Chamber and committees

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?

Apologies.

Absolutely, convener.

The bill is a bit vague in some respects: it is a framework bill with lots to be fleshed out. The situation for looked-after children in kinship care in Glasgow is an issue that I know well, and I know that Mr Burns has been actively involved in that over the years. We have come a long way from the days when Adam Ingram was the children’s minister and Steven Purcell was the leader of Glasgow City Council, when huge strides were taken across Government and across parties. As I understand it, looked-after children who are in kinship care relationships in the community now get the same rate of support as is given to foster families, but that rate differs across the country, with each local authority paying differently.

There is an opportunity—though it comes with a price tag—to ensure that there is consistency of financial and other support. With commissioned services such as the Notre Dame Centre, which provides a wonderful service in my constituency for people in Glasgow and across the west of Scotland, it is not clear where the funding comes from. Sometimes it is from the NHS, and sometimes it is from an integration joint board or various local authorities. It comes in tiny little pots of cash.

There is no consistency of financial support or of commissioned services for children in kinship care. Are there opportunities to change that within the national care service? That is important to me, so I would like to know people’s thoughts on it.

There is a lack of consistency.

There definitely is.

Again, the evidence session has progressed quite appropriately for the direction of my questions. We have been looking at the future of colleges more generally, but I will refer specifically to the situation in Glasgow.

When college regionalisation first happened, there was concern that community-based colleges and very localised provision such as the pre-employability work that Ruth Maguire and I highlighted in previous sessions would be squeezed out. However, regionalisation has not made that happen. There has been a flourishing of community-based, grass-roots development to enable those who are furthest away from education to get involved in college, including in Glasgow Kelvin College—I thank you for the visit that we have spoken about, minister.

However, there are further reforms down the line. Last year, the Scottish Funding Council spoke about the need for Glasgow’s colleges to work closely together. At that time, there was concern that that could mean a further merger in the Glasgow region—something that I have consistently opposed and that I think would be a negative thing.

The Glasgow Colleges Regional Board has been described as “transactional” and as a duplication of the work of the Glasgow colleges group, in which the college principals get together as a senior team to get on with the job of delivering for Glasgow and beyond. What assurances can the minister give that Glasgow’s three highly successful colleges are secure in their future and that their grass-roots work will continue? If any reform is needed in Glasgow, despite the good work that has been done so far, perhaps it is the GCRB that, although it has been doing a good job up to now, may have served its purpose.

I know that my question is lengthy, but this may be worth noting. I understand that the Scottish Funding Council has asked the Glasgow Colleges Regional Board to decide what future reform may look like, including whether there is a future role for the GCRB. That is pretty unfair on the regional board, which may potentially have to decide on its own future.

There is a lot to unpack there, minister. Given the time constraints, I will not come back in—I wanted to throw all of that in at the same time, because I was not sure whether I would get a supplementary question.