Seòmar agus comataidhean

I cannot give you an exact figure just now.

We will look not only at what the research tells us but at what stakeholders and the people involved in the service will tell us. It is important that we do not look at things in isolation.

Mr Stewart and I have talked about co-design, and it is vital that we listen to those who use care services and hear their opinions on what the service for children should look like. As I said in response to Ms Maguire, all of this evidence gathering and consultation will not go to waste if it turns out that children’s services are not to be included in the NCS. Instead, it will help us to drive forward change that is needed and wanted and that will best suit the needs of children and their families.

I think that there will be an opportunity to address that if children’s services are transferred into the national care service. I am aware of the history of kinship care allowances and of different local authorities paying different rates and allowances.

Kinship care might be transferred into the national care service, with ministers having accountability. We envisage that the NCS will set standards and that national frameworks should be implemented at a local level by directly funded care boards. One key aim of the NCS is to end postcode lotteries across a number of areas, as we have spoken about today. That will bring consistency in areas where there should be consistency, such as financial assistance for kinship carers.

The short answer to your question is yes. We think that the proposals should help to ensure consistency in care allowances across the piece, rather than having the current situation in which different local authorities pay different rates. I appreciate that that can cause frustration.

I am very familiar with that narrative. The bill gives us the opportunity to get consistency across the country. We have worked closely with kinship carers and have heard their concerns. This is one area in which we would have an opportunity to have national consistency for carers.

Children and young people are right at the heart of co-designing the service. It is really important that their voices are at the table, and we have been doing a lot of work with children and young people in that respect. We have been hearing from a lot of hard-to-reach voices, disability organisations, children’s disability representatives and so on to ensure that those voices are right at the heart of the co-design. That is important, no matter whether children’s services are included in the national care service, and the voices of the parents and carers of those children need to be heard, too.

It runs almost counter to some of the arguments that I have heard that we should not be looking at children’s services when we have not decided whether they should be in the national care service, but the fact is that we have to design a national care service that will be able to provide such services for children if that decision is taken, to ensure that they are not an afterthought and that we are not doing things retrospectively. As I have said, their voices must be very much at the table.

There are difficulties with recruitment and retention in adult social care services and, indeed, in children’s services, but those difficulties are not unique to Scotland. There are multifaceted reasons why people leave adult and children’s social care services. Some people have returned home after Brexit. It has been difficult to recruit and retain those staff, but we continue to support social care services to ensure that we have the staff.

I can give some examples of the work that we are doing to support recruitment across social care services—

We touched on that at the very beginning of the meeting, when we spoke about why children’s services are being considered as part of the national care service. The independent review of adult social care looked only at social care for adults. When the public consultation on the national care service was concluded, it was clear that there were mixed responses to our questions about the inclusion of children’s services within the NCS, mostly because people felt that there was a lack of evidence in that respect, whereas there had already been a large inquiry into adult social care.

Therefore, as part of an evidence-gathering exercise, we commissioned CELCIS to carry out independent research on how we ensure that children, young people and their families get the help that they need when they need it. There are five strands to that research: first, a rapid evidence review of the published literature; secondly, a deep dive to examine approaches to the integration and delivery of children’s services; thirdly, a national scoping and mapping exercise to explore different models of integrated service delivery and any potential effects on a range of outcomes; fourthly, a national survey of the children’s services workforce and children’s services leaders to build on emerging findings; and fifthly, targeted focus groups and interviews with the workforce. Although the research will not give us a yes/no answer, it will give us an evidence base for where we are, what is working and how the workforce feels.

In parallel with that, we are working with children, young people, their families, organisations that represent them and other groups on what they feel that they need from a national care service. We are not going back to ask them lots of questions for which we already have lots of evidence from the review of care services, but we will look at all that evidence in the round and make a decision in principle on whether children’s services should or should not be in the national care service.

The research, which started in September, will run for a year to next September. The committee might be interested to know that the strands will report as they conclude, and I am more than happy to share those reports with the committee if it is interested in receiving them. Obviously, I am not asking you to make a decision on that today, but the offer is there to see those reports before the research itself is finally written up. The timeline for the research has been developed to ensure that we can make those decisions on the inclusion of children’s services in the NCS, and the two things will run in parallel prior to the operation of the NCS itself.

No, no—that is all right. I will come in to address the second part of Mr Rennie’s question.

I hope that I answered some of that in my first response. We are ensuring that children and young people are involved in the co-design and that they are at the table.

I do not recognise what Mr Marra has said about young people being dropped into this. If children’s services are covered by the national care service, the services that will be provided will be subject to national standards and, through the charter that is being designed, children will be given rights that they currently do not have. There will be risk either way—there will be risk if we do not bring children’s services into the national care service, and there will be risk if we do. We have recognised that. Indeed, the task in the research that has been commissioned is to reach the best decision about where those services should be placed to best serve those children.

There will be changes, no matter whether children’s services are brought into a national care service, and we need to be prepared for them. The Government has been doing preparatory work for that through our engagement with children and young people and their families through the organisations that represent them, as well as through the research that we have commissioned on an evidence base for the best way to provide the services.

As a minimum, the charter will set out the rights and responsibilities in relation to the NCS so that people who are accessing support have information on the complaints and redress system, which will provide recourse if rights in the charter are not met, and information on how to access information, advice and advocacy services, which was one of the points that Miss Callaghan made. That is the basic minimum but, as Mr Stewart said, we are consulting, including with children and young people, on exactly what the charter should include.

Yes, I confirm that that is correct. The police can engage with children who are under the age of 12.