Chamber and committees

Will the member take an intervention?

I am sorry; I want to proceed, because I have particular points to make.

For example, regarding how the approach will work better, Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders are large, rural areas that require a bespoke approach to the challenges of distance and rurality. The bill allows for that, but ensures standards of care. Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders are separate areas with bespoke requirements, but certain standards will be matched nationally, which has to be welcomed, as it will ensure high standards of care.

I would have thought that the Opposition could get behind improving care standards and ensuring equity of care, but instead they simply continue to moan.

I turn to self-directed support, which I have worked on since my re-election. SDS allows people to receive money from their respective local authority, to be spent where people feel is most appropriate for them. That might be help with the management of a health condition or disability, help with buying technology, help with getting out and about, or even support for attending work or college. Over the summer, the minister came to Dumfries where we heard directly the lived experience of people who were receiving self-directed support.

That is all part of how we move forward—by engaging with and listening to people and through co-production with them in order that we have the best bill to take forward.

I realise that I am out of time, Deputy Presiding Officer. Thank you.

Fantastic. I thank the member for taking an intervention. I just want to ask Paul O’Kane, as a member of the Health and Sport Committee—which I am as well—whether he would concede that we are just two sessions into the scrutiny of the bill and that there is time to submit changes and to take evidence. Everybody is dumping on this right now, as though there is a massive issue with it. Do we not need to take the time to scrutinise it and allow all the voices to come out?

Here we go again with these Opposition debates, with members talking down the SNP Scottish Government’s commitments and, indeed, our hard-working NHS and social care staff. Such debates in this chamber are becoming wholly tiresome. Last week, it was Labour and, this week, it is the Tories. It is becoming increasingly harder to see the policy differences between the two better together parties as they come back together and make a massive muckle midden together in the lead-up to our indyref. Mibbes that is just what is going on.

Anyway, to dispel the drivel in the Tory motion, I note that the establishment of a national care service will be the most ambitious reform of public services since the creation of the national health service. The national care service, as proposed in the bill, will bring together social work, social care and community health to strengthen health and social care integration for adult services.

I know that at the heart of the bill is the idea of caring for human beings and looking after people whose verbal responses to the consultation indicated that they want a more joined-up service that brings all the care providers together.

By the end of the parliamentary session, accountability for adult social work and care support will transfer from the Government to ministers, who will be accountable.

I am sorry, but I dinnae have time. These wee four-minute speeches do not allow us to get on the record everything that we want to say, but I am happy to speak to any member after the debate if they seek a more detailed response.

The bill will increase transparency and standardise delivery of care to eradicate the current postcode lottery care system. Importantly, it will take the focus of social care away from today’s for-profit industry and will lead to a system that focuses on human rights and high-quality care.

Contrary to what the Tory motion states, the bill does not centralise social care. It is a framework bill, which means that other regulations will come after it—affirmative regulations that we will, again, be able to scrutinise. That means that it allows—

Paul O’Kane rose—

I think that Carol Mochan is asking the Government to take information forward. We have just begun scrutiny. Will we not have a stage 1 debate, in which we will be able to debate the bill in the chamber again?

We have looked at the issue of self-directed support, and I know that it is being reviewed. It seems to work really well in some places but not in others. You have highlighted the need to work with colleges, which is about co-working and co-engagement, and I know that, in both its Stranraer and Dumfries campuses, Dumfries and Galloway College is doing a great job in looking at future care providers. I just do not think that people know exactly what self-directed support is or means and how it can be implemented.

Thanks. I think that my question has already been answered.

Secondary legislation comes through committees all the time. I have been an MSP for six years. We approve affirmative legislation: we scrutinise it when it comes to committee, so I do not for one minute think that there will not be appropriate scrutiny of what is coming down the line. I know that this is a big piece of work and that the framework bill sets out where we are to go, but I take on board what Sandesh Gulhane said about organisations that provide care to disabled people and their perception that there will not be the ability to scrutinise the legislation. I suppose that my question is about how we can make sure that the Law Society of Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates and the Scottish Human Rights Commission are still involved in the process as we take all the legislation forward.

Issues have been raised about the national care service and employment. As we have seen—and, indeed, as I have seen from my own work—social care workers are paid differently in different parts of Scotland. If they are doing the same job, why are they not being paid the same wages? Carers do a vital job and need to be compensated appropriately.

I am interested in hearing whether you think that the bill has enough detail in it to ensure that fair work principles will be realised in the national care service. That issue has come up in various places, and it certainly forms part of the work in which I have been engaging locally in Dumfries and Galloway.

Jennifer Paton might want to go first on that.