 The 19th meeting of the Public Order and Post legislative scrutiny committee in 2017. Can everyone around the table in the public gallery switch off any mobile devices so that you don't affect the work of the Committee? Can I welcome Kenny Gibson, who is substituting for Colin Beattie today? Welcome, Kenny. First item on the agenda is taking business in private. Do we agree to take item three in private? Yes. Thank you very much. Let me move you on to item two, which is self-directed support. I understand that we are setting something of a parliamentary first today by combining two pieces of work. We recently invited suggestions from stakeholders and members of the public for acts on which they would like post-legislative scrutiny undertaken, and the Social Care Self-Directed Support Act was suggested by a variety of different organisations. Separately, we also took evidence from Audit Scotland on its Self-Directed Support progress report, and following that meeting, we agreed to combine both those pieces of work into one. I'd very much like to welcome the participants here today. Thank them for coming, and I ask perhaps all MSPs and participants to start by very briefly introducing themselves, and I'll start on my right to both geographically and politically. Liam Kerr MSP for North East Scotland region for the Scottish Conservative Party. I'm Ian Smith. I'm a policy and public affairs officer at Inclusion Scotland. Inclusion Scotland is the national network organisation for disabled peoples organisations in Scotland. I like Neil MSP for the Erdring shots, and I should probably declare an interest in that. I was the cabinet secretary of health at the time the SDF Act went through. I'm the manager at Self-Directed Support Scotland, and we're a national membership organisation, and our members are local disabled peoples organisations, helping people through that SDS journey. Bill Bowman MSP for the North East region. I'm Willie Coffey SNP MSP for Cymar Mac in the Erdring Valley. I'm Kenneth Gibson MSP for Cymru North. I'm just so excited at being here. Sorry. I'm David Williams. I'm the chief officer for Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership. I'm still Kenneth Gibson MSP for the North. I'm Jackie Baillie MSP for Dunbarton. Welcome to you all. We indicated in advance that we would have three themes over the round table session, because although it's a free-flowing discussion, we do want to give it a bit of structure. The three themes that we sent out to people in advance were firstly provision of information to people seeking access to SDS. The second theme was ensuring care decisions are outcome-based and not simply resource-led, and the third was removing the barriers to successful implementation. In the course of our discussion, if you want to give examples of good practice, then feel free to do so, but we're quite keen to get answers to some of our questions. Let me perhaps kick off with the first theme. Audit Scotland pointed out in their report that people need better information on self-directed support, better information on the choices available to them, and it was clear that not everybody is given information on all four choices, nor were they aware of access to independent advice and advocacy. The three questions that I've got are, how is information currently provided? Is that a reasonable picture that Audit Scotland painted? Secondly, of the four options, are they routinely described to people? Thirdly, what should happen in an ideal world, and I wonder who wants to kick off? Jess? Yes, I'm happy to make a start on that one. Our members are really, this is their work, is doing information and support around self-directed support, and ideally providing information on the four options. How is information currently provided? I think that the Audit Scotland report is really accurate in terms of what our members tell us and their experiences and the experiences of people who they're working with. It's really patchy provisions. Often people will come to one of our member organisations and it's because a friend told them about something or because somebody that they knew mentioned something, that kind of thing. We do sometimes, some of our members have really good referral pathways from their local authorities, so that social workers or others will be directing people to them, but it's not consistent, so there are some organisations who are out there trying to do the work, but they're not necessarily getting referrals direct from the authority, which is where that really needs to be happening. Even if they are, sometimes it's because there's been a conversation and it's maybe been identified, the person might be interested in Option 1, for example, and so they've been kind of directed then to that organisation, but there hasn't necessarily been the conversation exploring all the options, and so then actually when you go back and have more of that conversation, it might be that Option 1 isn't for them, but the social worker probably didn't have the time maybe to discuss all of that in a lot of detail. Are the four options routinely being discussed? Not in every case, certainly. I think there was the data under development work that came out earlier in the summer as well, that said, you know, actually SDS conversations have probably only been delivered to around 27 per cent of people who are accessed in social care, so that means everybody else hasn't had a conversation about the four options around SDS, and again we hear a lot from our members that people have only heard about it because they knew somebody or something like that, or even if they ask, I mean I was speaking to a lady last week who phoned up, who her friend had mentioned self-directed support to her, she was having a meeting with the social worker, so she said, oh well I'll just ask about it then, asked the social worker and they just said, oh well that's nothing to do with you, and this is somebody with a funded package, you know, who's got a budget, so that would have been the ideal time to talk about the options because the package in place wasn't working, and instead it just kind of got dismissed as well, we can't be bringing extra things in now talking about SDS, that's a separate thing, so they didn't get that opportunity, which really should have been there. And I think your third question was what should happen in an ideal world, well it's probably not surprising that I would say, what we would like to see is a user-led SDS support organisation that is independent from the local authority in every local authority area, and we do have that in lots of local authorities in Scotland, so that's great news, you know, but we don't have it in all local authorities across Scotland, and the funding isn't always consistent, and they might be funded only, so in some areas they might be funded, but only to work on option one, so actually there's a limit to how much work they can do around the other options, exploring options creatively, you know, thinking about moving between options, that kind of work, so but where it works, it works, you know, where it's there, it seems to work pretty well, but that's what we would like to see is something that's being led by disabled people, service users who know their stuff and are able to support people through that journey, and for everybody in Scotland to have access to that kind of independent support. Okay, Ian? I think that fundamental to the successful implementation of the act is that clients receive accurate information about the options that are available to them. The underlying principles of the act, which I'm sure the minister who was responsible at the time will agree, is actually about enhancing the human rights of people who receive social care by giving them choice and control over the care that they receive. That's about empowerment, but you can't have empowerment if you don't actually give people the information they need to be empowered, and I think too often the information, the anecdotal information that we receive from our members at events, is that too often social workers are making the assumption about what option is the right option for an individual, rather than giving the individual the information about the options available and allowing the individual to make that choice themselves. That removes the choice and control from individuals about the packages that they get. I'll echo the points that Jess just made. I think that the implementation rate for self-directed support is woefully low, given that it's now a number of years since the act went through in 2013. The implementation rate is still woefully low at 27 per cent, which means roughly one in four people. We should be receiving SDS as currently receiving that option, even if they've been given proper choice. Three in four have not even been given the option yet, and that really is not acceptable. That is partly because they don't have the information about it. There are other issues that I think are detracting from people getting SDS, which will come on to some of the later questions, but clearly providing independent information and advice to individuals so that they can make an informed choice about what option is best for them is essential with the act that is to fulfil its finding principles. Jess Wade says in her evidence that she talks about a lack of accountability in local authorities. I noticed that there is a real issue about consistency. 3 per cent, for example, in Western Bartonshire, compared to 78 per cent in Perth, Lincoln and Ross. Do you have concerns that people have not only been given the choice of options but have been steered towards specific options because, perhaps, the resources available would make one package more easy to deliver by a specific local authority rather than another? Those options might not be appropriate for the individuals concerned. Jess Wade is probably in a better position to answer than I am in long to, but some of the evidence that Jess Wade received in her paper from MECOPs and from Scottish Care, for example, suggests that there is an element of social workers saying to people that this is not right for you, we know better. It is not an appropriate package for you. In many cases, it is steering people to stay on their current packages, which are effectively option 3 rather than looking at whether there is an option 2 or an option 1 or even an option 4, which seems to be virtually unused, which is a mix of different elements for different purposes. It would be more appropriate. I think that there is an element, certainly, that the balance of power between the professionals making the assessment and the individual receiving the service has not yet shifted in the way that SDS was meant to do, and that balance of power is still with professional steering individuals towards certain packages. It is not even necessarily one particular option that people are being stood towards or away from. For example, a lot of our members who are working in rural areas have concerns that people are being directed towards option 1, a direct payment, when they do not actually want it, which is equally as inappropriate as directing people away from that option when they do want it. That has come about because there are not many service providers in an area, or in some areas there are no service providers. The only way for somebody to get support in is to take responsibility and directly employ someone themselves. That is fine whether the person wants that and whether there is support for them to do that. That is fantastic, but if the person does not want that, that is not an appropriate response either. Certainly, in rural areas, that is what we are hearing of cases of people being directed towards option 1 when they do not want it. In other areas, we hear about people being directed away from other options either to do with resource. We have heard of cases in local authorities where we believe that social workers have been told to encourage people towards block-contracted services first and to only look at alternative options after that has happened. We believe that that has happened in some areas. Obviously, that is around resource and freeing up money that is tied into block-contracts. As Iain says, it is not always necessarily directly resource-related but more around an understanding of what option is appropriate for different people. Rather than exploring what somebody is interested in and what might suit them best and making assumptions based on—probably some of that is around not having time. If workers do not have the time to have a good conversation, they might be making assumptions around it. For example, if the person sitting in front of them is an older person, people might be more inclined to think that they are less likely to want choice and control, so direct them to a more straightforward route that is probably what they will go down anyway, rather than taking the time to have the full conversation. Those SDS good conversations take a long, long time to do well, but we know that, when they are done well, that the outcome is better. I think that there is an awful lot of issues in even just that little bit of a conversation there. I probably want to start by making a suggestion that the manner in which data is collected across Scotland might be a challenge. I am not persuaded that data is being collected in a consistent way, with the same questions being asked across all 32 local authorities. That might be one of the explanations for diversity in relation to Weston-Batch or Perth and Cynros, but that needs a bit of further work. The Audit Scotland report highlighted that, but it points in the direction of general averages of 27 per cent, for instance, that kind of narrative. I cannot speak for how 31 other local authorities have introduced or implemented health and social care self-directed support, but what I can say in Glasgow is that we, as many around the table will be aware, introduced personalisation a couple of years before the legislation came into being. There were a number of reasons for that, not least amongst which was the output from the 21st century review of social work that was concluded in a 2006 changing lives document, which clearly outlined at that point that social work services across Scotland were not delivering services anywhere near enough in a personalised way. The Scottish Government had, prior to the drafting of the bill, signalled quite clearly its intention to bring in the self-directed support. There was a significant volume of lobbying, particularly from the user-led organisations and disability organisations, for the implementation of something like self-directed support following on from that changing lives document. In Glasgow, we felt that it was prudent and appropriate to move ahead with that, particularly as we had been one of the initial three test sites for the implementation of the legislation. What I can say is that we took the decision in the city to introduce personalisation to all existing and new service users who were in receipt of packages. That did create quite a stir in the initial time, because what that meant was that we were reviewing individuals who had been in long receipt of fairly established packages of support. Our reasoning for doing that was because we did not feel that it was appropriate to have a two-tier system of assessment of need and allocation of resources. We believed very strongly that there was a need for equality and equitable access to assessment and allocation of resources. We felt that we could only do that by way of a single-tier system. The consequence of that today is that self-directed support assessment personalisation is the only route to access of services for people who are not in that need for a response to a crisis or an emergency or by way of relatively low-level support to facilitate things like coming out of hospital, for instance. People with long-expected need levels and access to self-directed support are right from the word co. We have lots of more things to say, but we will come back to that. How does that tie in with the report produced by the Auditor General? Glasgow is one of the lowest take-ups of the variation in the number of people with direct payments per 100,000 population. Glasgow is well below the national average and is one of the poorest performers on that table. How do you reconcile that with what you are saying about personalisation? There are a few things. I come back to the issue of data collection and consistency of approach. I think that there is an issue in that respect. I also think that we need to be very clear that direct payment does not equate to self-directed support. It has been alluded to already that there are four options, and therefore we need to have a spread across that. I think that there are issues around the bureaucratic processes that are involved with the take-up of direct payments, and that is an expected and established issue in relation to how people who receive direct payments are expected to account for that spend, in line with the agreements around what that money should be used for, the provision of receipts and so on and so forth. One of the things that we are striving to put in place by fairly early next year is a prepayment card that will strip all of that out and take away the pressures on individuals or their carats from having to be involved in a bureaucratic process, because that is the last thing that I actually want or need to be involved in. Those kinds of issues are also prevalent in relation to direct payments. What I have not said is that we have got it sorted in Glasgow. There is a continuing journey in introducing and ensuring that self-directed support legislation and practice and the principles behind it continue to be developed. What percentage of people in Glasgow now would have self-directed support then? In terms of the four options? How does Glasgow compare? How many folk are in what would be described as self-directed support? I have got pretty much all individuals who have a learning disability or mental health issue or physical disability in the city. What percentage of the total eligibility would have self-directed support in terms of the legislation? The eligibility criteria is another issue that creates some requirement for a broad approach to the implementation of the legislation. It is not a case of presenting to social work services saying, I need a once self-directed support. There are statutory requirements of social workers that are around about an assessment of need. If that assessment identifies a need for care support, the social work department or the local authority has a duty to provide or make provision for that. That can be done in a variety of ways. In relation to the figures as they stand, it is about 21 per cent of people, as far as I am aware. However, we do not include the provision of support for older people over the age of 65 in that 21 per cent, but that does not mean to say that they are being excluded from self-directed support. Why are they not included in those figures? Our ICT system predated the introduction of the data collection systems that were put in place when the legislation came into effect. It would be a significant level change, including a significant investment and resource to be able to do that. We are moving to a phased implementation in relation to older people. We have a single provider in the main of older people's home care support through an arms length organisation in the city who does most of that work for us. We are expected as part of that contract with that provider that older people who are identified as requiring a continuing service are made available and accessed to the four options at the point of their first review with that care provider. That is fully in place. Our ability to collect that data has not been fulfilled yet, and we are working on that in line with the Audit Scotland report. We would expect our figures to be measurably improved. When will you be in a position to be able to answer the question that I have just asked about the percentage of people in Glasgow across the entire eligibility categories? When will you be in a position to give us—when will your IT systems be up to scratch to give us an indication of what the overall percentage is? I do not think that it is just about our IT systems. As I said, I think that there is a data collection system across Scotland in relation to how SDS is monitored and tracked in Glasgow. I accept that, but in terms of Glasgow, if I were a senior councillor in Glasgow, I would want to know when the IT systems are going to be able to give me the information I need. That is my second question. When are you going to be in a position to tell us when you are compliant with the act? Will we believe that we are compliant with the act? What we can do is to evidence that? How do we know that you have the information? I think that that is an on-going and continuing engagement with our Amazon organisation provider to be able to give us that information so that we are able to be able to do that in a constructive and transparent way. When will the IT systems be ready to be able to give you the inaccurate detail breakdown of what kind of support your clientele, if I can put it that way, is getting? You have said to yourself, David, that the IT systems are not up to scratch, so my question is put very simply. When will they be up to scratch? The blunt answer is that I do not know. The reason for that is because there are a number of priorities around the wider business of health and social care integration, which relates and equates to ICT and the connectivity between all sorts of different systems, so in Glasgow, with not just between within social work departments and with organisations like Amazon and other organisations, but across the connectivity to whatever ICT systems health provide. It is not a straightforward binary response to say that we are going to deal with that and nothing else because the business of health and social care is, as you will appreciate, very complex and with multiple demands on ensuring that we are putting things in place. We are confident that we are making available the four options to older people who are supported and provided support within Codia. At this moment in time, we do not have the ability to be able to put that into clear data and evidence, but we are assured by our on-going engagement with the provider that that information is being relayed to service users, that they are clear about the choices that they are making and that they are making as a consequence of that. We cannot evidence that, we are working on it. Can I just ask a supplementary to Jayce, to ask her for her opinions? Before you do that, I am very conscious that we have been joined by two people who were held up earlier, so I am delighted to welcome Colin Young, who is the Senior Policy and Outcomes Officer from Alliance Scotland. Welcome, Colin, and to Eric Sutherland, who is the Senior Manager of Planning and Performance at East Asia Health and Social Care Partnership. You may have come in and seen two people talking to each other, but it is, of course, a round-table discussion, so I am keen to ensure that that remains. I am now going to bring you in, Alex, so you can ask Jess Weed something. Just on Glasgow then, from your perspective and your member's perspective, is Glasgow, in this example, fulfilling the requirements of the legislation? I think that that is a very good question. I have to say that what I would have a concern about is what I heard you say, David, is that the arms-length organisation will be doing carrying out at first review giving older people the SDS options, offering them the options, and I would have a real concern that that is not independent information and support because it is coming from the organisation who is currently the service provider and then asking people, do you want to continue with what we are giving you, potentially? I am not saying that this is exactly the words that they would use, but it might feel a little bit to people like, do you want to carry on with us or do you want to change to something else? I am not sure how easy it is for staff to be put into that position from a service provider in terms of conflict of interest. If you are trying to offer somebody something that means that the money is going elsewhere and potentially affects your own jobs, jobs of colleagues, the health of your organisation, I am not sure that is a fair position to put people in. What I will say about Glasgow is that they do fund a user-led, independent information and support service, Glasgow Centre for Inclusive Living, and they would be a fantastic organisation to be in a really great position to do extra information and support. They would obviously need additional capacity to do it, but I am sure that they would be really happy to talk about what is the best way to do this, and actually is having called you to do those kinds of reviews the right way or the best way or the better ways of doing it. Certainly, an organisation like GCIL, I am sure, would have views on what is the best way, and I am sure that we would be in a good position to do it with resource. I think that hopefully that is a fair response. Sticking with the provision of information to people seeking out, because I want to wrap this up before we move on to the next theme, I will bring in in a minute, David. Liam, you wanted to add something. Yes, as Jackie said, just on the information. Certainly, I heard in Ian and Jess's answers earlier very much that people are being directed, and I got an impression of the social workers as gatekeepers almost, which I think is something that we might return to later. Can you clarify for me who currently is the onus on to provide information to users? Who should the onus be on? What is that information that is being provided? If we start from a position that says that it is not currently as it should be, and you tell me that it should actually look like this, who would drive that change? Legislatively, local authorities have a responsibility to make sure that people are offered the four options. As far as I am concerned, they can pass that duty on to somebody who they commission or contract to do that work. For example, an authority could say that you are going to get all the information about the different options from an independent organisation if they wanted to. What a lot of authorities do is maybe have an independent provider who specialises in option 1. That is historic. We have direct payments in place already, which is now option 1. A lot of authorities previously would be assessing people, and if the issue of direct payments came up or looked like it was on the cards, looked like the person was interested, they would go off to the independent organisation and get that support, but anything else would stay with their social worker talking them through things. A lot of our members are keen to do the extra work and the early stage work with people thinking about their options, and ideally working with people even pre-assessment, but that depends on capacity and funding. A lot of our members are doing that work, and some of them are doing that work through Government funding at the moment, through supporting the right direction. Some of them are doing that really early before I have even found out if I am eligible or not, sitting down and talking about my options around SDS. There is a service in five called SDS options, which is funded through the Government at the moment, where people can talk about the different options and open to them. If they want to follow up on option 1, they go elsewhere in the organisation to get that support, so it works quite a smooth transition. Who would drive that change? What we are really concerned about is that, with SDS, as with many things in Scotland, there is a central ideal or piece of legislation, what have you, and it is up to local authorities to interpret how that is done. We would like to see something stronger coming from the Government to say a bit more direction about what is best practice. For authorities as well, we know that there is so little money, and if you have to make a decision, for me, if I was working in authority in finance, what have you, I have to decide whether to fund independent support, which is kind of recommended, it is in the guidance, but can we get away without it? Or independent advocacy, which legislatively I have to make sure exists in my authority area? Which one am I going to fund? I am going to fund the one that I absolutely have to, and try and get by on the other one. How else would you make decisions? I think that something that puts some kind of greater weight on the need for independent support and greater clarity on what independent support is, so if the authority is doing it itself, that is not really independent, it might be separate to your social worker, but that is not really independent, it does not feel independent for individuals. Was that all your questions? I have a follow-up. I read somewhere, and I cannot put my finger on where I read it, but it was somewhere in those papers about that there is no consistency about how the local authority are collating data, and whatever it was that I read suggested that some may be logging option three, option two, when they have delivered option three, which strikes me as, it goes back to a point that Mr Williams made about data capture, which is something that this committee is very concerned about. It sounds from that that there needs to be a change, and if we accept that, then who is going to drive that change? The alternative is that it is the local authority to say that we are not quite getting this right, which I cannot imagine what would happen. I am guilty to having put that into the inclusion of Scotland evidence. Our concern is that there are two outlying authorities who seem to have a very large percentage of people in option two. Glasgow is one of them, North Lanarkshire is the other, compared with some of the other authorities. It is just a feeling that that seems a bit strange when I cannot understand why that is. David might be in a position to answer for Glasgow, but the concern is that option three is essentially the council provides the service, as is the old practice. Option two is the council manages the payments on your behalf for the service that you receive. Our concern is that, in some cases, essentially what is happening is that people are being offered the same service as they get at present, but it is being said that somebody else is managing your funding package for you, so in effect. Although it is technically option two, because somebody is managing the funding package for you, you are only really being offered what you do under option three. We have not got any evidence for that, because one of the things that we are concerned about is that there is not an audit trail going back to the individual to find out what they have been offered and what they are getting to see whether it matches what options people are being told they are getting. We are concerned that we need more surveys, more evidence gathered as to how the options are being implemented in each local authority going back to the individual packages that people are receiving to find out whether they are being recorded accurately against each of the four options in the package. I will bring in David and then maybe Eric from a view from East Asia. Okay, thank you, chair. I would like to come back to the corgi issue if that is okay, but in terms of having said that I cannot talk about any other of the other 31 local authorities, I could probably actually make a comment around about North Lanarkshire and that is that actually as a local authority they were streets ahead of pretty much every other local authority in relation to providing a personalised and choice led approach to the delivery of social care for particularly people with learning disabilities in that local authority and that was around about the kind of emphasis on option 2. I think that the approach and the comment that I made in relation to, we took a lot of learning when we implemented personalisation from what North Lanarkshire was doing and in terms of the development of our own programme and our own scheme and it was very clear that we needed to be able to look at how we afforded choice to service users if they weren't going to go down the route of direct payments and be able to demonstrate that and manage that on their behalf. Again, this is not straightforward, this is a really complex environment that does involve and did involve for us because we put pretty much all of our service users through that process, a review of their existing packages of support and if service users are very clearly going to say to us on the back of that review, I have been provided with the support for the last 10 years by ex-provider and I am very happy with that provider and I am going to choose under option 2 for that provider to continue, but I do not want to manage it myself, could you do it for me? Our view is that that is a legitimate choice and I think that that is probably partly in explanation to the fact that we and Northlandshire are outliers. Homecare providers are required through the Care Inspectorate to review their service users on a regular basis twice a year and there is a degree of pragmatism that is involved in how much an authority can do in relation to the delivery of all of its business. The approach that we have taken is that if the home care provider is required to do that anyway and there is a connectivity and by way of a contract between ourselves as the social work department and the arm's length organisation, why would we have two separate reviews, one being about the home care package and the other being about self-directed support, the two have to be considered in our view as the same. The issue around advocacy and independence is the issue of advocacy and making sure that people are able to be properly represented at the point of their review. We are absolutely correct in relation to all 11,000 referrals every year that Gordia will take. I would have to say probably not, but we work on the basis that most older people who receive services have family members who will be part of their review of care and support because they are concerned about their family members and want to be involved in the decision making about provision of support. I understand what you are saying, but there is a degree of pragmatism that is required in relation to how we are able to deliver services at the level that we are being asked to deliver them. You pointed out that older people may have family support in their lives to advocate for them. My concern is about the people who do not have close family members and have that network. We often see it in case work generally, where we think that the goodness of that person had family to come to us, but we always worry about the people who are stuck at home and who have no one. I know that it has been picked up in the Audit Scotland report about not everyone gets the choice and not everyone has that support. I live in the thousands of people, but what does happen when people don't have people at home or people in their family to speak up on their behalf and interrogate things a bit more? That is a fair point. I think that we should not get to a point where we are making assumptions that the social workers across all local authorities and our provider organisations are not seriously endeavouring to implement the legislation and the spirit of the legislation, which is a rights-based legislation. Social workers up and down the country have a professional judgment that they have to make, which is based on their qualifications, their learning and their statutory responsibilities to be objective and non-judgmental. That is backed and influenced by a rights-based approach in all cases. We have to be able to give a degree of credit to folk to ensure that they are able to advocate as well. It is not just independent advocates who can advocate on behalf of individuals who are service users. One of the core functions of social workers' jobs is to be able to advocate for people in the delivery and receipt of services. Ian Whittle to the brief point, and then Eric Whittle will come to you. I think that the danger of losing one of the key points of this is that the point of independent information and advocacy is that people can come in and give alternative ways in which services can be provided in a way that perhaps the current service user or even the family or the individual can do because they are not necessarily aware that the outcome can be achieved by other means than the traditional service. It is important that we ensure that people have access to independent information and advice, because that gives them the opportunity to explore different ways to have their sport needs met. Eric, what goes on in East Asia? I would agree that there is a data issue for us, and that is definitely the case. If we are looking at my life, my plan, which is our tool for having a conversation with people in my life, my review, then out of the 3,500 live case loads, 2,500 will have had that. We are looking at 66 per cent, 70 per cent, and we have chosen that option actively across the options. We probably, at a national level, need to get better at capturing how that data is recorded. More critically, we need to get better at capturing how outcomes are being realised, and that feeds into our commissioning processes, but that is probably for another conversation. On the option 2, for us, option 2 is seen as a very real choice for people, and option 2 has been an area of growth for us. I think that that is a healthy thing to see. If we are looking at that this time last year, we had about 129 people choosing option 2. We have now got over 170, as of last Friday. It is an area of growth for us, and I think that that is a really positive thing about the intention and the spirit of the law that people are exercising their true choice around option 2. We have had people move from option 1 to option 2, for example. I think that that is part of the intent. On independent information and advice, there are organisations that provide that within East Ayrshire. There is an independent living network that provides advice and support. We also have community brokerage network in East Ayrshire that provides a slightly different function between the professional and the individual and their families. They are round about how you shape an individual budget within the scope of that budget, so that the person is supported to make more creative solutions. That is being a really positive thing for us. It is also back to the point that Ian is making, that he is making advice for individuals alongside the independent advice and brokerage. How we have developed that is through very much a co-productive way of working. Our approach has been everyone together, which has started off with practitioners, families, the public, providers and everyone being involved in taking the SDS conversation out to communities. That is being a really positive thing for us. When we have come back to look at documentation, reviewing our processes, looking at the streamline and things, that is again being the approach that we would take, which is everyone together. Let us do it around the table. Let us all have that grown-up conversation about where we are at and where we want to be. Sorry, I am rambling. It was very useful. It is an interesting approach, maybe contrasts with others. Colin, I wonder whether you want to add anything about provision of information and advocacy support at this stage. Yes, of course. Sorry for being late again. I think picking up on the point earlier about self-corrected support being intrinsically linked with personalisation, I think when you look at the provision of information on how people feel about whether the information helps them to make the decision right for them, it is what people or options want into, especially if you feel that they have more autonomy over their outcomes. It is often the case that if they have the right information in the first place, they are more likely to make a decision for option one or two, which provides more autonomy and flexibility to give the outcome that they desire. We surveyed around 100 people and looking at whether information helps people make the right choice. Those are options for people who are less inclined to see the information they received, help them to make the choice. There are options for three people. Only 40% of them said that the information did not need to be preferred choice. So there is a real link between how you present information, how people use it. More I will say, it does often come down to the individual discussion between the social worker and the individual. It was worrying from our research that 25% of people who had been made aware of it, yes, from the social worker schedule, they still didn't know anything or knew very little about how to support a quarter of people. So I think the difference in social worker duty is to promote the needs of the individual, which I think is very dependable on how that information is presented and how the person responds. I think that that is very useful information. It underscores for me the need for early and independent advocacy, but you raised issues of staffing there, and I wonder whether that neatly leads us on to questioning from Willie Coffey. Well, thanks for that, Jackie. One of the auditor general's comments about outcomes in particular, which is your second theme, she was saying that social work staff are positive about the principles of SDS, of course, but a significant majority of them lack the understanding or confidence about focusing on people's outcomes, and that changes what you have just said in relation to information. Is there a job to be done to assist our social work services staff in giving them the skills that they need to acquire to do that particular job for us in terms of information gathering and, potentially, also assessing outcomes? Is it fair that we are asking our social workers to assess those outcomes, or should it be someone else? Does that really value your views on some of those issues? David? I think that there is always a job to be done in relation to how new legislation is introduced, implemented and progressed. The issue around assessing for outcomes is a challenge for all of us, and I do not think that that is just exclusive to social workers. That also includes provider organisations that are substantially responsible for actually delivering on services. I think that there are issues around the manner in which services are procured. For instance, in Glasgow over the last couple of years, we have been working really hard to see how we could move away from the procurement of services by the hour, for instance, because that is an inhibitor towards the actual delivery of outcomes. That is about how people are supported and enabled to get a life and have a life that they wish, and to be able to be included and participate in their communities and in society in large part. Of course, that leads you on to a bigger and broader picture that the delivery of support in its broadest sense for people who have an SES access in terms of identified need and provision of support to deal with that. The provision of that is way beyond what local authority social work departments' responsibilities are, but it takes in what is happening in communities and therein lies the issue around how we engage and create that marketplace in crude terms of broad support, including in which there will be actual care support, which is the bit that is commissioned and procured by social workers. There is a very big and broad task involved in relation to delivering on the principles and spirit of the legislation. I want to be clear about how the assessment process progresses and how outcomes are identified as part of what we would do in Glasgow called an outcomes-based care plan. That is absolutely, as Eric has suggested, done on a co-produced basis. It is not something that the social worker decides for themselves. It has to be about, and we have to be able to demonstrate and evidence very clearly that the service user and their advocates if they are advocates in place are part of that process. That is the significant change that the legislation makes as opposed to what historically used to happen, where it was very much a case of putting in place services on an inputs and outputs basis without actually looking at what is it and why is it that we are doing that. I think that the world has changed, but it is a developing story and it is one that is not going to be introduced overnight. I think that, as I say, that is because we have got in place a fundamentally seismically different approach to how a need is assessed and services are provided from what has been asked of social work services over the course of the last 20, 30 years to something that is measurably different. That is not going to happen overnight. Colleagues, from our point of view, it is where that conversation starts, what is the dialogue and what is that framed around. Where we have started with that is around about the talking points themes. It is about what matters to you question rather than what is the matter with you question. It is really supporting the workforce to have that dialogue and being really clear about putting investment into that and making sure that we are supporting people to work in that different kind of way, where you are talking about feeling safe, where you are talking about having things to do and where you are talking about the place that you live and how suitable that is for your needs. It is having that conversation and that dialogue. From my East Ayrshire point of view, we have put a lot of effort into making sure that the workforce was feeling confident and capable in having those conversations that are slightly different from previous needs-based, single-shared assessment discussions that folk might have had. We have also established a peer mentor type model where we have individuals with a different skill set who get alongside workers and get alongside teams and support them to work in that different kind of way. For us, part of that is recognising that there is a synergy between anticipatory care planning, self-directed support and technology-enabled care, so people are having those conversations at the very first point of contact. It has parallels with realistic medicine and those kinds of conversations. Part of that is not just about what other providers will do, but it is also about community capacity and making sure that we are maximising people's natural assets and having that conversation about what is important to them, who supports them and what statutory services need to do to support them. It is looking at natural assets, having the conversation with the individual and then looking at the additional support that is required around that, which is a different conversation. The self-directed support principles are very much in line with the human rights approach from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled People and the right to independent living, the approach that is about providing support to people to enable them to participate in society. What concerns us and perhaps the elephant in the room is that the resources are not there to back that up. Perhaps one of the reasons why self-directed support has not been implemented as effectively as we would have liked in the early days is because it is being implemented at a time when, in fact, the criteria at which point you actually start to receive social care has been getting tighter and tighter, and in many cases is now just critical care, life and limb support. It is not really an outcome for someone to be able to get out of bed in the morning. It is the outcome, it is what you do once you get out of bed, but unfortunately for many people all the support they get is how to get out of bed or get back to bed at night. The amount of social care that they get is that limited. Until we start to address some of the fundamental issues about what we actually expect social care to deliver and how we fund it, and perhaps using the shared ambition for social care, which was brought together by a number of third sector organisations, DPOs and others, and has been endorsed within the Scottish Government's disability delivery plan, we start to address some of those fundamental issues about social care. We are not going to address the problems with self-directed support. I urge that we are going to look at the outcomes for people. I am happy to support the committee, convener, but until we start to address some of those fundamental issues and start to look at what the outcomes people really want, which is to be part of society, to have jobs, to participate in education, to have a social life, the same as everybody else, we are not going to solve the problems of SDS. That was a lot of nodding when you said the lack of resource. I wonder whether I could bring in David, followed by Liam Kerr. Yes. At one level, I am not going to disagree with you in relation to the lack of resource, but we are where we are. I think that the issue around about self-directed support, it seems to me, is that rather than looking at that piece of legislation in isolation, as I have suggested earlier in the session, we now need to begin to look at what are the possibilities and the opportunities of the health and social care integration agenda, for instance, and there are 31 health and social care partnerships up and down the country, planning, delivering the receipt and experience of health and social care in a fundamentally different way from how they were previously planned and delivered. We are not there as partnerships in terms of the end journey. We have heard lots of narrative about that, but we have only been going for a couple of years. The key word in that title, the health and social care partnership, which incidentally does not appear in the legislation, is partnership. That is a recognition that the integration of health and social care, which many people, probably too many, see as just being a bit of a council and a bit of a health board being brought together to do that. The partnership is so much more than that, because if you look at the membership of voting and non-voting members around the integration joint board, you are looking at other stakeholder groups, the voluntary sector, the independent sector, service users, carers, patients, trade unions, clinicians, all who have now to work in partnership with this thing called health and social care integration, and we also have partnership responsibilities beyond that through things like community planning. What I am saying to you is that there is a significant level of asset and resource in the wider sphere that will contribute towards people being able to be included, involved, have a life, and have their aspirations met. If we focus just on the actual delivery of the self-directed support, we might miss the opportunities that health and social care integration can bring as a consequence of that. To develop something, when I was listening to Colin Young, you suggested that the provision of information can go some way to delivering a freer choice, but we then go on to hear about that almost resource-led approach. Specifically, something that I was very concerned with in the submission that we have had from MECOP, where they cite examples of practitioners sitting across from individuals with a calculator working backwards from an indicative budget to determine what they can afford to meet their personal outcomes. Is that correct? Is that really what is happening? That would be a significant blocker to real choice, would it not? I can well believe that that would have happened. I have spoken to people over the years. I have spoken to people who have had their social workers save, for example. We are going to sit down. We are going to have a conversation. We are going to agree what your outcomes are and what we think needs to happen. It is going to go to panel and it is going to be cut by 70 per cent. That gives you an idea of how workers are feeling this. Sometimes workers are. I absolutely accept that there are loads of workers out there who are really committed to this and want to make it work, but the reality is that their hands are tied. I agree completely with things Ian was saying about lack of capacity. It is not just about the money for packages. It is not just about moving money out of block contracts and into individual packages, but it is also about the capacity for training for social workers for the time and actually for the time to have those good conversations. That is the bit that, when you do that, I have been speaking to a colleague of yours, Erika, a few meetings this week and hearing really great stuff about what is going on, but it has taken a long time. It has been a big process and it means giving the workers the time to have these good conversations. That is a massive investment. If you have 11,000 referrals coming in, that is really difficult thing to do. It is recognising that this is a huge change. I agree with what David said about there are opportunities around integration. SDS, to me, is the answer to integration. Get the two working really well together and the one supports the other. SDS should be absolutely central to making integration work. It really supports it, but moving that money around, when at the moment where folk are just getting funding at critical level and nothing else means that people are not doing preventative work and it means the kind of creativity and flexibility just goes out the window because exactly that people are just looking at how much can I afford. The other thing that I would add to this is maybe slightly going a bit away, but I think it is important to mention is that actually the success in those kinds of conversations is not just the time spent, but it is also the trust. Actually, that is crucial to making SDS work and I think that is a major barrier because at the moment, I would say, I think it is a fair thing to say, there is very low trust from service users in terms of when they are sitting across from someone and an example like that, you are sitting across from someone with a calculator, it does not make you feel confident and safe and like here is a conversation that is going to be working for me. We hear all the time of people who actually are scared to come for a review or do not want a review, so the authority does not have time to do review unless you are going to ask for it, but actually you are not going to ask for it because you would rather put up with something that is not really working, but you know that if you have a review, the package is only going to go down, so that is a barrier to people coming forward and going through the SDS process themselves because they are scared of it. The example, the MECOP example, is an alarming example. It does not chime with our experience or our approach in terms of work sitting down with a calculator. Further point to that is about the SDS and the conversation and the time that is invested in the conversation. If you are looking at that in terms of the public pound, the detailed depth of conversation that you have about what matters to you will pay dividends in the future in terms of the public pound. We have some really good personal stories, personal examples. What we have also done with those personal stories and examples that we have consistently brought to our SDS programme board and to our IJB is that we have costed them pre and post the SDS conversation and it is markedly lower, so not only can people have very good personal outcomes, they can cost the public bus less. I think that in the challenge that we are in, SDS has that transformative potential and that is really where we want to focus on it rather than on picking some of the bits of it that are procedural. I suppose that that is fine. The only caveat that I would add is that it is fine that, when it is driven by the individual and it then happens to result in a saving, that is good. When it is driven by the local authority in a blanket way, that is bad. We have seen examples of that. Kenny Gibson? It is really a follow-up. I am glad that things are going well in East Asia in terms of that regard, but I think that the issues that I mentioned before were consistent across local authorities. One of the points that was raised by Jess Wade in her submission was that people are overwhelmed by the process and feel intimidated. That might not be an issue in East Asia, but it seems to be an issue in other areas of Scotland. I am just wondering if you can expand a bit on that. That is a direct quote from one of our member organisations who said that that is their experience in their area, but it is not only one area where people are saying that. I think that it comes back to that point that I was making. Folk often feel that they would rather not come forward for a review. They would rather just keep things as they are, even though it is not really working anymore. Everybody's life changes all the time. If you think about your own life and the changes, are you doing exactly the same things in the same way as you were this time last year or whatever, life always changes. If your access and support are always going to change, whether that is because your work has changed, where you live has changed, maybe now you have family where you did not before or maybe a key support that you used to have, somebody has moved away or what have you. People need to be able to come forward and say that things have changed for me and that my support needs are probably different, but people are scared of that. I think that there just is not the level of trust. David's point is key about social workers should actually be on the side of the person, but I think that more often than not they are now seen as the gatekeepers. We did a piece of research last year around service users' experiences of SDS and we asked people. Broadly speaking, folk felt that 80% plus were happy with the services they were getting, but less than half of them had actually heard of self-directed support, so they hadn't necessarily been offered choice. What does happy mean? You know, happy because I'm grateful because I'm getting something for free or actually this is really enabling me to live a fulfilling life, so there's questions around that and I think more research needs to be done and it's one thing that we hope to be in a position to do, but one of the things that came out of that research was actually that were things worked well and were people really felt they had choice and control, they were also saying that they did feel they had a social worker on their side, but that wasn't always the case. I think social workers are putting a horrible bit, I mean it's not a job that I would want to do in a million years because it's such a hard job and especially at the moment when you know you're sitting down and we've you know well I was going to say we've all heard stories, I've certainly heard stories of workers saying you know I'm sitting down with this person thinking well if I agree to that for you then next week I'm going to have to make a different decision for somebody else because actually I'm really conscious of how much money's been spent and again we are hearing good practice examples of and I think it's in East Dershire but correct me if I'm misquoting where there's you know good systems around how much budget social workers themselves can sign off on a quite high level I think before it has to go to a senior manager and but regularly reviewing that and making sure that it's working successfully but you know then we also hear systems that are very rigid where workers don't have much autonomy to agree to very much or they know it's just going to be cut anyway and that feeds into that level of you know you're going to feel intimidated if the person across the table from you isn't able to work in a supportive way but instead is really conscious of how much money they may or may not be able to agree to. Yeah I mean I understand that that issue I mean obviously but is there is there still an issue about cultural resistance whereby some social workers feel to be honest they're the ones who really know best and the individuals perhaps you know don't know as much as they should and therefore the social workers feel that they want to be in a stronger position to guide someone down a particular route it's not always just about finance it's more about they say well I've been in this job tenor 20 years I think I I really know what's best for you is there still that cultural issue and is it I mean obviously it must vary across the country I think I think there probably is to an extent but I think what I would say on that is it's less than it was you know so when I started in my job nearly six years ago we would go around the country and we would do stalls and speak to people about SDS and you'd speak to workers and they would say you know well either they wouldn't know what it was at all or they'd be saying oh that's that thing about letting people you know letting people letting people you know organise their own lives or you know say what they want and you know and you'd get a real resistance and increasingly I would say increasingly we're we're not hearing that as much we aren't speaking more to workers who actually are um are up for this you know and but even back then we spoke to workers it actually was tended to be people who'd been through training longer ago um you know would be saying this is why I got into social work this is what I want to be able to do but the system stops me do you know so I I think there will be that attitude sometimes but in honesty I would say it's more about the systems that are a barrier to folks so that they want to do this work but actually they know the system isn't going to let them or there's not enough money or there's not enough time or or they don't have the confidence so actually you know so what Colin was saying about kind of discussing the options is around um you know you might know what the options are but you actually really understand what's available or how how it would work in practice and then you don't maybe have the confidence to to talk to somebody about that so you might guide them down a route that you know better how it works um rather than uh you know going down another route where you're thinking actually I don't really know how to do this either so you know I'm going to stay this person away from that um so there's an issue about making the process more simple and straightforward if there are people who are intimidated by it and there are and there are seemingly unnecessary complexities within the system I think it's about making sure people have the right support you know so to go through that and I think the complexities are I mean for the individual in lots of ways it's it should be straight it should be straightforward what what's set up is not it doesn't have to be complicated I think it's how you present the information again like what Colin said it's it's actually how information is presented but it shouldn't be I think we all just talk in a lot of jargon all the time but it shouldn't be impossible to explain SDS to people in a straightforward way but what's difficult is the complexities within how it's delivered at the kind of behind the scenes makes it very hard then for workers I think to you know navigate okay thanks convener yeah sure a lot of the barriers are probably caused more by the processes and systems that these social workers are having to operate within the strategic commissioning structures which say that you know drive you down a particular route to receive a service or restrictions on how you can use your your self-directed support payments some of which are not actually lawful you know that they're told you can only use it for this thing when you can actually legally you can use it for anything which meets that outcome there are some examples and they meet up evidence of people being driven towards a particular service council run service rather than a private service because it's marginally cheaper but it doesn't meet the person's individual outcomes there are examples I think in Highlands where there was restrictions on how you could use yourself direct to support payments which were clearly outwith the spirit of the act of not the letter of the act which have now having to be amended thanks to them now not actually talking to disabled people's organisations in the area to try and get these things sorted out so there are a number of areas I think just so to be ironed out at how local authorities loosen up their internal systems in a way which allows people to take advantage of the options that are there I think one other thing I just want to say is I think one of the important things is there needs to be an opportunity to allow people to make mistakes that people should be able to try an option a way of giving their support provided and if it finds out that it doesn't work for them that it can be quickly corrected and I think the present there's a fear amongst probably the risk averse people within councils and also perhaps individuals that if they try something then they're going to be stuck with this for a year or two or wherever till the next review and I think there needs to be an opportunity to experiment to get the right service for the individual okay David and then Colin thank you chair the I think many of the comments that have been conveyed by Jesse and Ian are absolutely right but I think we need to be really careful and mindful that we're not we don't get into a position where it's the system is just the local authority system the system is broader than that and that is around about expectations that are of social workers as much and local authorities so many of the processes I think are bureaucratic we absolutely wholeheartedly sign up to that and they could be and should be leaner and more understandable no question about that but right now Glasgow City health and social care partnership is spending 65 million pounds every year of public money on personalisation on self-directed support so you can't have to freed up a system without being able to account for that level of spend on public sector budgets but I do think there is a place to go and that is around about it as I suggested earlier on how do we move away from that inputs and outputs type of provision which is actually the the fundamental driver for the hourly based procurement of services to something that is more outcomes orientated around about the whole and the totality of the individual budgets that are people are allocated to I understand absolutely the comments around about risk aversion but I don't think that's something that social workers innately are I think they are I think there can be a risk aversion in the system and probably is a risk aversion in the system but that probably comes as a societal pressure on what social workers are expected to do for our most vulnerable citizens so and and and and and that drives behaviour that drives a response that that absolutely says I will do whatever I need to in order to ensure that the people who I've got some statutory responsibility for are as safe as possible because I don't want to be the social worker who is hitting the front pages of the newspapers or the media outlets as a consequence of something terrible happening which is what happens to social workers who are involved in child deaths cases for instance not being responsible for but actually social workers are held accountable so the title social worker sits across the piece I agree with you in terms of the address the comments you made that self-directed support actually if it's implemented in the way that it should be implemented is actually what drives social workers to come into this business in the first place and 30 years ago when I was doing my training as a social worker it my view was actually that I understood my function to be about enabling and empowering people to take control of their own lives and as a system actually over the last 20 years we have become a very much doing to system not just a profession but system to people rather than a doing with and allowing to happen and I think self-directed support is getting us back to a place where social work should be but as I say it's not just about social work Colin Young Yeah come back to the point maybe we are where we are and I think from our research it seems that if people know and have a fun conversation about what they cause or what the resources is then they understand that they know the situation but it's about the flexibility and the resistance to allow people to take more control over their own choices and this issue they're even raised about issues that seem to be flouting the legislation that is really worrying when people are being told you're not allowed to use this for acts when the legislation is quite clear that if it meets the outcome and this has real consequences for people for instance we interviewed someone who has moved authorities and previously she was allowed the budget in a lump sum to take her husband away once a year but when she moved authority they said no you have to take it month on month and not be restricted for she was able to do it like too much poorer outcomes for people we also had instances of people being having a party agreed to to pay for their support assistance lunch in this point on for one year but then the local authority came back and said actually you're not allowed to do that so can you pay us £2,000 back please so I think it does come from senior management and people being giving me a towing me to make sensible common sense decisions okay Alex Neil general question to her guess has any work been done since the act was passed to demonstrate and evaluate the impact of SDF on outcomes you know compared to have the outcomes improved prior to the introduction of SDF is there evidence that those authorities that have made more progress in implementation SDF are achieving better outcomes is is there a said I mean there are 31 partnerships plus the highlands we are we spreading best practice what the arrangements for that you know is the improvement service doing that or who's doing that is it happening you know I mean I take the very conscious of all of these points about whether the system is actually working as well as it was intended or should be and clearly there are a number of issues that need to be addressed to do that but even with its faults is it actually making a difference to outcomes I mean Eric will know you know what's happening in your own area I think in terms of like a national picture of all you know when people get sds then it works better or something I don't I don't think that exists I think there's lots of sharing of good practice so we've got loads of examples and most organisations who are working in sds in and around sds will have case study examples so where you can see that for an individual life has changed for the better after having a good sds conversation and sometimes that's a case study that also shows oh and it costs a bit less and sometimes it may be cost the same and sometimes it may be cost more and sometimes that's okay right um so um I think there's lots of really good practice examples and and individual cases um but I'm not sure there's anything that sort of says and I'd be really interested to know if there are authorities who've actually said do you know what folk are meeting better outcomes now um I mean one thing I would say is you know Scottish Government is in the process of starting what's called an evaluability study and so some of that is going to look at some of the gaps in evidence and so whether that will come out of that you know I don't know. Just to reinforce what Jess has said there's national networks that are there where people are able to share good practice um we've certainly engaged positively with them for ministerial point of view um we've throughout the implementation of the act undertaken self-evaluation activity and audit activity to understand the impact that's having on individuals looking at um costs as Jess said but also how the individual's outcomes are identified how well that's done how well that equates to the individual budget that individuals get at the end of all those things so it's been on going self-evaluation and audit for us. Can I ask Eric does that show the self-directed support of itself improves outcomes? I think we can say that through case studies and examples I think doing that as a global judgment we'd need to be better at capturing outcomes and actually you know codifying those outcomes. David. We never counted outcomes before or we never evaluated against outcomes before so we're starting from a very low base from that perspective and and we made assumptions that things were going well and going right for people but I think that the legislation and Eric's had touched on it in a systematic way the answer is probably no we're not we're not certainly not in Glasgow but we have significant volumes of case studies examples where and people are routinely writing in to that you know the likes of myself or my managers locally just say thank you because their daughter or son has transitioned from a young person in transition through to adulthood and something through the support of for instance our local area co-ordinators and activity that's been able to put in place life changing provision and support for people that doesn't cost an awful lot of money when not long ago that young person might have ended up just going to a daycare centre for the rest of their days so there's a qualitatively different experience that is that is increasing and and I think that we get very few complaints if that's another way of putting it in in that respect. That's a key point, convener. It's not just a quantitative thing it's a more importantly it's a qualitative improvement and that's the most difficult thing to measure obviously. Okay Bill Bowman. Thank you convener if I can maybe just comment on some of the things we've spoken about and then ask a question. I think and David Williams you in response to Alex Neil spoke about compliance with an act that you said you were compliant but you couldn't evidence that and you weren't able to give Alex an indication of when you could. To me that's a bit of a red flag that you know are you going to go and do something about that. I've written at the top of the bit of paper here yes. Okay well thank you for that. I think just Wade mentioned that in the situation of a finance department making a choice between this payment and that payment and I think as you said you know how would they make that choice and I think that brought me on to what Colin Young said of course should be in the interest of the individual and if that doesn't come through from the top of the organisation then you know I don't think we have much chance in fulfilling the requirements of the of the act well not just the requirements but the spirit. We've heard you know if you're immersed in this topic it's easy to use jargon and I think even here we've had a few things you know community capacity natural assets maybe you know some acronyms that are very familiar to to all of you maybe not so familiar to me and that sort of leads me on to what I think Jess Wade was speaking about user led independent bodies can you just tell me a bit more is there a structure for these is it just ad hoc you know how does it sure great you actually get yes okay love to um so what I would say there's no there's not necessarily a particular model but most of our members follow a relatively consistent model so in different authorities you have different setups basically based on what's needed locally and what the priorities are and different organisations have come about differently so GCL and Glasgow is possibly the oldest one in the country and came about through a mix of campaigning from disabled people themselves and collective voice and support from people within the council key people within the council supported the setup of that organisation and that's what got it off the ground and some of those people are working in and around the fringes of social care and sds now many many years later you know and and many of the disabled people themselves have gone on then to work in other user led organisations around the country and actually you can trace the start of that back to the seeds of of GCIL but in different areas so ashu independent living network in ashu covers is user led as well and they cover the three authorities which is great because it gives them some kind of consistency there but working across the different areas in in Edinburgh we have Lothian centre for inclusive living which covers the four authority areas but there's different slightly different approaches most of those organisations will be registered charities so they'll be registered with the Scottish charity regulator Oscar and they will have a governance structure where their highest level of their governance so their management committee the board of trustees or board of directors whatever they are referred to are service users disabled people and in some organisations that might include carers of people who are accessing services and some organisations it will be people who are disabled people but not receiving services and sometimes it will be only people who are receiving services are there some black spots where there are no yes so there's definite gaps there's gaps where either there's no um now I should have wrote a list that would have been good um we've got um a sort of mapping website that covers the whole of Scotland where people can search for what's in their area but there's definitely key authorities where either there's nothing user led or there's maybe nothing at all that you can just go straight to um and get support so there might be organisations where you have to go. How do you enter into this would somebody in the care system suggest that you go or do you have to find out for yourself? Well so ideally um you would get if you're finding out that you're thinking about the fact that you need support what would what would really be ideal and feedback from our members is that ideally you would get actually a referral at that point so somebody if you start to speak to somebody in social work thinking about getting support actually most of our members would really love that that social worker or whoever it is then says to you oh did you know there's an organisation in your area who can help you think about your options and then you're able to speak to them as well and that means that you've potentially got that support right through your journey so you could have somebody um for example and the kinds of work that these organisations are doing is anything from um you know somebody sitting in um at an assessment with you not necessarily saying something but just sitting there um or helping you prepare for assessment in advance helping you think about actually what support could have benefit from in my life that kind of thing to social workers give that type of advice to um people they're speaking to columns or something uh-huh where it's available on the only only sorry around the third of people we surveyed hadn't heard or they didn't know they had a no-cry-fi centre had or hadn't a third hadn't heard of a third hadn't heard of a local surface and about a fifth she didn't know what we were talking about so I don't think it's very widespread knowledge I think it's very important that's how user-led organisations are involved in this process because they bring the direct lived experience of the the users of services to the to the table and I think that's much more significant than just you know somebody who can like myself give advice or advocacy and actually having that lived experience is very important and the key thing about user-led organisations is they are run by disabled people themselves and that is significant and I just want to put an important word of caution out there is that a lot of disabled people's organisations in local areas are suffering from significant cuts in funding and in many areas are going to the wall because they are not getting support sometimes that is because they were providing a service for the local authority which has gone out to tender and has been awarded to another usually a large disability organisation like capability or enable or someone like that instead of them and therefore they're no longer able to then provide the other good quality stuff that they provide as a disabled people's organisation so I think if you're looking at this whole thing in the round if you're looking at health and social care integration in the round stuff direct support in the round you actually need to think about the who you support in a local community in order to ensure that the voice of disabled people actually gets to the table. Jess Wade. Minging on that as well actually and you know your question about all the gaps or you know where are the significant gaps I think the other key thing to note is that at the moment the Scottish Government is currently funding a lot of independent information and support at local level so there would be a lot more gaps if that funding wasn't happening there's going to be another round of funding so again you know there will be work funded but there is a question about long term how is this how is this funded it should it be funded locally should it be funded centrally and if it should be funded locally which you know is the current basis that although Scottish Government is putting in funding that's very much about you know a period of change you know it's it's the local authorities responsibility to make sure this this provision is there you know but in the areas where there were gaps before this funding started will those gaps continue when that funding goes and I think there's a lot of concern from organisations about that and also around you know their level of independence if they are receiving funding locally okay sorry Eric just going to say that signposting to those organisations has built into our public information into our assessment process and into our guidance to practitioners it's constantly reinforced and that's fantastic and that's you know I think that's what we want to see more of that in other areas because we know to organisations operating in some areas that then don't necessarily get routinely signposted too so like Colin said folk are getting services but they haven't even heard that actually there was an organisation that could have made that process easier for them. David? Yeah I think it's really interesting the slightly contradictory comment that you made there just around about the the anxiety around about Scottish Government funding for these organisations and actually it should be done locally but there's also a concern around about the level of arms length kind of and I'm not sure how we can have it both ways from that perspective but I think there is also something around about provider organisations in general where that has because necessarily self directed support legislation created technically a business risk for provider organisations because we've heard the comments around about block contracts around about you know the big packages of support of based on an inputs and outputs basis for an individual going to a particular organisation that create that self directed support necessarily creates a business risk if you if you move towards full you know complete choice and the ability to switch providers left right and centre so there is a need to manage that really carefully so that you don't create so much uncertainty and instability in the marketplace and we already know that one of the issues for social care is the ability to recruit staff and ensure that they're recruited at the kind of right level of quality and the right level of skill sets in order to be able to to meet the needs so there are challenges in the system around about how with the best will in the world a properly principled bit of legislation can actually be implemented in the full in the context that we're in on the back of that can I ask how you're changing your commissioning strategies to to cope with that yeah well one of the things again this links to the the opportunities that integration I think provides because there is that commissioning responsibility that comes through IJBs is and and also that spirit of partnership much more so we are in Glasgow for instance in in relation to co-produced commissioning that we have embarked on in relation to our homelessness services for instance and we are increasingly looking at working at this moment in time to to look at how we can develop something called alliance commissioning which is around about actually giving an awful lot more control of the commissioning responsibility to provider organisations in terms of coming up with a spec around about tenders we do have to go through tenders for big bits of work there's nothing that we can do to avoid that and and I think that the integration agenda around about partnership working creates that opportunity now don't get me wrong it's not straightforward by any stretch of the imagination to develop something like alliance commissioning because of the constraints that are on local authorities and also on the system just in terms of how we can procure work differently and as I've touched on before I think there is something that needs to be about moving away from the procurement of services on an hourly basis or on a time basis because that is absolutely about inputs and outputs so coming back to the earlier question from Mr Kerr there in relation to the calculator story you can if that's happening you can actually see how that could happen because if somebody's got an individual budget of £10,000 let's say then straight away if you know the early rights of your provider you'll be working out what is that that we can deliver for that £10,000 and immediately you're into an inputs and outputs mindset rather than something that's focused on it actually what is it that's right for you to do so there are parameters in there but we are working on trying to change that kind of environment let me ask another question because some of us will see this through our constituency case that there is a ceiling put on some care packages and some of them may be more complex than others so I'm keen to know given that Ian Smith rightly identified resource being the elephant in the room whether that's the case across the board whether there's flexibility there and whether you count unmet need because to me that tells a story about what we should be funding but can't afford to so I'm curious to know if whether you routinely as organisations count unmet need and let me start with the local authorities Eric the bigger challenge for us is being able to shape that the market and the capacity in the community in a different way through how people realise their outcomes that then gets us into a truly outcomes focused way of commission if people are being creative around about how they realise their outcomes we are looking at the provider landscape that we've got the services that we've got and we're then able to shape them through the different ways that people are realising their outcomes that that's the real big challenge for me in how that works alongside that it is all about the collaborative commission and alliance commission and different approaches where rather than it being a paternalistic relationship between a local authority and providers you're getting much more towards having the conversation about what kind outcomes get met how do we do that together and how do you set your measures on that basis so I think it's the question the other way around and it's not my question for me it's how the outcomes are positively realised then influence and commission because people want to realise their outcomes in different ways and it's many and varied I absolutely understand that but you've got a finance director sitting on your shoulder is there an upper limit to the care packages you can offer not in that way not in what way then not in a ceiling okay so there's no ceiling you can offer an unlimited amount to realising somebody's outcomes you have no unmet need in East Asia is what you're telling me not saying that at all ah okay do you count unmet need not scientifically okay no moved away from doing it you count it in terms of whether outcomes are met whether they're partially met or whether they are unmet as outcomes but not in terms of how we previously did that through former assessment type documents don't do it that way okay David personalisation yes we would have counted and we would have had a list of people whose needs we were not able to meet because actually we had a disproportionate and inequitable system of allocation of resources and so people who had come out of the big hospitals for instance came out with big packages and increasingly over the years following that people with equivalent need in different parts of the city were getting hugely desperate levels of allocation and some somewhere not getting so once upon a time yes we were able to and the point about us moving to the personalisation approach prior to the legislation coming in was about recognising that the budget was the budget and and and it was inequitably distributed and increasingly so so we needed to get to a point where there was a kind of assessment of equivalent need across the city which would allow for an equitable and fairer distribution across the system so that's why we went down the resource allocation system the RAS model within Glasgow rather than looking at the equivalence model which was just about basic which is the other route to allocation of resources that many authorities have taken the equivalence route is is essentially what you had before you get the same again and and that's that move to a resource allocation system created some of the challenges for us from individuals early early on in the system but with it so and the way that works is that if you have an assessed need with a broadly comparable level of need across the across the city then then you get as an individual budget x the point about the then moving to the outcome base support planning approaches about looking at so how can that allocation resource go towards contributing towards your outcomes and there's a conversation on a co-produced basis dialogue with the individual which looks at perhaps needing an increase in that and actually that does happen because the senior managers or who are trying to establish consistency of approach across the city do have capacity and scope with which to to provide that nuance but that makes it absolutely personalised for that individual and and so there is a capacity for for increase it's very rare that the individual budget I think is reduced within the city because it is based on individual need but that might be able to be reduced for a variety of good reasons like the the implementation of choice is there a limit that two or three weeks ago I signed off on a package of support well of well in excess of a quarter of a million pounds per year for somebody coming through transition and a quarter of a million pounds is way off the ras score we will meet need when we need to okay anybody got anything to add ian i think the problem about defining unmet need is how you define need in the first place because we would argue that because the criteria has shifted and it's now much higher level of needs before you actually receive any support that there's a lot of unmet need below that level at which to support but you could say well actually we've defined these people as assessing assessed as having a need because there are critical needs and we're meeting that and the people who are lowered down the chain who we think should be getting support as well in order to be able to live independently are not getting support that is unmet need but that probably wouldn't be measured under any definition because this need is being met as what ian said i'm i suppose the only thing i would add to it is that you know with changing eligibility so that you know were previously you might have got your own package that you could have then had sds conversations around at say meeting substantial you know having substantial need you might only get that now at critical or you know where you previously would have got that moderate and now you would only get it at substantial you know do we really believe that local authorities were previously giving out lots of money to individuals that they didn't need because you know i don't think authorities would have been doing that and if they were why were they so you know i think that's maybe a way to also think about it that we know there are folk who previously would have got money but now now won't so exactly what ian said that's where the unmet need really is okay so the ball is getting higher david well it probably is necessarily getting high because of the resource issue but i i i do think there is a need for us to be balanced in relation to assumptions again around about what need equates to and i take fully on board what ian and jess have said but the the the parents letter that i alluded to that i received a couple of weeks ago their daughter has down syndrome and has been provided with support through the week which doesn't involve any social work funding at all and they have expressed their complete contentment about that so we need to make be clear that we're not making assumptions that just because somebody has a learning disability or a physical disability or a mental health issue or is aged elderly that they necessarily require social work intervention and it is about that that clear professional judgment coupled with what else is around that might actually provide the opportunity for people to get the support that they actually need okay eric did you want to come just to echo that absolutely because it's how that conversation takes place and if we're having a conversation sit around about people's natural assets and that jargon apologies community capacity that's there then that's where that conversation starts with and if people don't need statutory intervention we may well have been over prescribing in the past okay calling yeah i can't speak to how uned me to uned me to identify but we heard examples of even when need is identified and an indicative budget is um suggested people were still not getting that budget so the local authority assessed and identified that there are needs better not be met but even though they think they require sorry one other aspect and uned need is the substantial waiting times for assessments in some local authorities and also waiting times once you've been assessed to actually receive the package that you've been assessed as requiring so that some uned need which is quantifiable and what i'm picking up in every area we've discussed is inconsistency across local authorities that really shouldn't be happening so it does depend you know to use that horrible term of postcode lottery it does depend on where you live as to the nature of the service you get okay outcome based not resource led any final comments on that before i move us on to the final theme no okay we're moving on removing the barriers to successful implementation and let me just kick that off by by let's let's recognize that not everything is perfect despite the two local authorities here not everything is perfect what do we need to do to change it is it a problem with the legislation or is it actually a problem with implementation does resource have anything to do with it or is it culture who wants to kick off first eric smiled at me so he's going first culture is a huge aspect within this i think i think it's culture and implementation out of your questions first off and it really is that it's that bit about workforce development organisation development making sure that you have the capacity to support people to operate in a different way that's required under the legislation and it is senior leadership permission and support for implementing that within the spirit and letter of the law that that's my take on on those questions i think it is implementation but it's also i think there's an issue in relation to the fact that local authorities at the same time is being required to implement self-directed support legislation have also been required to implement health and social care integration and i think that that has probably taken a lot of the focus from senior management because as david mentioned earlier it is a fairly major piece of work there's also there are concerns within the disabled people's movement the independent living movement that the health social care integration is very much focused on the health side not enough on the social care side and that the the wider role of social care in enabling people to pay an active part in society is being lost and it's more healthcare in the community rather than social care how that plays through once the integration gets more fully bedded down and perhaps self-directed support becomes more of an asset a part of things that health social care integration partnerships deliver we have to wait and see but i think there is an issue there about just how much is trying to be delivered at the same time by under pressure local authorities okay under pressure local authority david oh that's not us clearly chair if you don't mind of course we're always we're always under pressure i mean i think that the the facts of the matter are that the day job hasn't actually gone away just because of integration of health and social care the the the integration has required us to do something measurably different about how we organise ourselves in order to ensure that the planning and delivery and receipt and experience of health and social care across the entirety of the age range in glasgow that's not necessarily replicated everywhere but certainly across the entirety of the age range is measurably different and as i said earlier on for us in glasgow in particular there are opportunities huge opportunities that come as a consequence of that that are completely consistent with the self-directed support legislation around about co-production so the at the the issue of for instance alliance commissioning the issue of how we've worked in a co-produced way in relation to homelessness services and addiction services providers work that's all happened as a consequence of the beginnings of that embedding at a very local level as a kind of locality based approach to the delivery of services that's come through the self-directed support legislation i just want to touch on and add to what eric said around about culture i think culture again is absolutely an issue in relation to self-directed support because this has meant change it has meant change in in in the way that people deliver services and receive services and so that's that's a challenge for everybody and i think we're still working through all of that but necessarily and it kind of links to the previous point around about issues not being resource led one of the some some of you around the table will will be aware that as part of our implementation in relation to personalisation in glasgow part of that resulted in the closure of five learning disability day centres with just two remaining now these centres were long cherished long wanted long desired by particularly carers of service users who had been intending day centres for anything up to 25 years but what we very clearly wanted to do was was demonstrate absolutely that just because you had a particular identified need once upon a time that doesn't mean to say that we actually shouldn't be striving for something better and different for you and the and literally hundreds of people have come through and moved out of the those five day centres and being supported into a different form of support which has given them lots more opportunities and better outcomes as a consequence of that i do and but the culture cultural challenge across the system across the community in relation to the prospect of closing learning disability day centres was not straightforward and that's not just about the local authority social workers okay Liam Kerr just to pick up on Jackie's question the report that i guess under pins our conversation today contains various recommendations at pages six and seven on various bodies as to what they could be doing do any of you have a view on will those recommendations actually move sds forward and assuming so do you have a view on whether the various bodies that are required to undertake the recommendations are actually undertaking Eric there's a report going to our ijb this very afternoon setting out the recommendations and that will be guiding the activity of our thinking differently programme board which is the successor to the sds programme board which as probably should say at this moment met all the way through our integration process as well so they certainly will be going there and they will inform the work programme of the thinking differently programme board that will be taken forward that whole work stream and is that something forgive me i'll just cutting on that and come back to the wider question is that something that's replicated across scotland or is that just something that you've been particularly good on can't speak for the rest of scotland my understanding is that there are similar programme type arrangements across other partnerships and we've just set that up from 2013 onwards and it has been transformed into a broader programme board thank you yes David we i took a report on the audit scotland report to our ijb finance and audit committee on the 6 of september so literally within a week or two of the publication of the report and we set out in in that some draft responses to each of the recommendations so we're certainly driving forward in Glasgow an acknowledgement of the the findings and the conclusions and the recommendations and as colleagues from audit scotland are aware i organised to meet with them separately shortly after the publication of the report so that we could find out i could find out what specific issues around about Glasgow so we're absolutely engaged in that by way of a programme board i thinking in terms of Glasgow i don't have a specific programme board in relation to self-directed support or personalisation in Glasgow and the reason for that is because it absolutely is seen as business as usual it's it's the primary route into adult social care and for children with disabilities children with children with disabilities social care we did have very extensive levels of scrutiny and planning arrangements in place for a number of years following our implementation of personalisation in 2011 at which were multi stakeholder which were linked absolutely to the then council's responsibilities in terms of so it's a subcommittee of the health and social care policy development committee and only when the integration legislation came into effect in in Glasgow city last a year last february march did that subgroup get disbanded as a consequence of us having moved to this being business as usual thank you i think the recommendations are really solid you know the question is whether everyone will follow them and under also i think for me that comes back to the point about really the disconnect around implementation so between central government and local government you know i think the legislation is sound but it's it's to what extent it's being followed and so where we see things in in local authorities happening that aren't necessarily within the spirit of the legislation you know often we might get in touch and express that view and sometimes the response is well it's open to interpretation you know and so it's very very difficult then to say okay well it's quite clear what you should be doing but often the response is well you know it's up to us to decide locally so i wonder in terms of the recommendations you know what will happen will people have to feedback on what they have or haven't done and it's really reassuring to hear the authorities to say and actually we've worked through that and we've come up with what we're going to do well it'd be great to see that for 32 authorities you know can i just press you on the you mentioned the Scottish Government and your answer do you have any view on what the Scottish Government should be specifically doing to help implementation i think i i would like to see greater i guess leadership direction towards authorities and i think that's a very difficult thing for Scottish Government to do with the way things are set up in this country at the moment so it's very difficult for Scottish Government to give quite strong direction towards local authorities about whether they need to change or improve i think or sometimes it seems that way and david do you have a view on that answer you've just heard i think the coming back to the chairs initial question around about is the legislation fine i think the legislation is fine i think there are guidance there are statutory instruments that require local authorities to follow and and so it's it's it's difficult to see beyond that how much more authority the local the local authorities could be provided by direction from scottish government that scottish government has discharged its responsibilities it is up to local authorities to to implement my expectation is that audit scotland's findings in their most recent report i would expect as i have done and that it's indicated the same as happening in east Asia that that this report will will appear in the public domain through ijb committees our boards eminently that's that's not unreasonable to expect because it's a transparent process that we need to be engaged with that's the spirit of the legislation that's what integration is actually about so i don't see why this would be any different that is quite a worrying answer because if you find the context of the whole premise of the right to support with the introducing control and we're seven years into the strategy and scottish government figures so surely only 27% of people have been offered chosen control that never mind whether that's leaving needing to outcomes the idle action of making sure people have chosen control is still shocking alone so we've the alliance recommended their report that it's a recent substantial increase in the new future and considering we've only got two years before the SCS strategy comes to an end we will be looking for a review of the act to try to push the implementation of conversations at the very least forward to increase uptake the standard i think we've talked quite a lot in the course of this morning about the inconsistency of information and that's available about the how it's monitored i think the Scottish Government has a fundamental role in ensuring that there is a more consistent approach across local authorities of how they record options and that there is a more consistent approach in terms of how we monitor the implementation both from local authorities itself but also working with the people who receive the services as to how they think it's actually working for them so we can actually get some of this data about about how the outcomes are improving that isn't there there isn't a consistent approach across scotland on that and i think the Scottish Government does have a very fundamental role there the other thing i think which is crucial in the recommendations from the audit committee is there's quite a number of references to working in partnership with the service users we need to ensure that service users organizations have the resources to be able to do that which means that we build capacity of disabled people's organizations in local communities to ensure that they can support their members to participate in all these significant areas where the audit commission rightly says that service users should be involved in the process. Willie? I was just wondering if I could raise another issue that's been identified as one of the barriers by the Auditor General and that is relating to recruitment, training, remuneration and retention of social care staff it clearly has a huge a huge issue what are the panel's views and how we can make some improvements there short of the obvious and making more money available and more of a career path and structure for people that want to go into the sector what are your thoughts on how we can make some improvements here? I think some of the things you've just said are key to making improvements you know and actually the shared ambition document that Ian mentioned earlier talks about that as well it's about seeing social care completely differently and it's about seeing it as an asset across the country you know that this shouldn't be seen as kind of the dregs of the jobs or what have you this should be seen as an important career that does have opportunities for progression but that actually also even without progression this is really important work and it needs to be well paid and people need to feel valued for it. We see a lot of people we work with who are employing personal assistants directly I would say have much more consistency with their own workforce than you see within organisations and that's because there's a personal relationship there and people get to work together and when it works really well you know then understandably for it want to stay in that situation and they don't want to leave it so I think that's where actually where direct payments work well for people and where personal assistant employment works well for people then that can need to greater consistency there but there's a lot of difficult issues I think. Can I ask when you talk about enhanced remuneration I mean presumably you're talking about carers and providers and I mean clearly one of the issues all the evidence shows with social care providers very often it's not just a remuneration issue but it's a lack of career development as well which is actually in some instances a bigger barrier to progress than the levels of remuneration so I think that's presumably what you're saying Jess. Yeah I mean yeah I think that's difficult I mean I think the thing to recognise as well is obviously with the living wage coming in you know that is a big step towards making sure people are paid more but unfortunately what we're sometimes seeing is if that means if a package isn't increased to reflect that then what actually happens is the worker is getting paid more but per hour but then they're getting their hours reduced potentially so you know we wouldn't we wouldn't disagree with that at all it's really important but it's it's looking at everything within the context and unintended consequences I guess sometimes. David. Chair I'm surprised a little bit around about the comment around about hours getting reduced as a consequence of the salary going up and the reason for that is because the scotch Government has actually made available in the last couple of years a resource with which to fund the increase to Scottish living wage so it shouldn't have made that impact or had that impact. I actually think though there is that we shouldn't shy away from the fact that it might actually be okay for there to be less paid person time going into somebody's life if things like technology enabled care for instance were able to be used in a constructive way to provide different type of overnight care support to individuals for instance something that we're going to have to address anyway as a consequence of decisions made in a different part of the system around about sleepovers and the payment of hourly rates to that so we are going to have to do things differently I think that's consistent with actually striving for an outcomes-based approach in relation to helping people to live independently helping people to move on with their lives regardless of levels of ability the key to it of course is to make sure that we're actually doing that jointly and in a co-produced way rather than actually just putting it in place and that's where that dialogue and that time needs to be given the capacity to do that. Ian Smith I think the concern that we have is that the money which is the Scottish Government keeps telling us has gone into supporting increased social care is actually primarily money which is there to support the living wage increase and there doesn't actually increase the sum total of social care that's available and we're not against the living wage increase obviously but I'm very concerned about the comment that David just made because he seemed to be suggesting that because of the overnight care wage rulings that they may have to look at how you provide overnight care and that sounds like a resource-based approach rather than what is right. I'm not saying that telecare might not be appropriate for some people might actually be better for some people but if it's done on the basis that actually we've got to save money because we've actually had this ruling which says we've got to pay people to do the overnight care then that is not a good approach and I hope that's not what he's suggesting is going to happen. Let me not answer for him but let me tell you it's already happening it does not necessarily in your local authority but in others. David. I don't think we can separate out the resource available to us from the need to deliver services and our responsibility as leaders is about making sure that we maximise on the available resource to us so if there is a ruling that comes from the HMRC in relation to sleepovers that has an impact on Glasgow City of increasing the budget immediately by £5 million just to pay for that difference in sleepovers then I have a responsibility to look at how can we absorb that additional potential spend in different ways so that it doesn't negatively impact on budgets elsewhere that's my responsibility and I think that's okay to do that because actually that's around about engaging in a discussion and a dialogue the other thing and it does link to the question here around about recruitment that necessarily the sleepover decision has created itself a workforce impact on provider organisations because the person who was doing the sleepover historically and traditionally was somebody who did a back shift slept over and did the early shift that person can't now do that sleepover so recruitment there are recruitment issues in relation to being able to provide that cover even if we had the money available to us just to pay it as a sleepover so we have to have we've got a responsibility to look at how we can move that on we could spend the next hour talking about sleepovers and whether resource should come from the Scottish Government to local authorities to help with some of that I'm not going to go there okay because this would be a whole other discussion but this is something that will exercise people going forward next week we have the Scottish Government and COSLA you've helpfully suggested areas that we can question them on I'm not going to extend the meeting to explore some of them with you now but I would be grateful if you think of something as you're walking out the door when you get back to your desk email us because we will be interested in putting your points both to the government and to COSLA can I thank each and every one of you for coming today it's been a really productive session and as I said we could have gone on for longer but discipline means that we're not going to because we have First Minister's questions shortly so thank you very much for your attendance I now move the committee into private session