I will be as brief as I can be. At the start of the meeting, cabinet secretary, you set the committee members a challenge: if we suggested to you that you should spend more money on any aspect of education, we needed to tell you where it would come from. My colleague Mr Kerr was unable or unwilling to rise to that challenge when he talked about colleges.

Thank you. Good morning, Deputy First Minister. The redress issue has always been surrounded with great sensitivity. With a process such as this, there can be a disconnect between people’s expectations about how efficiently a scheme will work and what is reasonable to expect in the initial phase. Can you give us a broad sense of how you feel the scheme has performed up to now, recognising that it is still to be built upon and developed?

Mr Stewart, you said that you are in listening mode, but I wonder whether you are hearing MSPs concerns about the role of Parliament if you decide to move forward. I am talking specifically about the substantial volume of secondary legislation that will be required to deliver this. Parliament is rightly expressing concern about that approach. Do you understand that concern?

I am going to put on my anorak and deal with some of the nuts and bolts. First, I am interested in the work that the Government is doing, or planning to do, to determine the exact number and nature of the pieces of existing primary legislation that will be engaged by proceeding with the inclusion of children’s services within the national care service.

I am also interested in what work is being done to identify the pathways that would have to be established to interact with the aspects of children’s services that are not intended to be captured by proceeding with the proposals. What flows from that is the question whether, if you were to proceed with the national care service for adults as intended but then decided not to proceed with it for children’s services, any new pathways would have to be established. What work is going on or is intended to happen to identify the scale of the challenge and the solutions? After all, we all want to avoid unintended consequences.

Mr Stewart, you have talked about addressing the postcode lottery and getting a service that is fit for tomorrow. We all want that, but you have also mentioned implementation gaps. In evidence that the committee has taken from some of the professionals, there has been—or, at least, I have taken from it—an underlying admission on their part that the sector is, in part, resistant to change and has been so for some time. We have seen that in the IJBs and the variation in and extent of local delivery of services. What makes you confident that the national care service, with all its laudable aims, will deliver what you want it to, given that the people on the ground who have been charged with delivering it might well be culturally resistant to change in general and this change specifically?

There is, absolutely, a logic to that, but what I would like to hear today is whether the Government is willing—at least in principle—to commit to taking a slightly different approach that affords this committee, or others, greater opportunity to scrutinise what is being proposed. What I am talking about goes beyond the affirmative and super-affirmative procedures. Is the Government willing—in principle at least—to commit to allowing committees to take evidence and produce reports, almost as they would do during stage 1 proceedings, and then treat the process of dealing with the secondary legislation more like a stage 2 process? That might give some colleagues a little more reassurance about having an opportunity to interrogate the proposal further, if you decide to take it forward.

We have the legislative angle to this, but we also have the practical application, which is about establishing pathways between a national children’s care service and its interaction with existing localised services not captured by the bill. If we proceed with the intended national care service for adults and then decide not to proceed with the same service for children, we will need to establish new pathways to ensure that everything works. What work is going on in that area?

You could have cited the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 as another example of local delivery not living up to the expectations of the legislation. As I read it, this proposal has the potential to address that and give carers a better deal.

I listened to the views that were expressed earlier, and I thank you for your candour. One could not help but conclude that the sector is undergoing great change, either culturally or practically. After 10 years of integration joint boards, we are still not there yet—at least in some localities. Is that not an indictment of the existing approach, at least in some parts of the country, and a reason to make the proposed changes, because they are the only way to deliver a system that is consistent for young people, wherever they live in Scotland?

On the subject of transition, is it not the case that better co-ordination, planning and co-operation can be achieved only through the sort of approach that is being proposed? Does it not offer the best chance to have better integration of whole-family support?

In responding to those questions, could you reflect not only on your own local experience but on the situation as you know it to be in other parts of the country? I am trying to get a feel for the overall picture. I appreciate that your experience is based on your locality, but you will also know other people and what the position is in the rest of the country.

Perhaps Vicky Irons can start us off.

With respect, though, their lived reality in too many places is that a locally delivered, designed and constructed system—however we want to frame it—does not work for them. I fully accept that there will be good examples, but what we currently have does not work for everyone.

We heard earlier that, after 10 years of effort, we are still nowhere near where we would all want to be. Is this not the one opportunity that we have to get there? Whatever your reservations about the approach, if the service is taken forward from this point in the way that I have articulated, is that not the best chance that we have to get this right for children and young people in the future?