring consistency and inputs. When you look at personalisation and understanding people's needs and understanding different local contexts that would be in Edinburgh to an island's authority, for example, you can expect to see those inputs to be designed very differently and appropriately so. The councils themselves rightly or wrongly, over time, are structured differently and how we work across services will be different and, therefore, the inputs will be bespoke. The overall ambition for consistent outcomes is one that we disagree with. It is the desire to have some consistent mechanism for delivery that there is some paint-by-numbers approach to that. We have to design services that meet people's needs and the unique nature of our local areas. We are all facing similar challenges, but perhaps in different scales. We have recruitment challenges, all of us. We all have issues in terms of complexity of need in responding to that. We have challenges with the markets, the local market mix that we have. For Edinburgh, when all of that comes together, it is the scale that challenges us. Again, we would be happy to work with all partners in how we might resolve the scale of those challenges locally and continue on an improvement journey to meet the outcomes that we all desire. Thanks very much. That's probably enough from the interest of getting other colleagues in, convener. That's fine. I'm now going to move to questions from Marie McNair. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. Welcome back, Eddie. I'll put my first question to Eddie. To what extent are councils currently accountable for the social care services that are provided in that area? I served in the IGB as a councillor, and it had me and two other councillors on it for the benefit of other members of the committee. What role do the rest of the councillors, the majority, have a role in determining how care service is delivered and what evidence is there that social care provision is considered at local elections? How have you involved service users and carers in reaching that view? First of all, I think that over and above the small number of elected members who are on IGBs, who, in our instance, tend to be the most senior councillors within the council, actually sit on IGBs, very much own what we call our social care services. The council still sees social care services as that local service that is delivered in every single local community in East Ayrshire, and our councillors will still come. All 32 of them will advocate in terms of social care for local communities with the IGB, and, given that, the director of health and social care is an employee of the council, which is perfectly entitled to do that, in terms of doing that. In terms of formal reporting arrangements, it is built into integration schemes about how often IGBs have to report back, but, in essence, they do it for us a lot more than that. We do it in relation to all our papers around alcohol and drugs. It will always lead within the IGIB, which clearly has an interest across the whole of the council, to do it in terms of looking after children, care experience children. Again, it is members of the council who are not on the IGB but lead on children services, and therefore they have no input into that. The IGIB and the social care services are not just managed within that unit, they are managed all across the services in terms of what we do. In terms of engaging our local communities, the most recent example of that would be our IGIB along with the council, but this one time specifically the IGIB is out doing participatory budget, so it is out with our local communities with a quarter of a million pounds, basically getting into local areas and saying what way do you want to spend that, and the decisions about how to spend that resource are actually made by the local communities. When we sit down with our children services, care experience services that we are talking about, our peeps and goat nights, as we call them, they are sitting down and you are talking to them, so the work around the promises and that, etc, very much engages people. It has been for us constant engagement with local communities in doing that, so I hope that that is answered for us. In terms of formal reporting, our IGB reports regularly to the Policy and Sustainability Committee but also to our Government Risk and Best Value Committee. There are opportunities to transparently hold to account the work and engage with the work of the IGB and the decisions that they independently take. I think that the council remains responsible for the staff that we employ, who are delivering the services and deliver the duties that we still hold, so there is definitely a legitimate relationship for councillors in relation to integration still, without, in any way, circumventing the arrangements for the IGB to take the decisions that it is delegated to take by law. In terms of engaging, we do annual surveys with our care home residents, we do community-based teams day-to-day engagement. It is not something that happens once. It is about working closely with communities, particularly around any key service design proposals, as we are required to do by our policies. In the interests of time, I will just move on to my next question and pop that to Michelle. Does the bill's financial memorandum adequately explore the potential financial implications for council and, if not, what would councils expect to see at this point in terms of financial assessments? In terms of generally speaking around the financial memorandum, I think that it has been widely discussed at different committees and also in the previous panel that there is an envelope that lacks detail, that there are pressures that are not included in it and that we would want to see much more work take place on the detail. One of the major issues for us is the lack of a business case at this stage to partner with a financial memorandum. A structural change of this proportion in the council, we would be doing feasibility study risk financial gaps. All of the things that you have to consider before you change something on this scale, we do not have any of that and also a financial memorandum that is lacking in detail. It is almost impossible to give you a good answer in the sense that there is detail missing that we cannot respond to. There is a lot more work to be done. I absolutely share the view. I do not know how we can accurately assess the financial memorandum with the bill as high level as it currently is and the absence of detail within it. That is very worrying. The only point that I would add is the financial memorandum. Indeed, the debate around this fails to really understand that this is not just reforming social care, it is reforming local government. We are not looking at the wider financial implications and operational and systemic implications for local government. Given that, the level of consideration that a reform of that scale does deserve. That is my final question. What impacts will be in local authorities should a third of their budget be transferred to the new national care service bill? We have talked a lot about the integration of delivery of service. In your previous question, I was writing down a list of the different parts of the council. In fact, it is all of it. The impact of detriment in other parts of the council is significant. Apart from the fundamental issue of the transfer of staff, which you have heard from other panellists, that is extremely complex. What that does is leave behind a structure that has been knitted in to the HSCP for good reason, for good policy reason and for good integration reasons. All back office, all other services, whether that be education housing, Glasgow life, city building, all of them have an input. Therefore, where are the boundaries? Because they are so blurred, the impact is, as Paula has said, effectively the reorganisation of the council on its budget. For me, in the current nature of where we are, there is almost a risk whether we go, the model of everything goes into the new arrangements or it does not. One of the biggest risks is the interim period in which we do not know what we are planning for. In terms of the partnerships where they have children's services, justice services, adult, older people's services, addiction services, all in, if we go to an incremental move across to the new boards, quite frankly, what am I going to do with my justice services? My justice services and my arrangements are fully integrated within our current things. My children's services are like that. I would need to go away and totally redesign the council to change the council. For some people, the proposed changes about putting things in would be a massive reorganisation. For others, incrementally, it will be a massive reorganisation. There is no do nothing option here other than trust that local systems know how to design the system for the better outcomes. It is not just about the money. The actual structure of councils just now is either the ones that have services in or the ones that do not. There is going to be a big lump of councils and they are going to have to totally restructure the councils.  Thank you. Again, hearing a lot from what colleagues have said that it would apply in our case 2, I do not think that it is possible to overemphasise the issues that councils have to face, particularly as we are rolling forward in the current scenario where, as Eddie has just highlighted, it would mean for us partial disaggregation. That is not only of the front line adult services, but also of the parts of the rest of the council that support that adult services. Then, potentially, a period of time down the road further disaggregation in the event that the remainder of social care, social work was to roll over. It seems to me that that, from a council perspective, is basically counterproductive and inefficient in that partial disaggregation, if things begin to run, is more coming out. Those comments should not be taken as a view that it cannot be done, but it strikes me as not necessarily a predictive solution or the one that will deliver the best outcomes for our people and our communities. I will make the point around lack of clarity on issues to do with children's services and justice. Obviously, they sit outside for us the IJB arrangements. It brings in significant concern about what that will mean for the local authority when some of our delegated functions would be transferring, but also functions that sit firmly within the council, but also the support services and what it means to disentangle from some of the services where we work really closely together. The real risk here in all of this is that we see a reduction in performance and outcome because of disruption, but also remember that these are the most vulnerable within our society. These are the most vulnerable who we need to put right at the centre of any change and making sure that the change is taken forward for the right reasons and that it should be around outcomes rather than an assumption of change per se and delivering structural change as being the answer. My councils are really concerned about the workforce implications. That is right across the board for those services that are within the integrated arrangements now, those services that our care services, social work services within the council and the services that are not part of that but do provide support and the disruption that that will cause as we move forward. I wanted to continue with a similar line of questioning, as I said in the previous panel, just about the impact on the remainder of services. I think that a lot of the panel have covered that and just wanted to maybe ask a different question rather than talk about the impact on the services that remain, just to talk about the impact on local government and its entirety. We have had police and fire nationalisation. We now are looking at social work, social care, we have got educational regional collaboratives chat about national education services. Is this a return to district councils by stealth? Is this an appropriate way to look at a whole change of the landscape of local government by piecemeal, or should we be looking at a wider look at local government rather than doing it this way? It feels like, I would not use the word stealth, I would use the word that we are in effect reforming local government by default rather than by design. I think that that is not the most advantageous way to talk about the role of local government and councils in delivering services to our communities. There is certainly space to have that discussion, but to be taking elements of roles and responsibilities and budgets periodically over time without paying attention to what that means for local government. The role of councillors, the role of local democracy in and of itself feels inappropriate that we should give that, the due regard that it should have and consider it in its own right. This bill is not just about social care, it is about the future of local government. I would agree with that. Speaking to local elected members about why do you stand for council, what is it that you actually want to influence? If people want to stand for council to influence the local services, social care services and the possible education services and that already policing fire are away, if you are not going to do that, what is the attraction in terms of what you are going to stand for? How do we make sure that local democracy has an influence over the local community? How do we make sure that it does that? If you take the accountability away as an example of it, what is the motivation for local government? What is the influence of that local councillor? I think that it is a good question. Just to want to check, Douglas, do you need to come in on that at all? I think that the basics from a council perspective have been covered. I think that there is perhaps again lack of clarity in overall terms in some of this, probably at a national level, about the role of elected members, certainly in relation to NCS, but maybe even on a wider basis. There is a drive to engage on a wider basis about a wider range of issues to do that with communities, with local groups and so on. There is a question, I believe, in there about the role of the elected member as a local representative of their community. Those two things do not necessarily sit comfortably together, so I apologise. I know that that has gone off on a slight tangent, but I think that it is part of the wider picture. No need to apologise. It is always good to uncover other perspectives. Just another question. Going back to the impact on individual services, and I think that I have heard from the panel here in person, but I wonder if I can come to Douglas. If you are able to set out a perspective of particularly a rural and island authority, what the impact will be on the services left over if we go forward with the national care service, what will the impact on housing, education and leisure in your particular authority? I might come at that from a couple of different angles. First is, it seems to me that there is an argument that social care, social work with other elements of the local authority, education, housing, all kinds of other services, do work better under that umbrella. That is not to say that we can still be joined up working under a different arrangement with an NCS, but it does seem to me that the existing umbrella overall framework within which social care is currently delivered is at one level. At a different level, others have touched on what it means for the remainder of the local authority. We have begun our guideline but to look at that. I emphasise comments that others have made. The work that we have done thus far indicates that the impact on other services is some definite potential, in terms of things such as legal support and HR. For example, in Argyllin, we have a fully joined up HR service between council and IJB. That definitely needs to be unpicked and there would then be a requirement to allocate people to separate parts of the post-unpicking, but it is wider than that. We still have care homes with other social work utilities in Argyllin but, as things stand, estates, ground maintenance and things like that are carried out by another part of the council. There is no guarantee that that would continue after unpicking and it rolls them to other corporate stuff such as finance. The finance team is integrated. If we move to the situation where there is a desegregation, I believe that that brings challenges for all councils in terms of redesigning what is left to support what is left, if that makes sense. I do not necessarily believe that that would mean the end of local government as it is currently known. That is a particularly gloomy way forward, but there are certainly significant impacts on the whole of the council in terms of service delivery and, as others have said earlier in this session, and I believe in the first one on council finances in general, impacts on capital spend and stuff like that. That is a kind of whistle-stop to what I think are some of the main factors that would be a play as we are talking about. Douglas, while you are still there, do you have a view on whether the island community's impact assessment, which accompanies the bill, meets the requirement of the 2018 islands act? Yes. We thought that there were a number of areas where the view could be taken that, the impact assessment and flaws. It is possible to take the view that it has not been carried out at the appropriate stage of the process. If you have, again, a particular regard to the circumstances of areas such as Argyllun bute, if you look at it in its terms, it is pretty high level and it is possible to take a view that it did not adequately address the position of authorities such as Argyllun bute. It is something that, ultimately, is a matter for ministers, I believe, to determine and, if they are content with it, they will find it, but it is possible to take a view that there are shortcomings in the process. We are now going to move to questions from Paul McClellan. Can you touch on this before? It was talking about your understanding of children's services when we removed transfer to the new care service. I just wanted to tie into two questions at once. It was also mentioned in the last panel on the reluctance from councils to invest in new and existing assets, if that happened, not just with the children's services but broader. The first is on national care on children's services. The second is more on the investment side of things, which would impact on your council's own ability or appetite at this stage. Eddie, you have probably come to yourself on that. I know that you have touched on that in the last panel. I suppose that, in our response from East Ayrshire, we have said that we took the decisions back. In 2014, we took the decisions to put our children's services, our justice services and so on, in the IGIB. However, very clearly, that was within the context of local accountability. That was within the context of local integrated children's services, so there is a strategic children's services board who has chaired the chief officer. I also chaired that education in everyone within that. It was the right place to go because it kept the social work profession together in terms of how we have done that, and they cross-cut things between justice, children's addiction and adults. We did that there. If at this stage someone was going to come back and say to us, would you do that, but the control of your children's services were going to be separated from your universal children's services in terms of your early years and your education service, I would need to take a lot of convincing and I think the actual work that is going on just now would need to do some of that in terms of saying what would be the impact of that in terms of transferring over. This is a changed position for where we were back in 2014, where we were put in arrangements within local accountability, local structures and I think that would need reconsideration. I think that every council would like to take reconsideration about where that was at that time. In terms of any investment in capital just now, it would likely be fair to say that likely every council chief executive is sitting down with their elected members and looking at their capital programme just now and seeing whether it is affordable just now, without even looking at it, given the financial circumstances that we find ourselves in. Again, we are in uncertainty. The uncertainty is that if the council takes a loan to build something in capital, are we assured that, if there is a transfer of asset, that resource is going to come back to us? If it is not, given the timescales, it would almost feel incompetent to go out there and spend significance amounts of council money that you knew there was a likelihood that it was going to be transferred away and the rest of the council was going to be left with the net charge for that for the next 40 years. It is not about a reluctance to invest in social care services, wellbeing services. It is about the competence of doing that in an already tight fiscal position and feeling that you may be left with that debt for the rest of the council going forward. I think that that is the position that most people would say they were in. He said it all, didn't he? It is about risk management and best value, how it is not a lack of desire to support and make the right investment decisions for the service and for the outcomes and for the people. It is how we do that legitimately to manage the wider risk to the council and with best value in mind to our communities. At the moment, with the amount of lack of detail around this, we cannot make those decisions really well with no information about what happens to the debt, the risk that we would carry. I absolutely endorse everything that has been said. There is a fundamental thing here about assets that have been invested in by communities through their council tax. Not only are we talking about best value and the practicalities of investment, but you are breaking that link, and that is a fundamental change in position. Also, because of the integrated way that we deliver through community planning, through the HSCP, a lot of our assets are shared with partners, so where is the consideration of that disaggregation? Again, without a business case, we just cannot answer those questions. I think that there is a general point here that I would make around whether it is about decision making in relation to investment in assets, or whether it is about even giving a view on aspects of the bill. There is the whole principle around informed decision making and being able to give an informed view and to have full understanding to give full consideration to matters. What is underpinning a lot of our comments and our responses is the lack of detail and the uncertainty that that creates. The concerns that we have, and I know that is shared by others, about the reliance on secondary legislation to take through some of the very important critical aspects of this overarching bill that will have fundamental implications for local government. With a backdrop of lack of clarity and lack of information, it is very difficult for a council to make decisions in relation to investment and allocation of resource. In the meantime, it is very difficult for us to give very concrete answers on aspects of what this bill is about, and the concern about the reliance on secondary legislation means that the level of engagement and scrutiny that will be available to councils in that process brings cause for concern. I was specifically concerned looking at the submissions, as an Edinburgh MSP anyway, at Edinburgh City Council's submission on fears that, in the short to medium term, the bill risks making service delivery significantly worse. I am acutely aware of the social care crisis that we have in the capital at this present time. What disruptions do you think could arise as a result of this bill? What are the Scottish Government telling you to allay those fears? I might bring you in, as I specifically said. I think that the fear that we allude to is very real. We have a workforce that has been under pressure for a long time in a market that is very competitive for that scale, the pace scale of role, and recruiting is incredibly difficult and retention is now difficult. At the same time, we have an ageing workforce for whom, after going through a pandemic and everything that has come over the last number of years, the challenges of the role in the round have to face change, change of employer, change of relationships, teams around you. There is a very real, and some parts of the council would argue already manifesting pressure on retaining our staff and decisions that they may make now not to continue in their roles and so on, exacerbating the challenges that we are under. That is what we mean when we say disruption in terms of the workforce. However, there is also that inability to plan because you do not know how long you are planning for because of the ambiguity around the bill and the intentions of the Government. That also exacerbates the first problem and causes more strategic challenges for the council in investing, in changing, in reforming our services in order to manage the pressures that are there right now. I agree with all those concerns. Given the specific pressures that Edinburgh is facing over delayed discharge, almost half of all delayed discharges here in the capital, likewise with homelessness and a number of children in temporary accommodation, that whole restructuring cannot help to tackle those problems specifically at this moment in time. To widen that out, in the earlier session we heard the challenges that are likely to come from transferring 75,000 local authority staff to a new national care service. Specifically, we heard the concern around that pension issue being raised, which was not necessarily there with Police Scotland and the fire service when they were centralised in 2013. However, I wondered what the panel thought, what lessons had been learned anyway from the creation of the national police service and fire service and what pitfalls we may be seeing with the national care service. Does anyone want to come in on that question? I suppose that it is not really clear what lessons have been learned, we hope that lessons have been learned, that some of the same examples have come up specifically around BAT. I think that you heard from the earlier panel and I completely agree that pensions issue is much more fundamental in this case due to the number of staff in one pension arrangement. In terms of staffing, what we worry about the most is that it is not really clear from the bill how reserved employment law to pay pensions and case law, not to get into too much detail, have been considered and therefore how those staffing arrangements will be implemented. The effect on staff back at the ranch is also that it was not necessarily an issue for other reorganisations. It is not clear that lessons have been learned because we do not have the detail to make that judgment. I think that there will clearly be some of the risks that we can all talk about, as there is a wide understanding of what went wrong almost the last time and some of the things that went well and so on, so I actually understand them for that. Where this is different, I think, is what we were seeing was bringing together our Scottish police services, bringing together our Scottish fire services. That is not what is going to happen here, so what would happen here would be a transfer of local authority staff to the national care service, there would be no transfer of national health staff, there would be no transfer of independent service staff, there would be no transfer of voluntary service staff, so it is not the same type of integration that we have seen before. I think that the differences there are really significant and we focused on, as I mentioned earlier, the difference between conditions of public service staff with people in independent and voluntary sector would need to be considered, but also just the overall fair work agenda that we want to get into here. That is significantly different, that you are talking about at least four different types of staff, actually going to be overall participating to the national care service that has been commissioned and directly delivered, whereas previously we are bringing together a police service or bringing together a fire service. That is a much more complicated issue. I add one point. We in Edinburgh have really strong, I am going to preface my comment, we have really strong relationships with our police and fire colleagues both strategically and at a very local level, but I would also say that the national, the centralisation of those services has definitely, detrimentally impacted their local flexibility in terms of budgets and assets in particular. It is more difficult to make locally appropriate decisions in respect of the use of budgets and buildings and capital assets, and we have seen that come through the system. If you are really focused on trying to make community planning and community empowerment and local responsive services work, that has not necessarily been a by-product of centralisation of police and fire. Douglas, do you want to come in? Just at the end, Paulist's point there was very much along the lines of what I had wanted to contribute. The point about something to be wary of in terms of the NCS, about lack of local involvement and engagement by the new organisation. There are some lessons to be learned or warning things to be picked up in terms of what has happened with police and fire. Paulist has covered the point. That concludes our questions. Thank you very much for coming in. It has been good to hear a level of detail from all of you. I know that we could have talked a lot longer, but we have written evidence as well. On behalf of the committee, we appreciate you being with us today. I now suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a change of witnesses. We are now joined by our final panel of witnesses today, which will explore housing and homelessness issues. We are joined by Ewan Aitken, who is the chief executive of the Syrenians and representing everyone home collective. Yvette Burgess, who is the unit director at the Coalition of Care Providers Scotland, otherwise known as CCPS. Ashley Campbell, who is the policy and practice manager at the Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland. Eileen McMullen, who is the policy lead from the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations. Shea Moran, who is the change lead from the All-in-for-Change group. I welcome today and I would like to begin with the first couple of questions. I'm interested to hear if the witnesses agree with the Feely review that the Covid pandemic demonstrated clearly that the Scottish public expects national accountability for adult social care support and look to Scottish ministers to provide that accountability. It's the same question that I've asked for all the panels, and if anyone wants to indicate they'd like to pick that up. I've no doubt that there would be general agreement that reform was required, and that people needed to go to know who to go to to ask questions when things go wrong, and that some of their experiences of asking the people who previously appeared to be responsible were not good. I'm less convinced that people then thought, well, if we put somebody at the top in charge, it'll all be sorted. That felt like a bit more of a leap than the critique, which was probably accurate, actually justified. To be honest, I think that people already believed that the Government was responsible for care, although it's delivered locally, given that there is already a department for looks at health and social care. I don't think necessarily that that would draw them to the conclusion of what's being currently proposed, because, obviously, the ministers are accountable for what goes on in local government as well. I would say that, since most of the guidance that people were hearing on a daily basis through various news broadcasts was coming from the centralised Scottish Government and from Nicola Sturgeon's updates, people were definitely looking to the Scottish Government for overall support and regulation, but they were still very much looking to their local authorities and local services to provide on-the-ground care and support and assistance where required. I would add that the pandemic really shone a light on the role of housing in supporting people within their local communities. It might be slightly off-topic, but I feel that it's worth mentioning that housing was a cornerstone for people receiving the kind of support that they needed, that housing providers themselves, local authorities, housing associations and local community groups really played a very strong role in ensuring that people had the basic needs to support them throughout the pandemic. I think that, just to make a really strong point at the beginning, housing really is key to prevention, to supporting people and to improving health and wellbeing outcomes within the community as well. Thanks very much for that. My next question is going to direct to you, Yvette, initially. It's around the IJBs and the third sector. What is the third sector's current involvement in IJBs and do third sector organisations feel that they are partners in the design and delivery of social care within the current system? Well, I think that it varies. In some areas, third sector partners are more involved, but what we've learned since IJBs came into being is that it's more than just structure, we need to make sure that those relationships at a local level are embedded. Definitely, issues around commissioning need to be looked at to make sure that commissioning of social care services is more collaborative and that third sector partners can play a really important part in that, along with other partners in terms of delivery. Thank you. Anybody else want to come in, Eileen? If you're including the housing associations in the third sector, I think that it is similar. It varies quite considerably. Some housing associations work really effectively with their IJB partners and in other areas it's less so. However, it's more about the contribution that they make in terms of the whole kind of area of prevention and supporting people to live independently, which is often overlooked and continues to be. I would also say that varies is not one's good and one's bad, varies is because different communities have different approaches. I sat on mydlodian IJB for three years as a rep and was able to have a clear contribution in equal nature. In fact, we never had a vote. We made collective decisions and I had a relationship with our referral group to do that, so I was able to bring the views of that. In East Lodian, there's been work to do a joint planning process between the two sectors to build that stuff up. Our experience of working in Falkirk is, again, a different size, and I think that the size is often the challenge in terms of the different capacities. The conversations that we're able to have with them as an organisation directly is a result of the space that they create for those conversations that aren't directly at the board, but because of the conversations that they have before the board, the board is able to make the decisions that we'd hoped to make. Whereas in Edinburgh, because it's so much bigger, it's three organisations representing and it needs to feed back in a very different way because it's quite complex to manage that size. The varied is a necessary part of the structure that we have at the moment, rather than one is good and one is bad. I really appreciate that clarification on the varied because I was going to ask a bit more about that, so it's been really helpful. I'm now going to move to questions from Willie Coffey. Thanks very much again, convener. The previous two panels, where it pains to size, I think, the local variability and delivery of service, we do have information and evidence from, for example, improvement services, local government benchmark and framework that does show differences in performance, not differences in how service is delivered, but actual performance differences that I think the national care service is trying to improve and make consistent. Why do you think those differences are there? Is it down to localism only or are there real differences in performance in the level of service that people get across Scotland? Maybe start with you, Ian. So the question is, should you run to that solution before you've asked the question about why that is and what's the route of those performance differences? There's no doubt that people have different experiences across the board. Sometimes that's driven by geography, sometimes it's driven by finance, sometimes it's driven by politics, I have to be said, but there are questions to be asked about that. To my mind, that comes to the point about accountability. It seems to me odd to say in the first instance, yet we need to make sure that there's a consistency of quality, not how it's delivered but the quality of what is delivered in every different place, and therefore have that accountability designed locally and people being able to call to account for that and then push the accountability up the way and actually distance the accountability from where actually it needs to happen, because if you're going to have locally designed services, those people locally are going to be making the decisions they'd by necessity need to, unless they're always going to have to punt everything up the way first of all before it can come back down the way, which would seem to me to be a long way around for a shortcut to get where we want to get to. So I'm unconvinced that creating a model of centralised accountability will deal with the issue that you rightly identify, which is, in some places, we've not got what we need to the standard that we need. I think I would agree with what Ewan was just saying. We all want to see better outcomes for individuals and for communities that I don't think that's in question. In terms of the bill and the national care service, we certainly appreciate and agree with the principles of the bill in terms of creating more consistency of outcomes, in terms of having a person-centred approach, human rights approach to providing services, that all sounds great on paper. In terms of differences in performance, the first thing to state is that local authorities, all 32 of them, are operating within very different contexts. They'll have different local variations in the economy, whether you're working within an urban or a rural context, can have a big impact on housing need and affordability and the types of services that people need. So I agree with Ewan about that need to be looking at local solutions for local people and local decision making. I think that it's a bit unclear to me from the structure of the bill whether the proposal structure is going to fix those issues or not. I think that it's difficult to tell when there's so little detail in the bill about what ultimately the national care service will look like. We do agree that there is an inconsistency across Scotland in delivering the outcomes that we all seek. It is inconsistency. How do we get there without a national model that could apply those standards, as Eddie Fraser described earlier? How do we improve consistently in the authorities, perhaps, where we need to, without that national application of standards? I would say that what you need to do is do the good things that are in there, ethical procurement, a human rights approach, a single electronic record—all those things would make a huge difference. I'm yet to be convinced that this level of structural change is pushing everything upwards. When I asked the question why all the local authorities staff are being transferred, the answer was that the ministers are already in charge of them, so clearly the culture is to push it upwards. Those solutions are required. You could do culture change in things without having a massive and high level of disruptive structural change. There is evidence of methodologies of doing that, which we have done, I would argue, within the promise and the ending on this together plan, both massive shifts in how we approach dealing with intractable problems with new lines of accountability but without having to create a new structure that actually removes accountability from the place where you're trying to have the decisions made using local resources, local understanding and local wisdom. Thank you very much. I'll give you a very clear answer for that. There may be a second question to Yvette. If I may, Yvette, your submission talked about the importance of flexibility and collaboration at the local level. Indeed, other witnesses talked about that at great length this morning. Do you think that they feel that those issues are threatened by the bill, or can they be enhanced, retained, protected by the bill? What are your views on that? CCPS has been some work to develop a model of change. That was very much in line with the review of adult social care and the Feeley report, so taking those principles and looking at the whole system change, rather than simply structural change, is a desire to improve outcomes for individuals, but making sure that individuals are at the heart of decision making, making sure that social care is transferable between areas and through different stages of life, making sure that the whole systems approach includes all those other services that contribute to people's wellbeing, particularly housing. We are very much focusing on the cultural changes that are needed, which accept that social care at its best is about relationships. It is a relational activity rather than a transactional type of activity. That is the model of change that CCPS has been developing. We have been able to look at the bill and look at the extent to which—we are still in the process of doing that, to be fair—we are looking at the bill to see the extent to which the bill promotes that. We have concerns about the focus on structural change, the lack of detail at this stage and, as many other witnesses have said today, a concern that a lot is being left to secondary legislation and a feeling that people who should be at the heart of all of this are not at that stage of involvement yet. It is great that the bill includes the principle of co-design, but we have not seen that in evidence to get to this stage. In terms of primary legislation, it is important that people with lived experience, a diverse range of lived experience, should be involved at that stage. Any other comments on that issue about flexibility and collaboration? Are we going to lose it or can we retain it and develop it with the bill? It is not had very much. It is just to agree with what people have said. At the moment, although the principle set out in the bill looks really good, it is difficult to see currently how that would be translated into a care service in practice. I will add the integration act in 2014. I do not think that anybody thinks that that had the impact that we wanted it to in terms of housing, health and social care working more closely together. I think that principally it was a health and social care integration act and then housing seems like it was kind of pinned on at the end so there was housing contribution statements and a little bit of partnership working, but not the kind of deep partnership working that we would like to see and able to be able to have impact on national outcomes and the Scottish Government's commitments to things like ending homelessness, to supporting people to live independently in their own h