e an incremental increase in costs rather than one day one every carer must be covered. I'm wondering if any work has been done to look at realistic costs and where that maybe falls short and what we need to do, what maybe work the committee needs to do when examining the bill. I think we have been working with our members and asking them for information around costs. We've shared that with Scottish Government who have obviously looked at that along with their data colleagues and I think as you'll have picked up from costless submission we're not in agreement with the figures in the financial memorandum and I think that is for three main reasons. We don't agree with the unit cost of assessment that's presented and we're concerned that about the speed at which carers may come forward following announcement of the new duties and we're also concerned about the total numbers coming forward. In looking at firstly the unit cost of assessment we had initially had discussions with Government and we're happy with a figure that had been arrived at which took information that we'd got from councils, removed the outliers, looked at what your average cost was going to be and that came out at 176 per assessment. However, what appeared in the financial memorandum did not present 176 as the midpoint, it presented it as the top point and put in some other costs below that. I think that we're concerned that that's not the realistic reflection of where we thought we were in our understanding about costs. You also spoke about within the bill carers not being covered immediately in the sense that the duties of the bill would apply across all 759,000 of Scotland's carers from day one. All carers would be covered immediately and I think where we then are in the business of trying to figure out how many people would come forward, you know, of those 759,000 would come forward and how quickly. I think that it's very difficult, our response, our submission to the finance committee recognises that, but what we did do is look at other areas of service provision where you have a universal entitlement. This bill will introduce a universal entitlement to a carer's assessment. Of course, not all people will uptake it, but it is a universal entitlement. If you look at how demand is built for, for example, free personal and nursing care, it was much sharper rise than is profiled within the financial memorandum. It profiles at very low and slow. If you also look to England, who have introduced similar legislation, it's too early to, you know, that's only just come into force. For example, they had to revisit their impact assessment, their version of a financial memorandum twice and revise the figures up the way for carers assessment. That would indicate that it's coming through quicker down there. What we're saying is that there's quite a lot of risk here in terms of demand potentially outstripping the resource that's made available if more come forward or they come forward more quickly. At the moment, all of that risk is lined with local authorities and with carers themselves in a sense that they'll have increased expectations of what can be delivered for this. You asked in terms of the committee doing further work. Where we are at in terms of doing further work is that we've asked the Government to revisit the figures and agree a model for estimating costs with us. We can't be certain, we just want to agree a model and agree to monitor the true costs of implementation and for Scottish Government to fund any excess requirement if demand does exceed it. I think that that's a more appropriate sharing of risk, but so far we've been unable to secure agreement to all of that. Sorry, that was quite a long answer, but I think that there are many unknowns and it is a difficult area. Are there any other responses, Pam? Yes, thanks. Just to add on and to answer your question, yes, we have in Dumfries and Galloway tried to model out some of the costs. We did an initial basic version when we were responding to the COSLA questionnaire back in January and then I've revisited that a number of times since. I was discussing this with my colleagues in the third sector and they looked at me and said, yes, but you've forgotten to take in the fact that we haven't got the capacity within the third sector at the moment. That's a really significant issue to be taking on board because clearly whilst we welcome the growth of the third sector in supporting us to go deliver support to carers, they obviously have their processes and so on to go through first. That's something that needs to be taken into consideration as well. In Perthgros, we've done some financial modelling based on the stats that we've got. Our unit cost for completing a carers assessment came out at £215, which is much higher than the high-level costs that it's presented. We just based that practically on how long we asked the social workers how long it took to complete a carers assessment, they said, between a day and a half. That's what we basically based on, a salary of social workers based on that. We've got concerns within the carers that we know are registered carers and we've got approximately £3,600. We know from the census in 2011 that there are 13,000 people identified themselves as carers and we've extrapolated from that what we would need if everyone needed a carer support plan. We worked out, probably cost around another £200,000 that we would need for that. We have been working on that in terms of the actual care costs, in terms of providing respite or replacement care, although it's quite difficult to get a sense of what that would be. The bit more concerned about is the waving of charges and what interpretation is given around the waving of charges and whether that includes some form of respite care, whether you start looking at day care as a form of respite. That's been one of our concerns around that area, but maybe that's going off the subject a bit. I was taking that, that was a supplementary flowing from the eligibility criteria, so if you can leave it at that, I want to get Mike in. The only one question that I would like to ask then in terms of those calculations about costs, has been any calculation about the benefits of proactive engagement with carers or the preventive benefits that might flow from earlier engagement with those carers who don't require anything at this time, but clearly carrying out a caring role? There hasn't been a kind of cost benefit analysis for what that would look like, but certainly in our plans, in terms of information and advice and early support, we think that that preventative support would stop further crisis later on, so we haven't actually worked on an amount for that, but we know that that is something that we need to do, so we support that element in terms of information and support and advice. If we can get that early, that would support that, but we haven't done any actual calculations without alleviate. Yes, just as a kind of back of the envelope kind of how many carers do we have in Dumfries and Galloway, knowing the sort of numbers of carers that we have caring for more than 50 hours and so on and so forth, and it was an amazing number of carers that are being delivered every week, and it turned into millions of carers per year, a staggering figure, and if you translated that into a basic unit cost of £18 an hour or £10 an hour or whatever, it still is a huge amount of money, so that's the amount of money that's being saved in terms of health and social care provision having to go in, so there's no doubt about it. We all see carers as an absolutely vital element of working in partnership with carers in going forward in the delivery of health and social care into the future. I think, not particularly picking up on your point, but some of the discussion around preventative care, that is something that comes up time and time again, not just with patient groups around long-term conditions and things, but also with carers, that desire to feel that there are small interventions that are put in that can make a big difference, and I think that's always the concern with the focus on either the high end of caring or all the discussion around eligibility criteria. We miss the opportunity for preventative interventions, whether that's a health intervention or whether that's a social care intervention, and I think we shouldn't be underestimating them if we're thinking about all the sort of push towards preventive and anticipatory care. We have to be investing at these relatively low levels because I think that will make a big difference. Just one final point is that quite often I've found that carers, if they've got the knowledge that there's support available, they don't access it. At one point in my life, I was a carers support worker and trying to encourage carers to come to support groups, it was for mental health. I used to bump into people, in fact I think I used to meet more people in Tescos than I met at the carers support groups because people were like, oh yes, but I'll come along when I need to, I'm sure you need to support somebody else who's got a greater level of the need than I have at the moment. People did really feel that safety net was really important for them. Cosly, do you have any work on that in terms of the possible benefits of the bill about early intervention or prevention? I think in common with Paul, what we haven't done is I consider a piece of work at a national level that looks at the actual financial benefits of outcomes. It's quite a complicated thing to do in a robust way. You're into looking at social return on investment models and such like, but all the work that underpinned the joint carers strategy and the joint young carers strategy very much took that as a starting point in terms of looking at how could you maximise more preventative approaches in the knowledge that that will take demand out of the system later on and is better for everyone. I think that those two pieces of work and also some of the work that was done around the change fund, if you remember the part of the change fund, was to be used for improving support and services to carers. That was very much again on the premise that it was about shifting the balance of care and looking at much earlier interventions. Did you achieve that with the change fund? Was that another case where the money was used to just meet the current demand rather than that preventive aspect? I haven't brought figures and things on the change fund with me today, but I know that there was a focus on looking at what that money went on and reporting around it. That's in the public domain, so I'm sorry that I can't give you a summary read-out today, but the information is available. It's always difficult to cost something that hasn't happened. I think that that's a problem with a lot of these sort of all these preventative things to cost something that hasn't happened, whether it's that someone didn't go into hospital or that their hospital length of stay was shorter or whether there wasn't a complaint or whatever. A lot of certainly in terms of some of the things that were spent with the change fund, a lot of it was things that didn't happen in a positive way, but to cost that and to show the benefit or even to prove it, I think that it's always a huge challenge. What we estimated that most of the support that we provide to carers isn't actually discreetly provided for carers, it's actually provided for the service user or the client, whether that's usually some form of daycare or any form of support for the client, invariably benefits the carer as well. In most cases, we estimate that we spend approximately £800,000 on carers specifically, but we know that we support carers in many other ways, up to about £40 million from our different day carers and so forth. It's actually quite hard to say that this is particularly for the carer and that this is for the service user or the client and that's what made some of the financial modelling figures that we were doing for the cost of submission quite difficult because we had to try and extrapolate bits from that because certainly the amount that we spend for carers discreetly is not all that we're providing for carers. I'm really interested in discussing about the finances around the bill and I think that Alison Jarvis was talking about innovation and eligibility criteria irrespective of where that's at and how it's at, that process, not squeezing out innovation and using money more cleverly. A lot of carers, just one section of carer community of course, is those looking after elderly loved ones and health and social care integration boards at the forefront now. I know that it's not specific to the bill but I'm just wondering whether there needs to be a reflection on opportunities that there are to have more of that early intervention for carers using the sum of cash, so not just local authority cash but the whole gambo of cash that now comes on the table from health and social care integration to do some of that work. Even some brief comments on that to get it on the record would be helpful and whether or not there has to be a cognisance of that, whether within this bill or within maybe regulations that follow from it in terms of best practice in promoting some of that. It's always good to support innovation, it's always good to support early intervention, it's always good to support anticipatory care, all these sorts of things. The challenge is that it always gets sucked up into crisis and the people that are deemed as most in need. I think that that's a dilemma in all sorts of areas certainly in healthcare. I think that the change funds have been useful but some have been more useful than others, we've been more successful with some than others and as the chair hinted upon my colleague has just said a crisis comes along and when you're trying to disinvest from something to put it into what the change fund has shown to be successful that can be particularly difficult to do. Should we nevertheless do it, should we be doing more in the way of prevention? Absolutely. I couldn't agree more in terms of the point about harnessing a wider range of services and using the opportunities that are afforded to us through integration. I think that we also need to remember that there is a lot that can still be done in terms of smarter use of resources. We know that there are challenges around eligibility and finite resources and I think that something that we were keen to see was a greater consideration of self-directed support approaches within a health context. That idea that someone who is in receipt of services under integration should not have a situation where their needs are still having to be categorised into this as a social care need and you can have flexibility through self-directed support options but this has been provided for a healthcare need and SDS does not apply. I think that at the time of the self-directed support act going through Parliament, COSLA has made a case for that duty and it has also been extended to the NHS. It was not, but that does not mean that there is no further work that could be done through guidance and through future bits of legislation that could harness some of those opportunities. One of the things that we have learned and that underpins self-directed support is that sometimes you can have a very expensive service that a carer is accessing that is not actually the best way to meet their needs. You can give them a personal budget and that individual carer will be able to have outcomes met in a far more innovative way than we have previously been able to manage. Just in terms of using the change fund and the integrated care fund to provide preventative services, I think that there are lots and lots of examples. We have set up dementia cafes and carers workers in the hospital to help to support that part of the discharge. More recently, we have used developed carer support workers to be part of an integrated care team, particularly to identify people earlier before they are in crisis. We can put in respite, we can put in replacement care before they basically end up in crisis because it sees crisis breakdowns that are costing us huge amounts of money. I will not follow up on the self-directed support issue at a local level within Glasgow. It has not worked well at all and I will not indulge myself by telling you why I do not think that it has worked well in the slightest. It has withdrawn choice from a lot of vulnerable people that I represent. However, I suppose that I just wanted to see if there was an opportunity for the carers bill to focus the mind of the new integration boards more than it otherwise might in terms of using some of those wider monies to support carers to do some of that preventative work. You do not have to come back on that subject yourself, but that was the reason for asking the question. I would just support that. It was quite disappointing seeing something that was mostly targeted duty under local authority, just as we are in to the discussions and the work around developing strategic plans and locality plans. I am pleased that carers are there in Dumfries and Galloway. They are being considered, but it would be really good to see that beefed up a bit more in the legislation. Dennis, will you help me out this time and pick up on the questions that you have been pursuing, Gertrack and young carers? Yes. Basically, I just wanted to go down the route of the possibility of setting out the duty for the appropriate assessments. Do you believe that the current legislation in the framework is adequate, or do you think that we need to improve it in terms of our young carers? In terms of young carers, our approach has always been to say that they need to be treated as children and young people first and carers second. It is very important that young carers have the same rights to having their outcomes met as do other children and young people. In terms of what is set out within the bill, we have a concern about fit with getting it right for every child and with the outcomes approach in there. Our concern is that by having a separate young carers statement, we will have a situation in which a young person has two parallel plans and that that will have an impact on holistic planning and co-ordination of support. Everything that is getting it right for every child is trying to achieve. There is a risk that young carers are almost siloed, if you like, and there is a subset of needs that is being treated differently. If it is decided to proceed with a young carers statement that someone also has a child's plan, that should be part of the child's plan. We shouldn't be going down the road of separate plans for subsets of needs. It also begs the question that, if you are having a separate plan for young carers, why not a separate plan for young people with disabilities or young people from black minority ethnic communities, it is running counter to the whole policy direction, which is about focusing on outcomes for children and young people and making sure that those are met irrespective of the needs that give rise to them. That is where it is. Is it important to think about the transition from being a young carer to an adult carer? I suppose the transition points are always tricky. They are an opportunity, but just considering when they go from being a child under GoFec and thinking how does that transition process work, I think, is important. Any drawing on that, certainly some of the feedback that I have had from carers centres has been the value of that young carers statement moving into that person becoming a young adult carer, although I have also had feedback that the terminology of statement feels a bit official and linked to the fact that you make a police statement and things like that, where the GoFec plan is less controversial, maybe. Dennis, do you want to respond to the comments? Having the statement there does it not then highlight the fact that you have maybe a lead or a key worker. You can achieve that through GoFec in itself, but having that statement does enable a process that maybe is not currently there. I think that it maybe does help with the transition period. Do you not agree with that? I think that the key point that was made is that it is not currently there. Our concern is that we have a major new piece of legislation, the Children and Young People's Bill, which will come into force in just August next year, that will require that there is a named person for every child and that there is a clear focus on ensuring that they are safe, healthy and active, and the rest of the scenario outcomes. That would lead us to question why do you really need that separate bit of legislation that is coming in just before something that will cover it and runs the risk of confusing the situation and making co-ordinated planning for young people that is actually more difficult? That is a substantive question. Just on the named person and the children's plan and statement and how they interact, some of the evidence that we received was that there was a reluctance on the part of young carers to have the statement shared with their named person, because, especially if they were looking after someone, for instance, with drug and alcohol problems, they were not very clear that they wanted that to be known by the head teacher in their school depending on how sympathetic that person might have been to that issue. I am wondering how things that a young carer would want to be dealt with as confidential would be dealt with, and is there the ability to have services set up to support somebody, to highlight to the named person that that person was indeed a young carer? That is really important, especially in a school setting, that adjustments are made to allow them to benefit from education, but some of the more personal aspects of their caring role, not to be included in that or not to be passed on? The key thing about the child or the young person being in control of what information is shared with whom, and I am sure that people who have given evidence in the next session will be able to go into how all of that plays out within the children and young people's bill. I suppose that the quick answer to that is irrespective of whether you have a separate young carer's statement or not. The named person approach and the child's plan approach and how information is shared among all the different professionals involved in that should be predicated upon involving the child or young person in deciding what information is shared with whom. My other question was about information and advice services. I have spoken to groups of carers, and some of those services have been set up in an ad hoc way by people who have been carers and may be seen a lack of information and advice for carers in their communities. There are a number of organisations in the third sector that provide that. There was a concern that the bill for placing a duty on local authorities would mean that local authorities would bring that all in house, and some of that really good local knowledge would be lost. I suppose that I am looking for a bit of comfort for those organisations. My own feeling is that if those services are out there, it would be for the local authorities to support them and, indeed, to develop them to make sure that they provided the services that are required in the bill. Perhaps you could give me some thoughts on that. Just in relation to Parthgan Ross, locally, when we have consulted with carers, its information advice comes up again and again. In terms of your question, our response is that we are going to commission information from the independent sector while we already have an information advice service. We do not see that necessarily as a line within the local authority only. In order that we have other independent sector services that are doing that, we are going to commission a special service just to make sure that we are providing that so that it would not be a local authority service, but it would be in partnership. I would say that I am trying to ensure that carers get the right information and advice at the right time is a real challenge. Certainly, we too commission from the third sector to the delivery of that, but we are finding also that through the carerware training that third independent and statutory sectors are delivering. In fact, we are starting to deliver it to hairdressers and people like that, trying to get everybody aware of where they can signpost people to. However, I think that it will always be an on-going challenge, unfortunately. We find that, particularly in a rural area, people can be caring for a long time before they even find out that there is a simple service like that. That is where the adult support plans are going to come in, I hope, and help benefit carers in that way. David, on the third sector, who knows what they are talking about, let us make use of them. I have a very good evidence that there are lots of carers out there who do not realise that they are carers or do not realise what services they are. I mentioned the information advice service, but I do not think that that is not enough in terms of what we need to do. There is also an issue about people who are declining carers assessments. We have about 625 carers a year who are declining carers assessments when there is an assessment of their client. Why is that? Partly, it may well be around information and training for social workers, but it is not enough to provide an information advice service. We need to do a lot more among our workforce and among the public to raise awareness about carers issues. Alison? There is so much information and advice out there already. It is not about reinventing the wheel. Whoever is provided, whether it is NHS 24, NHS Inform or whatever, as well as all the local services and signposting, it is either gathering it up into one central place so that people know where to find that information and being signposted. The information is out there, it is just that people do not know where to look for it, or as you say, do not realise that they are a carer and therefore that there is information and support that would make a difference to them as a carer. Just following up on that, excuse me Alison, but the national health service role, what part do you play in identifying the national health service? You are here for the national health service. There are obviously critical points that this committee hears about lots of things, such as discharge policy, unplanned going into hospitals and identifying of carers at that point. Does that happen? Should it happen? What responsibility should the national health service have for identifying carers and informing them at that point? I think that the health service has got a huge responsibility and I think that we have touched on it a little bit already. It is a hugely complex issue and some of it is around staff awareness about ensuring that people make the most of opportunistic moments to identify carers because people often do not realise that they are a carer. I was just to draw your attention to some research that was done with primary care and carers of people at the end of life or advanced illness. That is a group of carers that you would think would be easy to identify and that people would think that they were carers. In a relatively small study that was done here in Edinburgh, there were three main barriers to identifying carers. That was one that is often a gradual process and that is probably true for lots of things, whether it is a lung cancer or a dementia or whatever. There are not that many situations, probably something like a stroke, where you are catapulted into a caring role. Often, it is a gradual process and people appreciate that they are a carer until they are quite far down the line. Often, as someone's condition deteriorates, that becomes so engulfing that the carer can no longer separate out their needs as a carer and look after the cared for person. I think that there is also something about the legitimacy. I think there is ambiguity about the legitimacy of carers' needs in a carer's mind, but also in professionals' minds. GP's and hospital staff often think that their focus has to be on the care recipient. There is lots of work done in Lothian and I know in other board areas around staff awareness training and things. I think sometimes we are so focused and carers themselves are focused on the cared for person that there is a need to be very explicit about the legitimacy of carers' needs. We can talk about being engulfed by, if we open up to make it a universal right or whatever, I think there is an assumption that huge numbers of carers are going to self-identify. I think certainly this fairly small study showed that the vast majority of people that were identified from this study did not self-identify. It was by opportunistic conversations with a range of people in the practice, whether it was reception staff, GP, nurses or whatever. I think people are often quite hesitant about self-identifying themselves as carers and there is a lot of work to be done around staff awareness and a confidence. I think sometimes people don't ask whether they are anxious about opening up a Pandora's box of needs and of service demand that cannot be met. I think that is not the case. Often it is just a recognition and a validation of what they are doing rather than large service inputs. The local authority has the big responsibility for all of this in the national health service, to fulfil that responsibility when they provoke you. For instance, anecdotal stuff has personally been involved in the situation where emergency service would call for a arrived. If I hadn't been there that day, that relative would have been in the hospital but the presence of a carer reassurance or whatever prevented a hospital admission because a precautionary default position was that that 88-year-old person would have been in the hospital that day as a result of a fall in the house. The role of carers in that notification about admission to the hospital, discharge of hospital and that role and whether we are working effectively on whether the bill would encourage the wider question for this morning. I think that in the past we have been particularly poor at joined up working. I think that health and social care integration has been absolutely the right thing to do. I think that it was five pilots which I have been running for about seven years now in my own neck of the woods in Ayrshire. We are up and running with the health and social care partnerships and the rest of Scotland is coming along with it. That will go an awful long way to address a lot of those. Should there be attention paid to the role of carers in that health and social care integration? Absolutely. Carers do play a vital role in that. It has been indicated earlier in the mountain money that is actually saved within the public sector because of the role of carers. I think that it has been recognised and they deserve to get our support and return for that. I was just wanting to come in on the back of what Alison said again around the fact that we find that many carers might be told about the support that they can get and the information and advice on where to access it. Often it is when they are told by another carer that they move forward on it or by another professional such as a GP or a primary care worker. We tend to forget the influence of those people in getting people motivated to lift the phone and make that initial contact. If you are in the middle of being the complexities of life generally and the caring responsibilities that are on top of that, then something as simple as lifting that phone can be really challenging and finding the time to do that. I just want to say that I hope that that is why integration needs to have a far greater role in the bill in order to bring all of those things together. In terms locally of what the health service provides to support for carers, particularly through the change fund, we had health check workers for carers and we had a carer support worker, as previously mentioned, based in our hospital that really did fantastic preventative work and is doing preventative work. It would be good if it was more of a health, I think, from our point of view, health presence in the bill, but it does seem very purely focused on the local authority, almost purely focused on the local authority, and I think that jar has been mentioned with the integration agenda. Peining? Just to come back on that, because we too, under the change fund, offered carers across the region a health and wellbeing check followed by some kind of mentoring support if issues were identified that they needed extra supporting, like losing weight or stopping smoking and some of those other things that would help their health and wellbeing. Unfortunately, that came to an end when the funding ran out from the change fund. I would see that as a role of primary care, because those carers will also be patients of GPs. That could have been picked up through primary care, but we failed in Dumfries and Galloway anyway to get that followed through at the moment. It was maybe just to flip that on its head for a second, so rather than asking what we would have liked to see the bill saying in terms of duties on health boards or direction to health, to think for a moment around integration authorities and our ambitions for how they are going to result in more flexible services, better integrated services, ambitions around locality planning and being able to deliver greater involvement for communities in terms of how services are shaped at their local level. If you look at the causal response that has outlined some key concerns about where we think the bill is too prescriptive and too restrictive, although the duties are placed on local authorities, they will very much be devolved services, so we would have those concerns on behalf of health as an integration partner as well, if you like. It was maybe just to flip that on its head and say that we would see integration authorities as being the way to drive forward improvements for carers and all the bits in our response where we have outlined concerns about too much prescription on processes and inputs and not enough focus on outcomes that would apply for health too. Questions for members? Yes, Dennis. The view of yourselves in terms of there is a proposal to have a duty for information advice service rather than just establishing it. If the information advice service is there, do you believe that that would provide the opportunities for carers and other people, obviously, to take up what is there in terms of resources? So, just whether or not it should be a duty to establish information advice or not? Can we widen that because Dennis mentioned that? I mean, I think there's some discussion on that just earlier about advice, but I mean, I think resources, I think also, Dennis, is the capacity issues that the responsibilities would have on the bill and what, you know, what, what, you know, I think we've mentioned, we've been through the money thing. We will argue with Westminster we don't got enough, you will argue that you don't got enough from Scottish Government and that will, that negotiation will take place somewhere else, not necessarily in this committee, but the capacity issues and the requirements of the bill about what expectation we're giving out there and whether we'll be able to deliver that expectation as Dennis has alluded to in terms of, you know, good and independent access to advice or indeed the assessments that would need to be carried out or the increased people that we've been through, you know, what, what, what sort of calculations have we made about those capacity issues and whether the ambition of this bill will be delivered? The outcomes, how will it make a difference to individuals? Yes, Beth? I think in thinking about information and advice local authorities already have duties around information and advice under the self-directed support act and those apply to carers too. So, whilst we recognise that we need to get better, there's room for improvement in terms of information and advice, we're just not sure that additional duties within this bill are needed to layer upon on top of the self-directed support duties. I think in terms of what will make things better, yes, it's greater investment in information and advice and it's making sure that it's accessible for a whole range of groups. So, I suppose we were surprised to see additional duties on information and advice within the bill for those reasons. Anyone else? Paul? Just, I mean, it's already within the national carers strategy around information and advice and, as I mentioned earlier, that's locally, that's one thing that carers again and again tell us that they want is why we've commissioned one because they say, we just want one telephone number, one sort of website to go to, one where we can get information. So, I guess we feel it's, in terms of our strategic objectives, it's already there and in terms of meeting the preventative need that we have to, we think it's essential anyway. So, I mean, it's part of our current plans, but I'm not sure whether it needs to be a duty or not because it is or contained in other, is a strategic objective already? As we don't, the places we have it is working well because you've got maybe a hub, a one-stop shop for people in other areas don't have that facility. So, basically, you know, when we come back to the sort of national aspect or creating a duty, I'm just saying that Paul's identified good practice, but that good practice maybe is not being replicated in other areas. Perhaps you've got a bias sample here, because I suppose most areas would see it because it is something that comes up so, so regularly around, you know, from carers information and advice. However, as I said earlier, the information and advice might be out there, but people don't always find it. Is there any other questions from my committee? I thank the panel for the retentancy this morning, sorry about the delay in starting. We have, obviously, very good written evidence from you, which is clear and inside from your point of view, and will assist us in our deliberations. Thank you very much for being with us this morning. Thank you. Suspend at this point while we change the panel. We reconvene, I presume, our business continuation of agenda item number three, evidence-taking, and we now move to our second panel of witnesses. Giving evidence on the Care of Scotland bill today, welcome to you all, Tricia Hall, social work managers, Scottish Association of Social Work, welcome. David Fornston, convener, community care standing committee, social work Scotland. Fred Beckett, north-east social work carer team, manager of Glasgow City Council, social work services, and Tarn Bailey, Scottish commissioner for children and young people. Welcome to you all. I'll just wait a second until Nick hits his seat, and then we'll move directly to questions, if that's okay, with our first question coming from Rhoda Grant. Thank you, convener. The bill talks about young carers and removing the caring role from children, preschool children. Do you think that that's the right approach? Is it possible to do that? Should it be for children in school as well as preschool? Oh, right, okay. Absolutely, I think, for children who are under school age, we have to approach this from their children first and their carers second. I think that, especially in the very young children, there shouldn't be any acceptance of that being in a caring role. It may be that they can make a contribution, but I really don't think that that's feasible, and even for children above that age, I think that we have to strike a balance always between the capacity of the child and the expectations on their caring role. It's not to say that caring is always burdensome because children will sometimes thrive in those situations, that sense of responsibility, but we have to make sure that they have a childhood. Most often, the children who are young carers, one of their complaints is that they don't get recognition, and as a result of that, they don't actually receive the support and weaken witness. Many occasions where children are quite literally being deprived of a childhood because of overbearing caring responsibilities. If the act does anything, it will help to redress that kind of balance, which, too often, I think, is stacked on the expectation of the child. I would agree. I think that, particularly for young children, it risks formalising the caring role and almost places a formal responsibility on their child for the parent. That may be something that an older carer is able or willing to take on, but I think that, particularly where there may be protection issues and there's a conflict there, the younger child, I think that that would not be desirable. I agree. It's not acceptable for children to be working the law. It's actually really clear that children under the age of 13 are not allowed to work if they're talking about private enterprise or anything like that, so we shouldn't accept it in any other way either. By the same talk, it is about being sympathetic to assessing what is needed and doing that in a way so that a child who may be deemed in need doesn't become a child at risk. We're really, really clear about the support systems that we're putting in there. Hopefully, the bill opens up the fact that people may seek support where previously they may have been wary about doing so, because otherwise, they might have an assessment that will end up with their child being taken away, which I think that the message has to be very clear that that is not going to be the case, that we are trying very hard to put in mechanisms to support so that that child can have a childhood. In agreement with that, a child under preschool, under school age, taking on a care and role, it's not a very good indictment in our society and we should be doing everything we can to alleviate that care and role given my childhood. Rwyda. You'd have heard comments from the group before about the carers' statement on the child's plan and concerns that we had, certainly from representatives of young carers' groups, about confidentiality. Indeed, the child's willingness to have their carers' statement shared with their named person, who, for various reasons, might have concerns about knowing that, where do you think that that line should be drawn, come the two things, interact, is there a need for two things, should there be one thing, how best to support young carers? I think that that's about developing a relationship, being really, really clear that information that is shared, hopefully is shared with the consent of the young carer and should only be shared if that is not the case, if it is deemed that that young person may be at risk. I think that there are very clear guidelines in our legislation for that. Clearly, there will be a need for a use of both plans where a child does not have a child's plan and therefore is primarily a young carer. I think that where there is that overlap, where the child is thought to be in need or at risk, then I think that we would be concerned about the parallel plans. I think that the point was made earlier about confidentiality, and I think that keeping the child at the centre and consulting the child would be really important. Clearly, there would be occasions where there would be a need to share information if there were issues, for example around a parent with drug and alcohol issues. That was being kept by one social worker or as part of a carer's plan, but it was not known to the name person or the lead professional under goffick arrangements. That could certainly carry risks. I think that that would be about sharing with the child the need to breach confidentiality and make sure that information is known to the name person and other people who have a responsibility for protecting that child, which should be paramount. That is tricky, because we have just got new legislation that is about to be enacted with name person being central to that. As I understand the bill, it will highlight the issue for young carers through the young carers statement. The whole purpose of the Children and Young People's Act was to go down the route of having a single plan. I think that it is fine for those children where there is a children's plan. You can include the young carers statement as part of that, but there is a much bigger group of children where there will be a young carers statement. I am quizzical about where that would sit in terms of the overall legislative landscape. The second thing is that you have asked a really tough question in terms of the information sharing. Again, that goes back to the Children and Young People's Act, because the information sharing section on that and even the guidance gives rather a light touch to information that should and shouldn't be shared. Practice will be developed on that. The reason that it gives us a light touch is because so much of that is down to judgment and the judgment of the people who are holding the information or expected, rather under a duty, to pass on the information on the basis of wellbeing. I checked the latest consultation and guidance for the parts of the act that contain the in-person and child's plan. There are only two mentions of young carers. Both are examples. In fact, in the section on the guidance on the child's plan, there is no mention of young carers. In fact, I think that this whole process may highlight a gap in the considerations that would go into a child's plan, so it is not just for this piece of legislation. In fact, it is for the Children and Young People's Act of which we are just about to enact. I am absolutely behind shining a clearer or a brighter light on young carers, but because of the all-compassing nature of the Children and Young People's Act, we have to think carefully about how future legislation maps on to that particular landscape, of which we are just at the start of just now. I think that there are a lot of things to be sorted in relation to the name person, and I am a supporter of it. However, it presents challenges when we have a desire, as the bill has, to have a specific focus on a group of children with specific needs, such as young carers. Just looking at how we implement that in practice, what we are looking at in Glasgow is working hand-in-hand with education around them having a child's plan, and what we currently have as a young carers assessment will match the generic indicator so that we are building on that in relation to the care and role. Currently, we are just looking to share that with the named person, whether they come into us first or whether they come through. We have not got on to the way to have issues around confidentiality and how we support young people in the time of child protection. We are concerned that it is duplication. We think that we should be absolutely working hand-in-hand with Gyrffyx the way ahead. We should be working with schools and schools in an ideal place to identify young carers. We have not got to the menu to how we can jointly share those information and be guided on that. However, clearly the direction of travel is to work hand-in-hand in education based around the child's plan. Any further considerations on the reflections of the children's commission that are from the witnesses? Dennis Robertson? Just to pursue it a wee bit, we are obviously looking at the integration with the education, the integration with the CAMHS service. Do you feel that, obviously, because we are looking towards a local authority and health board integration with young children who have maybe been identified to CAMHS because of issues around caring or whatever? Do you think that the bill in any way through the young carer statement would help those children with the CAMHS service? I would go wider than just CAMHS services. Essentially, any adult services—in particular, drug, alcohol, substance misuse services, mental health services, disability services—any services that are dealing with adults and that are children involved, are issues that we would want those adult services to consider the needs of children? Most often, that has come up in terms of tragedies where there have been child protection issues, but in this particular instance, the other question is, and do those young children—those children—are they taking on any caring responsibilities? Is that proportionate for their age and maturity, or should we be making sure that those children get the necessary support? The identification issue is principally through schools, GPs and health services, but those special services that are dealing with some of our most vulnerable families may well become aware of children living in those situations who are in need of some protective measures or who may well be in need of some additional support as they are identified as being young carers in those sometimes quite difficult situations. What the bill will do is to help to tune people to ask in that question, is this child, assuming caring responsibilities, is that appropriate? What support should be put into that family, not just in terms of the basis of the adult who is requiring support, but also to consider the needs and best interests of the child that is living in that situation? To that extent, I think that it will help, because it will make people much more aware of what we think are huge numbers of children who are just not being identified right now. I have to say that I really struggle to get feedback from members of our association on this bill and some of the reasons given where maybe it was because there has been so much new legislation this year in mental health, children and young people act, SDS, public bodies, et cetera, et cetera. However, one of the examples that stood out for me—in fact, there were three of our members that raised scenarios whereby the police were actually the referring agency that recognised that there was a young person in a household that was doing things that really, in this particular police officer's opinion, should not be doing. As I said, there were three different examples of different police forces that identified something needed to be done there. The strap line was that it's common sense to see that. How common sense then relates, obviously, into support mechanisms is another kind of debate. However, I do think that there is more recognition of that than maybe there has been in previous years. Really, just to echo Tam's point, I think that, with integration, there will be a number of authorities, including my own, where children and adult services will be separated, there will be essentially two different organisations. The inclusion of a young carers statement and, conversely, an adult statement should focus the minds of social workers, whether they're working in children's teams or adult teams, coming across children who are in caring responsibilities or adults in a household if they're working with children. I would certainly see that as a benefit of the bill. Yes, Fred. I think that, in practice, the bill has a significant opportunity for the future, because we, across Glasgow, might have identified 300-node young carers last year, GP referrals, and sometimes predominantly the firefighting, but we don't see the most vulnerable children, the ones living with mental health, the ones living with addiction, and they're the ones going to school. If the children's bill on this gives us an opportunity to pick up them in the old preventative anticipatory before the firefighting gentlemen is absolutely right, the CAMHS team, by the time we get there, these are very damaged and vulnerable children. That is the biggest opportunity that we've had, to get into schools. The key agency in a child's socialisation is to look at them holistically and make a difference in their lives. We need to get this one right, or 10 years from now. We'll still be in social work traditionally firefighting, but we know who these children are. They're vulnerable. We have a huge opportunity to get education on board and work in a preventative anticipatory way to support the children for the future. Richard, do you want to add that to the bill? I want to add that to Mr Becket's point about the parents who have addiction problems. Have any of you been consulted about DAISY? Do you even know about DAISY? It's the current working group that is examining the new data collection system for drug and alcohol addiction. I tried to design one in 2007 and it's never been followed through, but it was one where the children and the children's needs would be looked at in the addiction services and that could be then transmitted properly. Do you want that, Richard? No, I'm not. I'm a politician and I had to come off the whole thing. They subsequently found a way to abandon the programme that I had got to the point of a piece of software in 2007. The powers that be decided that once I was out of the way they wouldn't continue it. Here we are eight years later, still without a collective data collection system. The committee could justfully write to DAISY to say that the issue of data collection has come up and there's an opportunity to at least flag it up as part of the consideration. If you feel that would be useful. It's worth waiting to give your evidence and a great double act to it. Can we get responses from some of the other panel members on that? In my previous life, I worked for Aberlour child care trust and we did start a realist evaluation study of work with a lot of substance abuse services whereby we used the wellbeing indicators for the adults as well as for the children involved and then started following over years. Sadly, the usual story is not enough funding etc. However, I think that it's something that the committee maybe would want to look at in terms of longer term outcome measures and actually measuring whether or not these outcomes are being achieved because I think we're very process driven. We keep coming up with new ideas and with new systems but it would be really helpful if we also put in some of the measurements and some of the ways of actually being able to state at the end of a period has this actually made a difference. What is our evidence? What is the impact as a result of that? Another thing that members often have come back to me about is what really works for them is hearing about areas where things are working. The Highlands Health and Social Care Integration is going to be a bit faster because obviously they were a pathfinder. Our members there have had more success and maybe also with some additional funding than maybe in some other areas and other people have found it very useful to hear what it was that actually worked there. Again, not just measurement but also sharing what works and doing that in a way getting people together and not another website because nobody's got time to read them any more. I'm looking at that as well. Anyone else? David? I'm certainly carers or however they define themselves of people who are drug and alcohol problems or its parents or spouses. Other family members are, I think that we'd agree, a hidden care group that are less likely to receive formal community care services, you know, home calps or daycare or whatever. They may have occasional residential rehab admissions but on the whole they're less known to social work departments and others so there's a need to raise their profile. Just on, I'm hesitating to get back to this process and stuff because I think we do agree with the committee, we need to identify best practice and focus on outcomes and, you know, how prevention can delay all that but processes, we need to go back to the earlier session and there was, you know, quite heated in and around the whole question of identifying and supporting those carers who are not currently identified properly or supported at this point. There's a capacity issue in terms of, you know, in and around those adult assessments and children and the earlier question was asking about the capacity and the current capacity. How will, we know, anticipates that that will identify people, barely help people, maybe prevent stuff happening but given the pressure within the system what is the capacity for social work in particular to be identifying these groups who may be a lower priority than currently is being addressed at this point. So what does that do to the capacity? What will that do to the outcomes indeed for those at a higher level who will see some of that capacity drift away from them? Tom, I just want to answer the question about identification because I think my colleagues could answer the one about capacity. I have had the privilege of attending the young carers festival for the last five years. The messages are quite mixed from young carers. On the one hand, they want relevant people such as teachers to know about it so that they can be sympathetic and give some flexibility in terms of the expectations of them, in terms of homework production or maybe the time that they come into school. On the other hand, some young people say that this is my family's business and I do not want people to know about it. It is actually quite difficult to get the right balance because I would always advocate listening to the views of children and young people but in this instance they are quite mixed in terms of what they would want to happen. I think that we should err on the side of asking the question of the young person so that we at least know who those young people are. All of the figures that are given are rephrased. There is some doubt as to what the actual numbers are of the number of young carers that we have. I think that we will not know until we start to more systematically ask young people about their caring responsibilities. That goes back to awareness of those who are working with them. It is about your schools, your GPs, your specialist workers who are dealing with the adults in those instances. It is through that that we will get a better idea of the numbers. If you share that resource with the front line, the house is burning down.  The universal services should be able to do that. I am just asking the practitioner's task. I have a Glasgow perspective on it's all throughout. It is not a new challenge for us. In 2009, we were inspected by the then SWEA, and we had only done 86 carers assessments. Their recommendation was that we must offer all carers an assessment. We had to get our house in order. Just to put our services in context, we are social work in a partnership. We have primary care, acute care, social work in a third sector carer centres. Can we look at this as what we have learned over the time is that you look at the carers agenda in isolation, and you need to put it in context, is that a carer only becomes a carer when somebody gets diagnosed with a long-term condition. Ten years ago, we were looking for carers in Tesco car park. Now we go to the GPs and they acute the hospitals and we identify people by design rather than accident. We launched in 2011 a carers partnership and we had the challenges of capacity. If I look at it, last year, we identified 3,200 new carers. We did not identify the 10,000 or tens of thousands that we would expect and the 76,000 figures that are quoted. We started to identify people earlier in GPs closer to diagnosis and preventing people from getting into crisis situations. 470 of our referrals last year came from primary care and 105 from acute care. 72 per cent of our referrals came as we have an eligibility red amber green that came in early. It prevented of so. In terms of the challenges of how we respond to the demand, which was described by a colleague in the voluntary sector as a dripping tap rather than the flooding, I would adhere to that. We responded to that demand by providing anticipated preventative services in creating a level of assessment that was level to a risk. We could not do everybody an eight-page comprehensive carers assessment, so we started screening assessments and delivering services in that way. I think that we have learned overwhelmingly that we got caught up in the processes. We trained the social worker. Are we providing that level of assessment? However, the outcomes that we are getting back from individuals who are accessing that service in a preventative way is that they are really happy with what they are getting. We need to continue with that. This is nothing new to us in terms of the challenges of delivering the services. That is on top of the traditional social role where people are doing assessments of carers as part of a single-shared assessment. We are not expecting to do all that, but that has helped us to rise to some of the challenges. We are hopefully not going to see the tens of thousands knocking on the door. I would also add to that that the point that was made previously about an integrated way of working with the NHS is that we need the NHS to tell us when they are diagnosed with somebody who is in a long-term condition as close as possible, when that bears in to help and support them in a preventative and anticipated way. When we get that right, we avoid people getting into crisis. We deliver better outcomes and it is less resource intensive. The old days are where people just turned up 10 years ago at the duty social work team in their hands and knees to be honest and we try to turn that around. We have better ways of delivering services than that. David. As an association representing senior social work managers, we would not be in favour of an unrestricted definition of carers and that is for the reasons that I am sure that have been covered already this morning. Firstly, the impact on practitioner time, the ability of practitioners carrying caseloads to be able to prioritise their work and deal with the people who are most in need and most at risk, would be prejudiced. Notwithstanding the extra funding that might accompany the bill, it is unlikely in this day and age that local authorities are going to be significantly increasing the size of teams. I think that there will be worry of creating new posts or permanent posts. It is likely that social work teams are going to remain about the same size. I think that it is really diverting or could divert social work time away from pressing matters towards albeit very important matters around carers. I suppose that the accompanying thing about a diversion of scarce resources, again if we are dealing with budgets that are currently anyway at a level or declining, that if we are talking about certainly diverting carers resources that are not necessarily for the cared for person but could be for the benefit of the carer without additional resources, that would be a second concern. Maybe a slightly more conceptual point, I suppose, some concern about the universalising of the caring role, potentially quite a shift from private to public in terms of the care role bringing carers into the social work net, whether there are other ways of dealing with that in terms of capacity building within the community and a much wider carers strategy, which I could go into later in more detail that it is not just about improving social care but a range of other measures that are going to help carers continue in their role. I think that people sometimes still go back to section 12 of the 1968 act, which places a duty to promote social welfare by making available advice, guidance and assistance on such a scale as may be appropriate for their area. That legislation has never been repealed, although there has been different variations in different new bills that have come to fruition. I think a lot of social workers would still really want to work as change agents, as community workers that work within the community and are a part of a hub. That is a cultured change that I think we still need to promote as much as we can. There is nothing as damaging as individual social workers doing detailed assessments, identifying need and then saying that we cannot do anything about it because we have not got the resources. There has to be that fine balance. If a need is identified, we also need to be confident that we can meet that need. The way that we meet that need goes a good example. There are other authorities that have really tried to have that conversation and to go more towards a public health model, to be more preventative, to enable that culture change and not just make it the duty of certain professionals to do the work that needs to be done but to make it something that actually resides within the community, where people within the community also have a role to play. In that context, it is very important to maintain some of the support mechanisms that are already there. Examples like a young carer that I knew used to go to the youth club. That was her time away, that really kept her going. The youth club is now closed because there was no money. I know that there are very, very simple examples but there are very important examples in this context. Can I just supplement here on that? David, you mentioned this wider support. I have gone back to Tam earlier as well about what people see, the role of the family, the family business, and the balance, I suppose, that I am trying to get at. Not just simply in a wider term, but in a community capacity. The family's capacity to care and how to support that has not been too intrusive that you can actually chase the carer away because you do not want to be there when the assessment shows that a carer should be there, so you do not want to clash with any of that. David? I absolutely agree. In case my comments were seen as negative, I think that there are a lot of positive aspects to the bill. My concern is just that carers are raised expectations, they are drawn, they come and ask for their support plan and that may or may not be the appropriate avenue for them. I appreciate that this committee is concentrating on the devolved powers around social care but supporting carers properly has to take in all kinds of tax and welfare benefits, access to further education, flexibility around employment, all matters, which I am sure you are aware of. A national carer's strategy needs to reflect all those things rather than, as was said, targeting it on a particular profession, whether it is social work or health or whatever, and saying that you will carry out those support plans. Is this what people are looking for as opposed to better supports coming community-wide? There will be occasions where a child is part of a range of supports that are in a wider family network and there may well be no need for additional support to whatever role that child is playing. There will be other occasions where, yes, there is a need for some additional supports, but whether that has to always come through social work, I would question. I think that there is a range of agencies that would potentially be involved with that family. There is quite a debate about the role of health services. There are voluntary sector organisations and there may be specialist organisations, so I do not necessarily see the burden of support falling just on social work. We should be using a range of organisations around a child to enable them to have the best family life that they can in whatever circumstances they are living. We are learning a lot about the needs of carers and I keep going back to the long-term conditions. We have had nurses in our teams for some time. We can predict which conditions people will be diagnosed with that will have a high-care burden, such as motor neurones, Parkinson's and MS. I think that there is a role to be played in there. I was a social worker. If you walk into health service and try to say, have you got any carers, you do not get very far. We recruited nurses and they walked in and we have a massive increase in primary care, getting people identified earlier. However, there is a role in there for the NHS Party. Your standards of contact are about identifying patients and supporting them in their carers. There is specialist information about managing conditions. We do not have to do it all in social work. There is a role there for the NHS that they are already doing, but perhaps it is not counted in how they look at their services. Equally, a lot of the people who come to us as part of the partnership work hand-in-hand with Alzheimer's Scotland, Chest Heart and Stroke. A lot of the information that carers want is about managing that condition. One of the biggest increases in demand in Glasgow is training. People want to be shown how to move with assist, how to manage conditions. The increase in that capacity does not all have to come to the local authority or carer specific. We need to work with condition specific services around the long-term conditions to your one self-supported care. We are not always coming with a ball and saying, give us more money. We need to have looked at how we provide that anticipatory support in a creative way across all the services out there and get them working together more effectively. Ideally, by doing that, we are delivering better outcomes for carers and the person that they support, but we are also shifting the balance of care in terms of reduced falls, hospital admissions, accident and emergency appointments, so it meets the strategic priorities as well as delivering on the better outcomes. Before we go into my substantive question, I will just mirror what Mr Formstone said in relation to the wider carer strategy irrespective of where powers or responsibilities sit. Some carers have told myself, for example, that carers allowance is £10 less a week than job seekers allowance and quite often it does not go claimed because there is clawback from other benefits and you get underlying into how much passports are on to other things. I just put that on the record to say, I think that we appreciate that it is more complex than just having young carer statements and adult carer plans. It is in relation to the young carer statements that I want my substantive questions to be on. The first one is just to get some brief information on the record. The bill says that when a young person reaches 18, if a support plan is not in place, the young carer statement should stay valid and on-going in terms of dealing with transitions. I am just wondering whether that is desirable, if there is any additional steer that you would give us as a committee of the Government on how to make sure that works effectively. Transitions is a difficult issue for a whole range of aspects of children's lives and, generally, we are very poor at the transition from children's services to adult services. It is a welcome consideration about how the young carer statement would somehow carry forward until such time as there is an adult carer statement, if that is the right terminology. You would need to put a time limit on that, but I think that it is worthy of some consideration as children move from child focus services to adult services. We have got exactly the same problem in additional support for learning, in terms of young people leaving care and even moving from education to employment. It is a really difficult time, so I welcome the consideration. It is a modest proposal that it continues, but that may help. However, you might want to think about how long it will continue and the expectation that there should be an adult statement in place before they are removed from whatever the statement was in terms of the young carer. David? It makes sense not to have a sudden cut-off at 18. One would assume that a young carer is caring for an adult. Therefore, if the adult is receiving services, those will be already in place provided through adult social work teams. That should not be a problem. The issue may be about meaningfully supporting the 18 or 19-year-old with their plan that may have happened previously with the named person or a children's social worker, moving into adult services with a much higher number of client service users. The issue might be about whether that young person could be intensively supported for any length of time. We are on new ground in 18. I am going to keep going to Glasgow. We have an integrated service, so we have adult workers working alongside young carers. The fundamental change is that when you hit 18, you should be alleviating your care and role up to the age of 18 and then supporting it in your care and role at 18+. Each circumstance is individual, so we need to have a look at that. However, where we have had young people who were detrimentally affected by their care and role, we have looked at things such as self-directed support for children with parents and the way that MSs are. It was not appropriate for them to be taken on moving with assistance or personal care and role. We have supported those children to get back to school and have a childhood. We need to have a look at that. If we have known a child from a young age as being a carer and we are hitting 18 or older and they are still detrimentally affected, we really need to be having a look at ourselves as in what we are doing with them up to the age of 18. It asks big questions, not just of social work, but of wider services and alleviating children. We are going to adopt an approach in the future. We will start it now. We are looking at a family-based approach. There have been ways of taking children out of households and providing services and then putting them back into the same environment. We think that we need to be looking at questions with the whole family if we need to move down the adult support protection or sometimes child protection. We have to do that, but we should be asking families, what are you doing to allow your child to have a future? Is there small changes that we can make further down the road that prevent us from hitting crisis points? There are a lot of services out there supporting young people in schools, careers, advice and what have you. Are you aware of the issues that young carers face? When you are looking at their future plans about college or education, do you just write that off? Are you a young carer? Do you look at how your named person finds out about that? Again, they are passing through the system, and they do not just get into crisis at 18. It is preventative anticipatory services. With what is already being said, it is helpful for there to be a formal point of recognition that there is just somebody or something that allows for the young carer to have additional input, because it may well be that somebody has quite a divided loyalty in terms of not wanting to say to themselves that I want to move out or that I want to have my own relationship and go somewhere else. There may be issues about attachment. There may be issues about being frightened. Maybe not themselves wanting to say that I want more help, but being able to use the fact that I have come to the end of my support statement, I am now going into something else. It allows for somebody else to come in to make that assessment again and to allow a bit more freedom. I think that all of that on the record will help our scrutiny and to pose some questions back to Government in relation to that. We have heard about anticipatory planning in terms of the emergency happening down the line. Can you mitigate that? The young carers that we met with as part of our evidence session in Glasgow were talking about, for example—I have to say that they were over 18, but they still defined themselves as young carers. They were young and in a caring role. I am not talking about the legalistic aspect of the bill, but, for example, going to college was their respite care. That was the respite break that they were getting, rather, was going to college getting on with their life. It is in how we tie in other agencies to future planning, which is not about mitigating the burden of care or anticipated planning for emergencies, but it is about future life planning. Whether there is a role there for wider public agencies such as colleges, universities, Skills Development Scotland in terms of awarding apprenticeships in schools, who is doing that job, where does that fit in? I am trying to paint a picture of a web of support to allow young people who happen to be carers to get on with their life as close to normality or their normality as possible, where they still have the same aspirations as everyone else. Sometimes the chat—not today—has been about, well, how do you support the young carer when there are significant burdens of care to get some respite in relation to that, but it is about the longer-term planning aspect, so that they are not held back in their own personal life as individuals because of the burden of care. Does the bill fit into any of that, or could you give us any pointers on how we could give a nod to some of that? That was the evidence that I got from the session that we had in Glasgow recently. You might want to look to the Children and Young People's Bill on how they approached corporate painting responsibilities. They had a very long list of public bodies who came under the schedule associated with that bit of the act, and they are now under the obligations of that particular section of the act. My office is part of the corporate painting responsibilities. People who read this will find it quite amusing, because we opposed that, but it took a very wide perspective on who are the agencies that are responsible for young people leaving care, and they included them as having duties under the act. If you have a list of relevant agencies, you might want to think about that. My advice would be to keep it to those that are absolutely relevant, but you have already mentioned some of them. If I can just widen it out to all carers, taking on Mr Doris's point to a minute, I think that transitions is the time when carers who are parents of young children, I think that it suddenly hits them. They have had full-time support from school, they have had a lot of support often from health services, suddenly the child leave school, maybe a special school or whatever, and the local authority is struggling to provide, if you like, a five-day replacement service through daycare and other activities. I think that is when carers, they may be in employment, they may then struggle to keep in work, and they come into us saying, if you do not give us that amount of support, I am going to have to give up my job, they may want to take on education, they may in fact be reconsidering the whole caring role and say, well, I have done this for 21 years, I would like some respite to this. I think that that touches on one of our concerns, I suppose, about the whole thing about outcomes as opposed to needs, which you may have rehearsed previously, but I suppose how we distinguish routine personal outcomes for the carer and outcomes to do with the caring role, and I think that that would certainly, if this legislation was couched in terms of aspirations and outcomes, I think that that is where we may struggle to distinguish what is a caring outcome, if you like, from wider outcomes. Thanks for that. Yes, Fred. Read it, sorry, read it. What you are saying again about the difficulties between looking at the carer in isolation and looking at the carer for person, but we need to get better at future planning, because a child just doesn't decide at 18, you're going to go to college or university, and if they decide further back down the road, there is an opportunity for conversations, we do overlap with SDS, we do look at telecare, assist of technology to allow people to have more freedom and more choices, but we need to get better at looking forward at these issues and planning for them. Final question today is from Dennis Roberts. Thank you very much, convener. I'm slightly concerned from David's remarks. I'm looking at empowering carers, being empowered as individuals to have lives of their own outwith that caring role. If I was taking up David's remarks, I think that you're saying that you're possibly concerned that you may not be able to facilitate the care, if the carer suddenly spreads their wings and goes off to either college, university, employ it, whatever, and leaves this vacuum, is that what you're saying? The resources may not be there to facilitate that. I would be absolutely for empowering that carer or person who no longer wants to be such a full-time carer to be allowed to do all these things absolutely, and we should be doing our part to facilitate that. I think it's the harsh reality of limited resources and the fact that increasingly social work departments, local authorities are struggling to fill in that a whole week of support to allow the person to carry on employment or enter education. But now it's certainly not something that we would be against. We would absolutely wish to empower carers as far as possible. No other questions. I thank the witnesses for being with us today. We've taken note of the evidence that you have given us. Thank you very much indeed. That concludes our business for today. See you again next week.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping a couple personal boxes here for John H. We've got a 2022 Select UFC H2 box as well as a 21-22 Panini Mosaic Premier League hobby. All right best of luck here John. Let's see when we get you. Thanks for hopping in Annie's in chat. We're gonna start with your Select H2. See some nice discos. See a patty disco rookie that'd be pretty sick huh. Empty box. Good luck. Alva. Got Kabeed. Peter Yon. Disco of Jamaya Hill. And Silver Rookie of Claudio Puellis. Premier level. Max Holloway. Top Barrier Rookie. Yana. Blazkowicz. We've got Wood and Silver Rookie of Shamil Gamzatov. Shamil Gamzatov rookie. Light heavyweight there. And Toyah. Shot Evans. LeCue. We've got Octagon Side Curtis Blades. That's a big dude man. We've got Amorabh Divashilli. Dashlet D. Valishvili. Bantamweight. And Disco. My girl Thug Rose. Not my cuteness. Nice one there on the Thug Rose. Last pack here for you John. See some color. Come on. Oh we got some red in the back there. Murphy Rookie. McMahon. Dominic Raz. What do we have here? We've got nice Disco. Octagon Side. Our Octagon Action Signatures of Neil Magney. Nice. Those are definitely harder pools out of this product. There you go John. Not guaranteed and definitely a harder pool. Cool. Nice Magney. Derek Brunson. And we've got red of Forest Griffin on the Red Disco Light Heavyweight. This one there. That is 7 out of 99. There you go. Solid box of H2. Again not guaranteed. Autos on that one. Nice H2 box. Now we're going to get into your Mosaic Soccer. Let's see. Let's see. Look at for what? Harvey Elliott. Once I see his name I'll remember. The other rookie. Arsenal. Right. Insan. Nice. Hedge Rover Rookie Kai Havertz. We've got autographs of Eduardo from Arsenal. Otto out of the first pack there. Nice. Got red. Sean Longstaff. Mosaic. Ward Prowse. There's a Harvey Elliott rookie. Alanga Saka De Bruyne. A Norgaard Silver Rookie from Brentford. Mosaic. Policic. There you go. Happy place. You're just talking about him. High Masters Keen and Pitch Masters Keen. We're going rookie Pogba. Ben Dyke. Got red Calvert Lewin for Everton. Mosaic. Andros Townsend Everton as well. Saul. Saul. It's a really annoying man. I can't remember his name right now. Saul Longstaff. Martinelli. That's exactly who it was. Martinelli. Rookie Arsenal. It was rookie Arsenal. A Joshua King Silver. Mosaic. Den Dockner from Wolverhampton. Wilcoire. We've got red rookie Mosaic of Lees Mellon for Norway. Mosaic. Emilano Martinez. Ashton Villa. Skip Rookie. Gilmore. Got Otto. Diego Silva for Chelsea. Another nice hit there for you, Jonathan. Bonus Otto for their two hours. Yeah. You got an extra autograph out of this box too. Nice Silva. Chelsea. Rico Henry Red for Brentford. Poshburg. Man. John Polanotto's left and right out of the boxes. Heck yeah. Lukaku. Silver of Shevely. Mosaic of Roshika for Norway on the rookie Mosaic. Grealish. Norwich. What did I say? Norwich. Norwich. Thank you. Peio. Ramsdale. Pope. Silver Gallagher for Crystal Palace. Mosaic Fabianis. Febianski for West Ham. Armstrong Rookie. A couple packs left here for you, John. Colt Palmer. Docka. Got red. Emerson Royal. Tottenham. Mosaic Rookie Adam Armstrong. Southampton. Odegaard. Last pack here for you, John. Lowe Rookie. Werner. Declan Rice. Silver of Suchek, West Ham. Mosaic Rookie Daniel Bachman for Watford. Conor Cody. Conor Cody. Alrighty, John. That will do it for your two boxes. Congrats again on all those autos that you got, and we'll be getting this right out to you.