Chamber and committees

So, there is more than one way to achieve that. A national care service might be one way, but it is not the only way.

My final question is for Ross McGuffie, and it widens out Fiona Duncan’s point. The issue is not only the allowances that are paid to support children in kinship care and their families, but also access to wider services, in which there is significant variability across the country.

Ross McGuffie talked about trauma-informed care and support, which he was right to do. I have a centre of excellence for trauma-informed care for kinship carers in my constituency. It is funded on a commissioning basis, sometimes from integration joint boards, sometimes from local authorities and sometimes directly from the NHS across a number of local authorities. It is a mishmash of funding, which makes that centre really struggle with sustainability.

Could a national care service have an advantage in enabling better commissioning of specialist, trauma-informed services for vulnerable children and young people?

I am asking not only about finance but about the quality of the commissioned specialist support. It is sometimes commissioned through the NHS, sometimes through integration joint boards or individual local authorities and sometimes through education services. One provider might have a patchwork of funding. That happens not just in Glasgow but across the country. Something clearly needs to be addressed. Whether the national care service addresses that is another matter, but there may be an opportunity for the national care service to address some of it.

It will only take half an hour, convener. [Laughter.]

We are talking a lot about the point that there is not much in the bill and that it is a framework bill, but I am trying to mention things that are in the bill. Witnesses have not really latched on to the things that are in the bill; they have taken us back to the abstract. It would have been helpful if witnesses had latched on to what is in the bill rather than what is not in the bill. That would have helped—

Absolutely, although I have a supplementary question first that follows on from Mr Marra’s exchange with the witnesses. I am a wee bittie concerned about the idea of the national care service potentially leading to people working in silos, with less communication. I hope that I can get some reassurances on that.

My understanding is that, way before health and social care partnerships and integration joint boards were a thing—we are now moving, potentially, to a national care service with local care boards—the police, social work, housing, third sector, schools and childcare were all talking to one another as best practice anyway. Sometimes, the practitioners say that, irrespective of the structures that are put in place, they will get on with delivering best practice. The question is whether the structures facilitate and support that best practice and drive consistency.

The committee has to decide whether a national care service is the best thing to proceed with. I suppose that I am looking for reassurance that, irrespective of whether it goes ahead, you are confident that that best practice, which I saw happening in Glasgow before health and social care integration and before we had spoken about a national care service, will continue. Mr Burns spoke eloquently about some of the progress that has been made in Glasgow.

What reassurances can you give that the concern about silo working might be a wee bittie of a red herring? Can there be some reassurances?

I want to ask the other witnesses this question as well but, Mr Burns, do you believe that that will still happen anyway, irrespective of whether we move to a national care service? It is not necessarily about whether that move is the right or the wrong thing to do, but can you give us a reassurance that you think that that kind of working will continue to take place? There has been a suggestion that it might not.

This evidence session is about how to realise the rights of children and young people within the development of a national care service, if we decide to go down that road. I acknowledge that the bill is a pretty general framework bill. I was looking at it during the last line of questioning. The bill contains the idea of a national care service charter, although it does not say very much about that. That is where various rights, including those of children and young people and their families and carers, could be entrenched.

Irrespective of whether that is desirable to the national care service, are there advantages and opportunities in having a human rights based-charter for the benefit of children and young people? I understand that those rights have to be delivered at a local level, but are there opportunities in the national care service charter?

I will make the briefest of comments.

Mr Nisbet, you have anticipated my supplementary question.

More generally, do the other witnesses think that there are opportunities in the national care service charter? I can see opportunities in other areas. For example, I have a great interest in palliative care, which is outwith the scope of this committee. I would like the right to good quality, local palliative care to be entrenched in the national care service charter. Regarding this committee’s consideration of the bill, what opportunities are there to entrench something for children and young people in the charter?

We did not get to what the opportunities might be. Children and young people have all those rights, but it might be desirable to have an easy document or charter that separately spells out the day-to-day realisation of those rights. I respect the legal background that Cameron-Wong McDermott and Iain Nisbet come from, but I would like to set out bluntly what people’s rights are, rather than looking at legal remedies.

I will turn to the legal remedies. Once we have the national care service charter, which no one has taken the opportunity to talk about, we could entrench rights in that. We have advocacy and then we have remedy in the bill. It does not say what that remedy should look like, but it says that there would be remedy. Can any of the witnesses talk about what a complaints or remedy process might look like, within a framework bill?

That is helpful. I tied that question to my one about the charter because people will be able to read what is in the charter, which will be in easily accessible language, and look at the service that they get and say, “That’s a service failure and my rights have been breached. I want to do something about that.” That would be a very obvious way for someone to try to access their rights without always having to go to legal recourse, so there are opportunities to make rights more accessible and readily available for children and young people.

I am trying my best to tease out what that could mean in practice with what is a framework bill. Will Cameron-Wong McDermott comment on that?