Chamber and committees

The member will perhaps remember that I met her to talk about this issue prior to her going on maternity leave—and in that regard, I welcome her back to the chamber and offer my congratulations. It is very nice to see her.

We work closely with the representatives of the PVI sector, including the Scottish Childminding Association, and I am more than happy to meet the member again and update her on all the work that has been going on while she has been taking care of her little daughter.

Will the member take an intervention?

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to give evidence to the committee on two draft Scottish statutory instruments: the Police Act 1997 (Offences in Schedules 8A and 8B) Amendment (Scotland) Regulations 2022 and the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exclusions and Exceptions) (Scotland) Amendment (No 2) Order 2022. I hope that the following will be of help to committee members.

The instruments make amendments to the offence lists in the legislation covering disclosure. Those lists contain the offences that must be included when disclosure checks are carried out on individuals. The SSIs are required in order to ensure that there is consistency between state disclosure and self-disclosure.

Most of the amendments made to the offences lists by the instruments are intended to bring them into line with the equivalent lists passed by the Scottish Parliament in the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020. The changes made by the instruments will remain in place until that act is fully commenced.

If an offence is not included in the lists, a conviction for that offence cannot be disclosed on any level of disclosure once it is spent according to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Higher-level disclosures are used for roles involving a high degree of sensitivity, or where there is an expectation of integrity, or for the purpose of public protection. The offence lists therefore serve an important safeguarding purpose by ensuring that information about serious and relevant spent convictions can continue to be disclosed once the convictions are spent.

The legislation contains two lists of offences: list A and list B. Offences in list B are for convictions that must be disclosed in accordance with the rules and include those such as fraud or theft. An individual can apply to have spent convictions from that list removed from their disclosure. To do that, the individual must apply to the sheriff court.

There are some offences that must be disclosed regardless of how long has passed since the conviction. Those are the offences in list A, which include serious offences such as rape and other sexual offences as well as certain terrorism and firearms offences. An individual can apply to have those offences removed only after a certain amount of time has passed and depending on their age at the time of conviction. That application must be made to the sheriff court.

When the offence lists were reviewed for the purposes of the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020, some offences were moved between list A and list B, some were removed entirely from list B and new statutory offences that had been created since the offence lists were established in 2015 were added to both lists. For example, the offence under section 1 of the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 of abusive behaviour towards a partner or ex-partner is specified in list A of the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020, but it is not specified in the offence lists in the legislation that is currently in force. That means that a spent conviction for such an offence cannot currently be disclosed on any form of higher-level disclosure. I have introduced the instruments in advance of the full commencement of the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020 to remedy that and to reduce any safeguarding risks that might arise in the interim period.

In addition to the changes made to align the existing legislation with the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020, some further changes are being made to the offence lists to take us through the interim period. Those changes relate to amendments that could not be made during the bill process due to the onset of the pandemic; new offences created since the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020 completed its passage through Parliament; and a general review of the offence lists. The factors that informed the creation of the offence lists and the review for the purposes of the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020 were revisited in order to classify offences as either serious, and therefore on list A, or less serious and on list B. Full details of the amendments are set out in the policy notes, which I believe members have.

Any corresponding amendments that are necessary to update the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020 offence lists will be made as part of the implementation of those provisions in 2024.

My officials and I are happy to take questions on the draft regulations and order.

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—

Mr Stewart has already talked about the phased approach to the NCS, and the approach to children’s services will be similar if they are to be included.

We need to maintain strong links right across all the services that work with children, whether they be within or outwith the national care service. I touched on that a little when, in answer to Mr Greer’s question about education and early learning and childcare, I said that we needed to ensure that such links were built strongly. However, we already have the underpinning of our getting it right for every child policy, which committee members will be familiar with. Everyday working for our health, social care and education staff is well embedded in all those services and gives a good, strong foundation for working across disciplines and services in the best interests of each child.

Our current work will help inform us as we move forward, regardless of whether children’s services form part of the national care service. Included in that work are the research that CELCIS is carrying out and our engagement with children and young people on what they need from a national care service, what they have asked us for, what they have told us is not working well for them and how they would like services to work better for them—which is essentially what this process is about.

We all recognise that improvements have to be made right across children’s services. As with adult services, they experience postcode lotteries, and they also encounter difficulties when they cross local authority boundaries, because one local authority might provide service X while the other does not. We will endeavour to continue our work to improve children’s services; indeed, we have already done a lot of work in that respect. For example, we have introduced the Promise, which Iona Colvin referred to; we have established the whole family wellbeing fund; and, just a short while ago, we launched the new GIRFEC practice guidance.

In short, a lot of work has been done, but we are not standing still, regardless of whether children’s services will be included in the NCS.

If the decision is to move children’s services to the national care service, those services will move, too. If you—

I cannot give you an exact figure just now.

Mr Stewart has given you an answer, but I can give you the overall headcount for children’s social services.