Audit Committee, 24 Oct 2007

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Official Report 155KB pdf

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Free Personal Care (Independent Funding Review)

Are there any comments on the letter from Lord Sutherland?

We could refer him to the previous committee's recommendations. I note that Audit Scotland is due to publish a report on free personal and nursing care in January 2008. We will want to see Audit Scotland's detailed consideration of those matters to help us in our deliberations.

At this stage, I suspect that there is nothing for us to do, but we will have to come back to the matter.

I presume that the clerk's paper was written before the Macphail judgment, which throws everything into the air, does it not? I am concerned about making open-ended commitments, as should be the committee. Andrew Welsh raised that point in the context of police call management. There is no more open-ended commitment than our commitment to free personal care for every person, irrespective of their income. We need to examine the matter in much more detail. We need to know more about local authorities' responses—I do not know whether it is appropriate for this committee to deal with the matter. We also need to know the implications of the Macphail judgment. It might not be this committee's responsibility, but Parliament needs to examine what would be the implications of targeting.

The review raises huge issues, so responding to the letter by Friday 9 November, as requested, will not be easy. I am not sure whether Stewart Sutherland feels that the Macphail judgment throws his whole review up in the air—maybe I will have the opportunity to talk to him some time—but it appears to me that it does.

I am aware that the Health and Sport Committee has also been asked to respond. There will be further opportunities for our committee to get into some of the issues, not least when we have seen the Auditor General's report. The issues that George Foulkes raises are entirely pertinent to this committee. What will be the financial implications, not only of Lord Macphail's judgment but of increasing the amounts that are available? How far will those increases go? What are the financial implications of the on-going dispute in a number of authorities over who should pay for the preparation of meals and whether that should be considered as part of free personal care? What implications for the Scottish budget and other spending areas will arise given the population growth that we know is coming and the increase in care needs as people live longer?

Issues for the Health and Sport Committee and future policy issues notwithstanding, there are significant budgetary implications on which it is relevant for us to comment. I do not know whether we want to say to Lord Sutherland that we think that those questions should be considered, and that we will come back to them at a future time—just to put down the markers—but it would be premature for us to get into any of the detail just now.

I agree with Andrew Welsh, and George Foulkes raised some important questions, but I am not sure that this committee should be driving the agenda forward. We need to look forward to the work that Audit Scotland is doing in the area and then follow up on it. In the meantime, as Andrew Welsh said, we should reply to Lord Sutherland, drawing his attention to the recommendations that this committee made in its report on free personal care, and leave it at that for the time being.

We will get the Audit Scotland report in January 2008. Audit Scotland reports are this committee's stock in trade. We tend to deal with issues after the event. It is important that we do not interfere with the remit of other committees that are dealing with live issues, and that we act accordingly. Since we will have an Audit Scotland report in January, we will follow through on the issues then. The Audit Scotland team has raised some important matters today. We will see the actual practice in Audit Scotland's analysis, which should help us to be positive about the whole issue.

Does anyone from the Auditor General's office want to comment?

Barbara Hurst will outline the work that we are doing.

The committee has had an interesting discussion. We kicked off the work that we are doing now just before the Sutherland review was announced, so we have liaised closely with the review to ensure that our work—which will be quantitative, as it is based around data that we are collecting directly from councils—can inform it. There will be enough in that work to enable the committee to discuss a lot of issues that lie within its remit.

The January reporting deadline is challenging for us, given the scale of the work, but we deliberately pulled it forward so that we could be seen to contribute to the Sutherland review and so that we would not put too much of a burden on councils by asking them for different types of information. The committee will be interested in the report.

Andrew Welsh said, rightly, that the Audit Committee deals with issues after the event. The Auditor General reminded me of that recently—I corresponded with him about current events, which I am still pursuing, but that is another matter.

The purpose of looking at issues after the event is surely to inform Parliament in making decisions. Those decisions might be made by other committees, but the purpose of our work is to say, "Hey, wait a minute—something went wrong in a decision that was made previously. Let us learn lessons from that and pass it on to the other committee that is making the decision." Is that not the case?

To some extent. I suppose that we can reflect on what has already been done. We are able to look through the work that is currently being done by Audit Scotland in order to examine the number of people who qualify, the current costs, the future projections of need and demand, and the financial implications and the implications for the budget as a whole. Once we have the report from the Auditor General, we will be better placed to do that.

I will write to Lord Sutherland to draw his attention to the previous Audit Committee's report; to highlight some of our concerns regarding implications, which we will come back to; and to ask that those points be taken into account in the work that is being done.

It is important that we do not duplicate effort across committees, and that we provide the specialist service that this committee has always provided.

Okay. That concludes the public part of the meeting. Item 7 will be taken in private.

Meeting continued in private until 11:39.