 Good morning and welcome to the 22nd meeting of the Public Order and Post Legislative Scrutiny Committee in 2017. Could everybody make sure that any mobile devices that they have are switched off or at least in silent mode so that it does not interfere with the work of the committee? Item 1 is taking business in private. Are we agreed to take item 3 in private? Yes. 2, contesting the ads on the agenda, we are moved on to evidence on the joint Audit Scotland and Accounts Commission report on self-directed support, and I welcome this morning Frazer McKinlay, Director of performance, audit and best value, Antoni Clark, assistant director, Lorene Gillis, senior manager and Zowie McGuire auditor all from Audit Scotland. I invite an opening statement from Frazer McKinlay. Thank you convener and good morning members. As you say, convener, we are delighted to bring to you today the report on the progress of self-directed support. As you say, it's a joint Auditor General on the Kent's Commission report. A wee bit of background, first of all, self-directed support, often referred to as SDS, aims to improve the lives of people with social care needs by giving them much more choice and control over their social care support. That requires significant changes to the way social care has been provided in the past. The 10-year self-directed support strategy was introduced jointly by the Scottish Government and COSLA in 2010, and the Self-Directed Support Act came into force in April 2014. At that time, you will remember that we published a report on readiness of the implementation of the act at that time, and we found that council still had a lot of work to do to make the cultural and practical changes needed to successfully implement SDS. This more recent report looks more closely at people's experiences of SDS and what is helping and what is hindering progress. As you'll see in the report, convener, we found many examples of positive progress, and the audit team heard some real success stories from people for whom SDS was working well. However, it's also clear that authorities have not yet made the transformation required to fully implement the SDS strategy, and we also heard about people not getting the choice and control envisaged in the strategy in some who were really struggling with the process. Social work staff are very positive about the principles of SDS and of the whole idea of personalisation around people's social care, but a significant minority of them lack the understanding and confidence that they need to implement self-directed support successfully, and we found that staff need to be more empowered to make decisions with people about their individual support. Where staff are well trained and supported, and they have permission and encouragement from senior managers, that's when they are more able to be bold and innovative with people about their social care. Of course, you'll be aware that authorities are experiencing significant pressures from increasing demand and limited budgets, and within this context changes to the types of services available to people have been slow, and authorities' approaches to commissioning can restrict how much choice and control people have. In particular, what's known as SDS option 2 looks quite different from one area to another. There are some tensions for service providers between offering more flexible services and making extra demands on their staff, particularly when there are already challenges in recruiting and retaining social care staff in many places in the country. We found, finally, convener that SDS implementation stalled somewhat during the integration of health and social care services. We found that managers' attention was inevitably diverted towards the arrangements for setting up integrated joint boards and running and scrutinising those new integration authorities. In conclusion, the report makes a number of recommendations for local authorities, for the Scottish Government, for COSLA and other partners involved in implementing SDS, and those are shown in the report on pages 6 and 7. As ever, we will be keeping a close eye on the continued progress of self-directed support and, in discussion with the committee, may well consider revisiting it in the future. With that, convener, I and the team are very happy to take any question that the committee has. Thank you very much, Mr McKinlay. Can I record apologies from Monica Lennon and from Alex Neil, who aren't able to be with us this morning, and then turn to the first question from Colin Beattie? I'd like to look a little bit around budgets here, because that's, to me, the key to all of this. Money, unfortunately, is central. I'm looking at paragraph 62, bullet point 3, and you're saying here that fewer people qualify for social care support because of the tight and eligibility criteria at councils, and you're saying that the number of older people in care homes has gone down from 38.4 to 33.3 per thousand, and the proportion of people receiving home care has also decreased from 60.8 to 49 per thousand. That's quite dramatic drops, and yet, a couple of bullet points before, you're talking about an 8.6 per cent increase in real terms of the cost of servicing a much decreased population that qualify. Why is that? I'll ask the team to come in, Mr Beattie, but in a nutshell it's the demographic change that we're seeing, with significant increases in particularly older people, which means that we're needing to spend more on social care not only to keep up, but to keep the system running. It's worth saying, I guess, that the question of eligibility criteria is a long-standing issue in social care that predates self-directed support. Of course, that's always been part of the equation that authorities have to balance in providing care, but there's no doubt that the combination of, for local authorities overall, reducing budgets and increasingly demanding demographic changes both in terms of the number of older people and the care needs of those older people means that that's where the squeeze is coming. Are you saying that the complexity of care has increased dramatically and more than compensated for the reduction in the overall numbers? We covered this issue a little bit in the report that we published last year on social work in Scotland, and at that time we reported that you probably know that most councils have a common framework for assessing needs with four levels of eligibility criteria. So there's critical risk, which is a high priority. There's substantial risk, which is also a high priority. You drop down to moderate risk and then you have low risk. Over the last few years, most councils are now only setting and providing services for people who are assessed at being critical and substantial risk. The point that you've highlighted is that the threshold for receiving services is now higher than it used to be, and therefore the services that people are receiving tend to be more complex and therefore higher cost. Is that purely because of demographics? It's a combination of demographics and also choices that councils have made in terms of the targeting of their resources. I just find it difficult when there's been a fairly substantial reduction in the number of people in the system, which surprised me. Couple that with an 8.6 per cent increase in real terms of the spending. Does that equate? Does it make sense? The other factor that is probably worth bearing in mind is the cost pressures in terms of paying increases of staff and general inflation across social work services. That doesn't just apply uniquely to social work services, it applies to other services that councils provide. That's also a factor in this whole discussion. Further on in your report about staffing, you're talking about difficulties in getting staff, lack of staff available, staff shortages. It's not as if our staff costs are rising at that level when you can't get staff anyway. I think that I need to do a bit more analysis to properly answer that question, Mr Beattie. Is there something that we can go by and look at? I think that in terms of the workforce, there is definitely difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff in social care. That's even with the changes that have been introduced more recently about paying the living wage. That's an increase in cost pressure, but, even then, there is still, in some places, very low unemployment these days. It is proving difficult to get people into those kinds of jobs. When we are out there, the added pressure to that now and the added risk is the decision to leave the EU—relatively high proportions of non-UK EU citizens working in social care. Workforce is a real pressure for authorities across the land. I'm still just trying to get the logic here. 8.6 per cent real-terms increase. Staff numbers potentially have not increased dramatically. There may have been a bit of an increase because of the living wage. The numbers of people in the system that are receiving care have gone down fairly dramatically in terms of home care and significantly in terms of people in care homes. I'm just trying to figure the logic here. They don't seem to make sense. We can forward this on to Mr Beattie. In the previous report that we wrote on social work in Scotland, we had an exhibit that set out the changes of spending across the different services that social work departments provide—older people, children and young families and adult services. What that demonstrated was that there is a relatively stable position in expenditure on older people's services, an increase in spending on children and family services and an increase in spending on services for the 18 to 64-year-olds. If we forward this on to you, it might help you to understand how the figures have all stacked up. Okay, that could be useful because on the face of it, it doesn't really stack up what we're seeing here. The funding for care, does that come through the IGB? Increasingly, yes, but it's worth bearing in mind that the funding for the IGB comes both from the health board and the council. At the moment, the process is that the health board and the council in a local area agree how much funding goes to the integrated joint board. It's then the integrated joint board's job to commission the services that are required for the social care services that are within scope of that integrated authority. It is worse remembering that different IGBs have different services in scope. Is it working well? It's early days, I think. As we say in the report, Mr Beattie, there's no doubt that, over the last couple of years, as integrated joint boards are being set up and established, that has taken a lot of time and energy and focus, particularly from managers getting the arrangements around IGBs. As we reported in our report last year, it's taken a lot of time and effort. Inevitably, that's diverted attention away from things like this. So, is it working well? I think that it's too early to say. I think that we are all up and running. We've just finished the first year of audit of the integration authorities. We're proposing to do a second report on how the health and social care integration is going next year, and that will be about this time next year that we're bringing that through. Obviously, we'll bring that to the committee. At that point, we really should be able to see what the impact is on services and potentially on the outcomes for people at the moment. All the evidence has been around arrangements and getting themselves set up and governance and those kinds of things. We are now needing to get to a stage of seeing integrated joint boards make the difference to services and to people's outcomes. At the moment, it's a bit early to say. Thank you, convener. Good morning. Sometimes I like to ask detailed questions, sometimes a more of an overview. I think that this morning is more of an overview. In your introduction, Fraser McKinlay, you gave a very balanced description of the situation. However, my reading of the report and the key messages from you are that the programme is not going as quickly or as smoothly as might have been hoped for or expected. I wondered who is responsible for that and who, in the chain of command, is holding them to account. I'll kick off on that and then ask the team to come in there, Mr Bowman. You're absolutely right in that it's a mixed picture, I think, is what we say. Genuinely, we've seen some great examples of where SDS is working well for people and, in some case, study areas, places that are really committed to it. You can see that culture change beginning now to come through. We also say that everybody—government councils and everyone else involved in it—underestimated the scale of the challenge to this. I think that you would say that, when the strategy was written back in 2010, we probably would have expected to be further on, as we sit here in 2017, seven years into a 10-year strategy. I think that that's absolutely fair. One of the concerns, I guess, is that delivery is still far too inconsistent. Depending on where you live, you will get a very different experience. We heard that a lot in all the research and all the audit work that we did. I'll briefly touch on the accountability question and then hand over to Lorraine. I always feel like I'm in danger of fudging the question a little bit when I say that it's not one single person, but it is a genuinely systemic change this one. I think that if I were to characterise it in two ways, the Scottish Government sets the strategy, set the policy with COSLA. Actually, in our last report that we published three years ago said quite rightly that the Government had taken a very inclusive approach to developing that strategy, and that was well received. I think that you can see the benefit of that now in that the vast majority of people you speak to who are involved in social care think that this is a good idea. We've not really heard anyone at this point saying that we shouldn't have bothered. The challenge then—and actually, since we did the report three years ago, there's a lot of guidance and a lot of support out there now to help people deliver it. And there's no doubt then that if you take it to the next level down, which is councils, health boards and increasingly now integration authorities, that the delivery is very patchy and there's lots of different reasons for that and we try to get into some of those in the report. So in terms of who's accountable for it, it really depends where you are. The national picture obviously, the Government ultimately accountable for that, but in local terms, depending on how the services are delivered, it's going to be a combination of either the council or the integration authority. Llyrgane, do you want to add anything to that? That's a very good description. Having been involved in some of the fieldwork on the audit, I think I was struck with the differences. We as a team did have lots of discussions about is this glass half full or glass half empty? It was very difficult for us, I think, to come to any real conclusion because there are some, as Fraser said, some really good examples and we were quite excited and enthused about some of that where creativity was clearly happening and people were having really good outcomes because of the way that they had been empowered to engage with decisions about their own sport. On the other side of that, we did see lots of examples where people weren't being empowered and that the decisions weren't being made with them, they were being made for them and that's clearly against the landscape that we're moving into. I think that what has been slightly disappointing is that we have a landscape just now around empowerment and that people are being encouraged to be involved in planning their own sport more. It doesn't feel to me that that has gone hand in hand, but we've certainly called some of that out in the report and I think that there is scope for that landscape to take this forward. I don't think that I would have anything else to add unless that's the way you want to. So, from what you're saying, there's good work being done, we wouldn't want to take away from that other areas where support or guidance is needed. Does it come back to the concept of project management and is anybody project managing the whole thing? There is a team, there's a policy team in government and there's an outfit called STS Scotland and there's a website and so that kind of infrastructure nationally is in not bad shape. I think that the thing that we saw that makes one of the biggest differences locally is leadership and how managers engage in this whole process. We use East Ayrshire as an example of where we saw very clearly the most senior people in the social care function, not only being accepting of it but actively promoting the principles of STS as a way we now do business. It's fair enough that I was reminding myself of the official report from three years ago when I was talking to the committee then and I was saying at that time that I had to get it in my head that it's not a case of you either take self-directed support or you don't. Self-directed support is a new way of delivering social care services with people and I think that's the shift that people are having to make. We see some authorities that are further down that road and doing it well. There are others that are less far down that road and a big part of that is to do with management and leadership. I think that I take from that that there is still some leadership needed overall. I'd like to pick up that leadership ball if I may. You say at paragraph 9, page 9 of your report that the Scottish Government continues to have a crucial leadership role to play in the successful implementation of this transformational strategy. First off, does that mean in your view that the Scottish Government has not been providing the required level of leadership? Can you give more detail, if so? Certainly, Mr Kerr. I don't think that that is what we mean in this context. I think that, as I said in response to the question earlier, the way in which the Government has gone about this whole exercise has been very inclusive. As I said, we recognise that everyone involved in it underestimated the scale of the challenge. From that point of view, I think that they have done the job that you would expect them to do. There is now a question—and certainly we heard—about funding. To be fair, the Government has been very clear all along about what the funding is for and how long it is going to be. We are now coming to the end of that transition funding. There is now a question, as we look ahead, as to what exactly the role of the Scottish Government is going to be in generating the environment, the climate, if you like, that I have just been talking to Mr Bowman about. That is what we are trying to get at here. Even though we are seven years into a 10-year strategy, this is absolutely not the time for the Government to take a step back and say, well, over to you, local authorities. There is still a need for that national leadership to create an environment in which this is the way that we do things, so we are embedding it. Earlier on, Fraser mentioned the finding when we did the first report, which was the Scottish Government working in partnership with COSR and local authorities. Whilst we were doing this work, we found that that story continues. It was very much a sense of Scottish Government and local authorities trying to work together to understand what needs to happen to make this policy real for people out there. There is the joint COSR, Scottish Government, Self-Directed Support Implementation Plan 2016-2018, which was recently published, that sets out the actions that they plan to do over the next couple of years to address, in many ways, the issues that we have found in our report. The things that they are focusing on are things to do with improving commissioning, creating a culture where staff have the confidence to be more innovative, and also trying to make sure that they work together to streamline and make it easier for people to negotiate what we found in our audit. It was often quite a complicated process for people who are trying to access self-directed support. It is a tricky balancer, because I think this is not a change that can be micro-managed or that can be imposed on local authorities, and local authorities, IJBs and health boards need to be able to respond to local circumstances. That is both an opportunity and a challenge in itself, because clearly you want a consistent and well-developed approach across the country, so the national leadership role is partly about setting the direction. It is also about working with all the other partners to really understand how effectively this has been delivered on the ground, and we have made a recommendation in the report about strengthening and improving the quality of data about the extent to which people really are receiving choice, and this policy is improving the services and outcomes. Can I press you on that? I read the 2014 report as well, and I was struck by that. It appears to me that this is an initiative that has been brought in. It is a potentially very good initiative, but it rather seems as though, when you talk about micro-managing, the impression that I got from the previous report, and to an extent from this one, is that the policy has been brought in and almost said, there you go, this is what you have to achieve, but we are not necessarily going to guide you particularly closely as to how to achieve it, which surprised me. Do you have any thoughts on that? I think that it would be a slightly unfair assessment to say that it has just been handed over to you really. Fraser has already mentioned that there are a whole range of groups in place, that the joint groups between the Scottish Government, COSLA, providers and experts that are trying to understand what is happening at local level, prepare guidance in a collaborative way. So there is a sense of joint working, I think, to provide clarity insofar as one can about what should be happening at local level. Guidance has been prepared beforehand? Guidance was prepared at the beginning. I think that what I am talking about here is people learning the lessons of how implementation is going and then refining guidance so that things can be improved moving forward. It touches on the point about the finding of people having slightly underestimated the scale of the challenge. People have learned a little bit as they have gone along about what they need to do to make this work more effectively. It was a voyage to an extent into the unknown, really. You are trying to develop and implement a very different way of working, a very different way of engaging with service users. I think that it was always quite difficult to predict quite how that should best be done. Yes, and you have alluded to the challenges being underestimated a few times. I appreciate that. This committee hears quite a lot about challenges being underestimated, policies being brought in and then we look at it some years later and say, oh dear. That rather concerns me. We have looked at the £70 million that has been spent on implementation so far. There are two questions begged by that. First of all, do you have any insight about what modelling was done at the outset to say that the £70 million is what we will need to implement this project? Was there business planning done to say that this is the amount that it should be? And then, coming forward, is there any assessment, any learning to be taken from an assessment of what outcomes have been achieved, what KPIs have actually been hit and where best value has been achieved for that £70 million? I will ask the team to come in a second on the specifics of whether we looked at the modelling point. That is a very good question. I think that what I would say in general terms is that we are frustrated, as I am sure you are, that again this is a report where we are saying that we do not know what the baseline is and we do not have a benchmark. That was a recommendation that we made three years ago. Some progress has been made but we are still in a position where we do not have good enough data really to get under the skin of the scope and the reach of SDS, in particular things like option 2, which is obviously the newest bit of the landscape. That is frustrating and, as you say, that is a common theme. The question of how much things cost is related to that in that we do think that it is difficult to find exactly what has been achieved for that money. I think that the Government would say that that money was very specifically to provide guidance, to provide support, to help with the transition, so you may not necessarily expect a direct line to improved outcomes because it is about getting the thing set up. I am also conscious from our work and I think from the submissions that you have received that there is a debate between local government and local government and Scottish government about whether that money was enough. That is a common debate. We hear on lots of new policy initiatives, whether it is early years in learning, whether it is SDS or anything else, and there is always a judgment in there. I think that your point is well made, though, about and we will take this away and have a think about what we might be able to do around that whole question of the rigour around the financial modelling and the business case that comes through the financial memorandums and the legislative process, but then it obviously turns into actual real money when it comes to implementing things. I think that your point is well made there. Team, do we have anything on the specifics of how they came up with the original figure? Because we were looking at progress to date, we did not really look back to say what was done at the start of implementing the legislation. There was also a financial memorandum that was prepared and there was a degree of scrutiny on that. You would be aware from the correspondence that you received from COSLA that there still appeared to be some on-going concerns about the overall level of funding to support implementation. I would like to come back to that in a couple of seconds. One quick question begged is understanding is that the funding will be turned off, if I can put it that way, in 2018. What happens then? Why was that not planned for at the outset? To be fair, the turning off to use that phrase was planned for. That was always the plan. That is not really coming as a surprise to anyone. It was very specifically transition funding and the way that has been managed is as it was set out by the government to be fair. As I said earlier in the report, there is now discussion under way about what, if any, additional funding from the centre, if you like, is required to get the strategy up to a better place of completion. Those discussions we understand are under way at the moment. I think that you might know from the submission from the Scottish Government that the Scottish Government has already committed to on-going funding for advocacy, support and information services running through to 2021. Talking of submissions is finally in this section. Given Kozla's concerns regarding the Scottish budget process, do you think that the Scottish Government needs to take a longer term and more flexible approach to local authority funding to implement this part of the national—the transformational strategy? As you know, Mr Kerr, we are big advocates and fans of as long-term as you can. I would include that in the local government and the NHS. It is reported that it is something that we have said in relation to the NHS. It is something that we have said, the county commission has said, in relation to funding for local government. Absolutely, I think that the more clarity and certainty into the future that councils can have about their funding overall and therefore the bit of that that is for social care and how that applies through to SDS would be a good thing. We would encourage Government to do that, as we encourage councils to take a longer-term view of where they can. It is not directly related to self-directed support, it is related to another piece of work that we are doing that will be bringing to the committee next year, which is on early learning and child care. As part of that work, we are looking at the planning for expansion of early learning and child care to meet the Scottish Commence commitments by the end of this current Parliament of expanding the access to publicly funded early learning and child care. That is an area in which we understand that the Scottish Government has already committed to local authorities that will give them a three-year funding envelope, to allow them to plan with a bit more certainty and confidence, so to understand that that is happening. Thank you, Fraser, for the comments that you made earlier about East Ayrshire and the role that they are playing in that process. I do know that they are heavily engaged in this and I do believe too that it is the way they do business, the way they see it, that was the comment that you made earlier. That is very encouraging, and it is encouraging also to hear about so many success stories right across this programme. However, as usual with the Audit Committee, there are always opportunities for us to explore how we can improve the situation that we have. I would like to turn to one of our favourite subjects, data gathering and evaluation. You have mentioned it several times about the inconsistent approach to data collection that you have seen during your inquiry. Can you give us a little more insight as to how the different authorities are performing here, particularly on the relation to the options that people have? I am particularly keen to find out about option 2 and the take-up and what the picture looks like across the landscape in Scotland. I will kick off on that, Mr Coffin, and I may be assoyd to come in with some of the detail. As we say on page 14 and onwards in the report, more reliable is required. I want to make the point that we do not just say this because we are auditors because we like data. We say this because we think that it is important. We say this because we think that it helps decisions. We say this because it helps people to understand what their choices are. For me, there are two levels. One is a basic one about how people are accessing services and what options are they taking up. Even within that, as we say in the report, if you take option 2 as the example of being the most innovative and the newest option available, it looks very different depending on where you are. To some extent, you might expect that. I am not saying that that is a bad thing, but the point is that we do not really know whether it is a planned variation or whether it just happens to be different. I think that that is the bit that would be enormously helpful to better understand. Zoe can say a little bit about what we have done in the report. In the next couple of pages, 16 and 17, we have pulled on the data that is available that begins to paint a bit of a picture around SDS, but it is slightly impressionistic because we do not have the solid data on the choices. Zoe, do you want to add anything to that? I suppose that, in terms of the specifics of the local authority areas that you went to, I do not think that we saw anyone that cracked it and got the data-gathering thing together. It is quite complex. It comes down to a lot of areas such as computer systems and understanding it. Also, for social work staff to understand the options that they are presenting and that they have given each option explained with the service user, each option that is available to them. We did not really see anyone that cracked it. There are some authorities that are starting to understand it and to get the computer systems in place, but that is where it starts. Obviously, the local authorities cannot gather the information well enough. It is really hard to upgrade up to the national level, which is why, when you see it under, we say about how we need better information gathering from the national statistics, which I think the Scottish Government recognises. At the moment, it is under development. There are a lot of issues with those numbers and I would not feel comfortable saying that this is exactly how many people are getting SDS, because we just do not know at the moment. In the authority areas, was there any assessment of what the uptake should look like per authority? The authorities have done that. How do the people who are exercising option to exercise? Do they come forward and say that they want to make that positive choice? Is there an encouragement to people to think about that option as being the one that most closely reflects their needs? How it should work is what you just said at the end there. How it should work in terms of the legislation and the guidance is that through meaningful dialogue and conversation with service users, under carers and their families, you come up with the best option for that person. One of the challenges is that it is possible for that whole process to go really well and to be done absolutely in the spirit of SDS and for people not to know that they've just had option 2, because they're not necessarily sitting down with somebody saying, you've got these four options and here's option 2 for you. If it's a genuine conversation about their needs and what's going to have the best chance of improving their outcomes, you might not really know that you've gone down route 2. It's important for the council to know that, I would suggest, and for the providers to know which it is, and that's why there's always a point about the systems is really important, but it's not necessarily the case that the people on the receiving end of this will necessarily know which option they're taking, and actually that would be a good thing. The issue, as you've said though, Mr Coffey, is that that's not what we see everywhere all the time. The Perth and Cunroth model is interesting, for example, where they've delegated certain amounts of money to certain levels of people that they can just commit without checking and they keep track of that, and we find that's helped in terms of that sense of empowerment for the front-line workers who know that they can commit up to £200 or £400, wherever it is, on services to have the best chance of improving outcomes for that person. That's not in the model that we see in other places where it's a bit more tightly controlled and people are a bit uncomfortable, particularly about more innovative or certainly more creative solutions. So I think exactly as you say that, as well as the kind of statistical thing about how many people are getting what option, there is also then that difference of experience that people are having across the country, which will vary enormously depending on where you are. The colleagues have mentioned budgets at the end of the day, that'll be the crucial factor. Do you think we've got the balance right in supporting the choices that people wish to make in terms of the options that they wish to exercise on their own behalf and the support service that we need to put in place to deliver it? Have we got the balance right there, do you think? No. I don't actually have—I think that it's as best as it can be. I think that I wouldn't have a strong view either way on it. That's not a very good answer. That's terrible. As part of the audit, we did quite a lot of work with social workers, social work managers and support staff to explore what was helping in hindering implementation of self-directed support. We anticipated that budgets would be a big story, but it wasn't the story, it wasn't universally the story. In some places, social workers and other staff were saying that it was clearly constrained on the choices and their ability to implement SDS, but it wasn't universally the case. We found variability both across authorities and even within authorities. It's clearly part of the story, but it wasn't the whole story in terms of what's helping in hindering SDS being implemented properly. Looking beyond the report again, convener, where would we go next with something like this? We're seven years into the 10-year programme. You've made some fairly familiar recommendations that we've all seen in a number of years. If you're back again next year with us, what would you expect to see by way of improvement in data gathering and evaluation? We would expect to see the data that Zoe described as currently under development having moved on and being much more reliable. We would expect to see a continuation and an upping of the pace around sharing good practice examples and ensuring that the learning in the system is happening. I think that, really importantly, particularly now that the governance discussion around integrated joint boards has happened, we really need to be seeing those organisations making a difference on the ground over the next two to three years. I think that the next three-year period for IGBs is hugely important. You can forgive people a bit for getting those things up and running and getting the governance arrangements sound and understanding how all the money works. Of course, that's really important, but there's no doubt that our evidence on the ground is that that's got in the way of things like SDS. Actually, in an ideal world, those two things would have been considered together. We would have been looking at setting up IGBs alongside an approach to social care that the SDS sets out, but that hasn't really happened. We've been going to concentrate on getting those things set up and now we're coming back to upping the pace on SDS again. I certainly hope that in the next two to three years, the remainder of the strategy, you really begin to see that consistency of experience, the consistency of delivery supported by better systems and data being the norm across the country over the next three years is where we need to get to. To help that process to succeed, is there an independent evaluation plan that is under way by the department to assess and monitor this? When can we expect to see that? As you'll see from the response, the Government has a number of things in train that will help them to evaluate where they are as they get towards the end of the 10-year strategy. Absolutely, we would expect to see a clear assessment of the extent to which strategy has achieved the aims that were set out 10 years ago. I would hope that we could see as constituency members, regional members of the Parliament, how their respective local authorities are performing, not just a framework or a national picture, but I would like to be able to see per authority how we're doing with this whole programme. Thank you very much for your responses. Just before I talk about the workforce issues, I would like to just, a number of times you mentioned things being underestimated. At paragraph 87 of your report, you talk about what was underestimated, but have the Scottish Government or any of the partners actually explained to you why they underestimated the scale of change? So, not really, I suppose, is the answer to that. I guess that's because it wasn't just Government, it was everyone, I think. While a lot of planning had gone into the strategy, a lot of planning had gone into the implementation of it, I think the bit that was very difficult to know at that point was just the sheer scale of the cultural change that was required to make this thing work. As well as that, obviously, a lot has happened. The world has moved on since 2010. As you say, we list some of the things in here that we've subsequently identified as some of the things that they didn't anticipate that weren't completed. I'm not sure that our sense is that it wasn't an absence of thought on their part, on anyone's part, it just genuinely was. The scale of this cultural change here was something that people had underestimated. We don't need to analyse that, though. In order to get adequate learning going forward for when something like this happens again, don't we need to understand the why, as well as the what? So, I think that's what we've tried to do in these sections, I think that we've, with the benefit of hindsight, looked at what was planned, what actually happened, what was done, and we've identified, on parades 87 and 88, the kinds of things that with hindsight should have happened. As you say, in future, we would look to learn these lessons, for sure. I want to look at the workforce briefly. Zoe McGuire, in an answer earlier on, talked about the options being explained to users. I see a paragraph 53 of your report. You have a quote from somebody who says, in my view, social workers have become gatekeepers for resources. They know the decisions being made ahead of us are wrong and, in some cases, counter to the legislation, but they have no power to do anything. Is it conceivable, in your view, that staff may identify several beneficial outcomes, but only those achievable with the existing resources being provided are the ones that are actually presented as options? Yes, we had certainly had those sorts of discussions with front-line social workers, as we were doing our case study work or our field work. It all seems to come down to leadership and permission, so if a social worker has a permission to be able to think out in the box and be innovative and creative, you can follow that through to the outcome for the service user. Where permission is not clear or where there is some sort of different understanding of what the purpose of self-directed support is, we did certainly see some differences in the outcomes that were being achieved by the service user. To put it crudely, if there is a buy-in that this is about people being able to have that discussion and having those tricky conversations about what is the best thing for them, and if that buy-in is there, then, by and large, the social workers are able to deliver on that. If there is some sort of sense from front-line staff that this is quite tricky, this could be difficult to do, that is not on the list of things, it is a wee bit strange, then those conversations are more difficult for them. Fraser referenced the Perth and Kinross model, and we certainly found that that was making the difference. Where there was an implicit permission for social workers to have a threshold, they were able to be more creative and innovative in the discussions that they were having with people. The point that you make, Mr Kerr, is absolutely right. It is something that you see across to varying degrees all public services. Doctors have similar choices to make about a balance between the best possible care that is available and the cost associated with that. It is exactly the same with this, and there is always that kind of balance to be struck. I think that when it works well, as Lorianne says, is when that is a conversation between the service provider, the social worker and the service user in an explicit way that says, well, yes, that might be the best thing that we can possibly have, but that is going to cost too much, so what else can we do? I think that where it is more problematic is where the social worker, and I think that this is what the quote is getting a sense of when the social worker feels very constrained to even have the conversation in the first place, so the message that you hear as a service user is that we just can't afford it. There is no budget, which is a very different kind of conversation to one that is actually trying to explore what the solutions might be. Again, it is that qualitative nature, which is why we have done for us a lot of qualitative audit work in this report, speaking to service users and social workers, because I think that is where you really begin to get under the skin of it. Just to add on to Fraser's point, one of the important messages that came through from the qualitative work with service users and carers was differences in terms of the transparency of the process. Some people were quite clearly saying that they weren't entirely sure how much money was available, both in actual terms or nominal terms, and therefore they felt that they weren't necessarily being able to express a full choice or participate properly in that discussion about the right services for other themselves or the person that they're caring for. Staying with the actual staff on the ground, as it were, in one of your key messages, number four, you say, at the same time, there are already challenges in recruiting and retaining social care staff across the country, owing to low wages and social hours and difficult working conditions. I beg to questions. First of all, this is in the context that Anthony Clark mentioned earlier about increasing of early learning and childcare. How will the commitments under SDS be resourced in a context in which the demands on the staff are increasing significantly, aren't they? It's very challenging. Beyond the discussion that we had earlier about the transition support and the support for advocacy, there's no indication that there's going to be specifically more resource for this. That's why it's about a shifting of a way of working more than it is investing in more. There's no doubt that the point that you make about care staff across the board is hugely challenging. We're keenly awaiting, I think, towards the end of this year the joint Scottish Government and COSLA strategy workforce plan around health and care. As you know, we did a report earlier this year on the NHS workforce and we're expecting, as I say, Government and COSLA to produce a health and care workforce strategy by the end of this year. We'll be looking very closely at that because I think that's where we would expect to see the response to the challenge that you just described, Mr Kerr, because it is significant for sure. It's not, as you say, just in terms of a quantum of work or a volume of work that is increasingly a thing. It's also the nature of that work, particularly around SDS being quite different and asking quite different things of front-line social workers and care workers. That's exactly right. The second question is, of course, that the issues that you identified—low wages, anti-social hours and difficult working conditions—are presumably not going to change or be changed by the developments later in the year. Do you see anything changing? If not, do you see the challenge being solvable? What we've described there is how we've tried to capture the challenge and, to some extent, the perception of care work at the moment. I suppose what we're beginning to get into is if you're genuinely thinking about changing how care is provided and delivered. For example, if in 10 years' time we get to a place where home care is provided not on the basis of 10-minute slots, if we manage to find a different and better way of doing that, then actually the profession of being a home care worker might be more attractive to people. The two things go hand in hand. I think that's the kind of thing that we would expect to see in a workforce strategy at the end of the year. It's not saying how we deal just with the problem today. It's actually what does the service need to look like in five or ten years' time and what, therefore, do we need to start doing in terms of recruitment, training, promotion, attraction—all of that stuff—to make it a more attractive career option for people. It's those kinds of things that we'll be expecting to come through. The other dimension to this is not just the role that social workers and health staff and the third sector play. It's also the role that communities play as well. When we were doing our fieldwork, we saw some quite innovative and thoughtful practice around local authorities, IJBs and thinking about what the community empowerment tax might mean for the role of communities in supporting people themselves. That's just an idea that I mentioned to this, which may reduce the pressure on the resources that are needed from the public sector. I was just going to make that point. I think that we saw some very innovative work, particularly up in Western Isles. The other thing to say is that we've seen some examples of local authorities who know that this is an issue and that it's going to be a worsening issue and are trying to do some innovative work. For example, we saw Stornoway Western Isles Council doing some work with Skills Development Scotland to try and attract young people into caring. That's a difficult thing to do. There's a challenge. It feels like there are discussions starting to be had given the resources and given the demographics that you're working with. Forgive the dafflady question, but some people are doing some really good things. How is that best practice being captured and shared across the piece? We've already described lots and lots of support agencies and organisations, particularly in the third sector, that are supporting a lot of this innovative and creative thinking. There are lots of examples of practice exchanges and people trying to come up with new ideas and discuss their particular issues and the challenges that they have. That is a live issue. People are not very aware that there are issues around that, and there are various attempts to have those discussions and to share practice to look at where they can do things a little bit differently. We did hear and we were hoping to hear some more of those sort of cluster. Zoe, do you want to describe what we... So, I'm going to pant off to Zoe. I suppose picking up on that a little bit is the idea of self-directed support. If someone goes in and has their outcomes assessed, and for example, we met a young man who had quite severe learning disabilities, so on a traditional model he might have a certain going to a care home or something, but under SDS he's given, if he goes under option one, he can get a direct payment, and then his personal assistant was a friend that he made at school, so it was a more peer-to-peer support type of care rather than a more traditional type of care, so it worked really well for him. He met his outcomes. He's able to actively participate in societies. He went to school, he went to college and could actually really engage in society. So, mate, you can see how some of the issues around the more traditional care work it becomes a better option when you're talking about care work in a slightly different way and thinking about care work in a different way. To come back to the big picture, again, not the individual ones, and looking at the Scottish Government responses to your points, which I think you presumably have, do you feel that you've been given the sort of answers that you would hope to hear? I read the last one, which says, ensure that the requirement to effectively implement self-directed support that's reflected in policy guidance, and so on. The recommendation will be examined and progressed, and they will finish up saying something like, this will add new impetus to the implementation of self-directed support. There are things going well, but there are things not happening. I think that, to somebody else, you were asked what you might see in a year's time, and then you were speaking about a 10-year timescale. It doesn't sound like they're taking this on board and going to do something about it. Two things in there. As ever, I would like the responses to be more specific, and I think that one in particular could have been more specific, and so that I would accept. I don't think that necessarily means, though, that the Government aren't taking it seriously and doing quite a lot of work on this, so I don't think that I would go that far. On that one in particular, I think that that's really important, because if SDS is genuinely about a different way of operating, then it needs to be built into everything else, and at the moment it still feels a little bit siloed. It still feels a little bit like there's an SDS policy over here and there's a childcare policy over here and there's a community empowerment act over here. All of those things need to be coming together, and so that's why we made the recommendation, and of course we will look very carefully at the reform of adult social care programme as it progresses. I guess that we are content with the response from Government. We would have liked in some places for it to be more specific in terms of the action that they are now taking, but to give assurance to the committee, we will continue to keep close to this whole issue as we progress towards the end of the strategy. Do you see something behind the scenes that suggests that, oh goodness, this report is telling us that it's a wake-up call, we need to do something? I'm not sure that it's been a wake-up call, because I think that with some justification, I think that Government would say that they've been awake to this for a while, so a lot of the stuff that Anthony mentioned, a lot of the stuff that we've raised in our report and recommended, is contained in their strategy action plan for the next two years, 2016 to 2018. I could speculate that that might have had something to do with the fact that we were doing this audit and they knew it was coming, and behind the scenes they knew what we were likely to say, and if that's the case then I'm delighted with that, because it moves the thing on. I guess that it's one of those things where it's a process that has been on-going, and I think that what we're saying now, and I think that Government agree with this, is that there is a step change required in the pace and coverage of implementation, I think that that's the key thing. There's been a lot of good work done, but we're now at a place where it needs to be happening more consistently in more places. Wait, but they just need to get out of bed, maybe. I wonder if I could just ask you for your thoughts on the issue of choice, ultimate choice. A service user perhaps decides they need this or that, and an assessment disagrees with that. Not on the basis of cost, so Liam Kerr was leading us earlier, but say there's no issue about cost. Ultimately, who makes the decision? I see your example on page 27 where you referred to him as George and he decided he didn't want particular care in a Saturday so that he could save the money up for a carpet. Did George get his carpet, as I've always been? Ultimately, where is the choice? If there's a professional judgment about something that a service user wishes that the professional team disagrees with, where do we sit? It's the kind of core question at the heart of SDS, Mr Coffey. The starting point is the safety and wellbeing of the service user, and I guess, at that level, to use that terrible word, the professionals will say that that's just not a good idea. We do say in the report that there are some cases where that element of choice isn't really available to people, even if they want to do something different. The needs assessment may be saying that, actually, that's really not a good idea. Again, that's where Anthony's point about transparency and discussion is important, because it's important that people understand why that's the case rather than just told you're not getting something. Beyond that, then, you do get—and this is why, in Exhibit 6, we highlighted some of these challenging scenarios in relation to risk, because, as well as the money that there is for authorities in particular, and the carpets are a good example of this, some big reputational risks around some of this stuff, because you can imagine some of the local news headlines if public money is being spent on somebody getting a new carpet. That is where the leadership question is important, that's where front-line social workers operating in a clear policy environment is important. We mentioned somewhere else in the report, a weak case study about the Highland Council, trying to—I think—coming from a good place, trying to provide a bit of clarity about what was okay and what wasn't. In actual fact, it was received not positively by people, because it felt like things were being prejudged and decisions were being made even before we'd had the conversation. It is very difficult, and it is going to be a judgment, and that's why the meaningful dialogue between all the parties is so important, because then you've got a better chance of getting to an answer that everyone's comfortable with, rather than a more transactional thing, which is somebody coming along saying, I want this big long list, and somebody else saying, well, you can't have 10 of those things, you can only have two. That's not going to work. I think I would say that this was something that we considered very much when we were conducting the audit. It was very much how we approached the audit and the methodology that we used, because we were very clear that if we took a more process-based approach to this, we would be able to tell some parts of some stories. It was very important to us that we were able to talk to people who are using self-directed support in their families and their carers to try and understand some of that nuance and some of that tricky stuff. I think that there was a challenge for us to try and present that in a way that we were able to show some of that, some of those tricky conversations and how that could be perceived, because there are some difficult decisions being made by front-line social workers who are being trained and supported to be able to use their professional judgment in a way that is about an outcome for the person that they are working with. There are clearly some challenges up and down the line of command and accountability and supporting those decisions being made. We talked a lot to social workers who loved self-directed support because they felt that that was what social work was about. They were able to help people to get what they wanted, but there were some tensions around budgets and what people think and all that. I think that that was something that we came across throughout the whole piece of work that we did, and I am hoping that we have been able to show through the report the complexity of the decisions that are being made with people. Lorraine makes a very important point about the link between outcomes and choice. This is a very different way of thinking about the support that people should receive under the SGS model. Previously, as you know, people would simply be almost put in boxes for you to need this service or that service. This is about trying to think about people's needs and identifying how you might develop and deliver different services or combinations of services in quite different ways. In the report, we highlight the assessment work that the Care Inspectorate has done on how social workers feel about assessing outcomes and planning for outcomes. There is quite a striking trajectory of the extent to which the support plans that social workers agree with users and carers do focus on outcomes. It has gone from half of the plans having outcomes at the centre in 2014 to three quarters of the plans having outcomes at the centre in 2016-17. That is quite a big change. That is part of the tension here in terms of social workers beginning to understand whether the service will deliver outcomes as well as the cost dimension to the discussion. This is about judgments, not it? People will have different judgments about what is right, both in terms of the services and also the use of public funds, which add to the complications of this process for everybody. There is still a big issue in there for local authorities or social workers or T's who may fear litigation, perhaps, if they recommend something that is for a person that is ignored. Are there any cases in which the service user does proceed with their choice against the recommendations of the social worker? I do not think that that was a thing that we came across. The concerns that social workers had were not to do with being sued or litigating in any way, Mr Coffey. It was more to do with what happens if this does not work, can I spend the money, how is it going to look, what is my manager going to say, am I, do I have permission to do this kind of thing? It was those kinds of issues more than a specific thing. Just to be clear, the concept of best value remains incredibly important in this whole discussion. Absolutely the decisions that are taken, however innovative and how creative, need to stand up. They need to stand up in terms of both the outcomes and in terms of best value and value for money. In an ideal world, and we have some of those in here, you can do all those things, you can improve outcomes and it can be less costly and therefore value for money best value is delivered, but absolutely there is a need for authorities, managers in particular, to have an eye to the issues of best value and reputational risk, of course there is. I take you back to the point that Colin Beattie raised with you, because I just think that it is helpful to capture some understanding of this. I think that it was Mr Clark helpfully outlined the framework by which social work allocate resources as critical, substantial, moderate and low, and basically the top two are the ones that get funded. Is that then a reflection, if there is greater spend but fewer people, that money is going towards complexity and crisis rather than prevention? Is that a fair comment? I think that that is a reasonable conclusion that you can reach, convener. Over the years, as Anthony says, that bar has raised so that the bulk of that increasing resource is being spent on longer-term and more complex cases, and therefore that money is beginning by definition not being spent on prevention. The only reason I hesitated, convener, was that that does not necessarily mean that there is not any preventative work happening. It is just that it is not being spent out of that particular budget, because of course there can be lots of work in the community, there can be work in housing, there can be all sorts of other ways in which prevention can be done that can help prevent people getting into those top two categories in the first place. There is not a direct line necessarily, but for sure your analysis of sound, which is the bulk of that money, is now being spent on the top two categories. I remember debates, maybe less than a decade ago, where we talked about shifting the spend to prevention, because that avoided people getting into the more complex, more costly stage. I am assuming that, if that is happening across the board and you accept that analysis, then it is happening within SDS as well, and this is simply funding complexity rather than anything else. No, I do not think that that necessarily follows. As I said earlier, the question of eligibility criteria and decisions being made locally has always been there in terms of social care, so in a sense that has not really changed and that would be the case regardless. If anything, I think that you would probably argue that self-directed support as an approach should actually ease the pressure to that, it should actually help, because it should allow more engagement with the people who need services at the lower two areas, so it should be part of the solution, but there is no doubt that constrained resources across the piece inevitably for people makes it harder to change significantly how they are going about their work. I agree that I would have thought that it would lead to earlier intervention and therefore more prevention, but we really do not have the data that takes us there, so key from you and one of my colleagues pursued this is actually getting the data set right that we are able to truly measure the effectiveness of that. What discussions have you had with the Scottish Government and COSLA, do you sense that they will get to the right place, because you recommended this in 2014 and I do not think that they paid much attention to you then? We are always hopeful. We do now, to be fair, have a data set that is, while under development, at least it is a data set that was not there a few years ago, so our sense is that they will continue to develop that. We have the responses now from this report and, of course, whatever the committee decides to do with it will add weight to that, but I could not agree more that that is a really important issue, not in its own right and for its own sake, but in terms of ensuring that this policy is well delivered and implemented across the land. Let me shift, because others have explored budget issues with you and it is typical amongst my constituents that they say that there is no money and that is why we cannot get the package that we think we need. However, the scale of change is something that everybody has raised with you. I remember direct payments introduced in the legislation, which I think was 1996. I think that SDS is built on direct payments. You have in your papers Exhibit 3 that shows, by local authority, the uptake for 2015-16. How does that differ? Is the substantially more uptake now that we have self-directed support or is that broadly in keeping with the trend that there was previously? To be honest, the issue around the number of direct payments has been an increase in the uptake of direct payments, but we have to be a bit cautious about how we read some of this data. Across the board, from the more traditional direct payments data, around 5 per cent of people are now taking direct payments. That is of all people that receive social care services. Within self-directed support of those who have self-directed support of assessed, this is bearing in mind the data that is not brilliant around self-directed support. All those people who have been assessed of having a choice and control, 11 per cent of people have gone under option 1. The number of that 5 per cent are receiving SGS Salman. Some of that is quite difficult to unpick. I suppose that my caution against looking at some of these numbers is that what does that actually mean in terms of is that a good thing or a bad thing that has increased in direct payments? We explained a little bit in the report about this. It could be a good thing because that is the best way for that person to achieve their outcomes or it could be choosing direct payments because there are no other services that they could have. That is the path that has been put down. It is really quite hard to unpick. It is quite complex. I can be very brief. In exhibit 2, just the page before, the green line tries to demonstrate what has happened to direct payments since 2010 up to 2016. There is a very gradual increase there. Two things are that there is a gradual increase. It still strikes me instinctively as quite low given how long they have been available. As Zoe said, the caution then is that it is also difficult to attribute any increase in direct payments to SDS or not. We just do not have the good enough data to tell. You think that an increase in direct payments would be a consequence of enhanced choice for people but, as you say, we cannot tell at this stage. I have a couple more questions, but I will let Colin Beesie in just now. Sorry to be obsessive about budgets, but I think that there is maybe some quite important behind that. In your briefing paper, you said in key message 2, bullet point 3, authorities are experiencing significant pressures from increasing demand and limited budgets. At the same time, paragraph 88, you are talking about a smaller workforce. And again, coming back to paragraph 62, as I said before, you are indicating a substantial decrease in the number of people taking up the service. At the same time, the budget has gone up by 8.6 per cent in real terms between 2011-12 and 2015-16. The people who are taking up the service, do we have a breakdown at all of what services they are using? There has obviously been something significant happening there, changing, that is impacting over and above what seems to me should be a reducing cost, not an increasing cost. I am not sure if we have a breakdown specifically of the services, but it does come down to, as the convener said a second ago, the complexity of the care requirements of people that are now in the care system, in a nutshell. People are living longer, they have more and more complex needs and health and care needs, and that is why we are seeing the pattern that you have just described. We do not seem to see the analysis that brings that through and shows that change is happening, because obviously planning for the future, we need to understand what is happening behind this, because on the face of it, the indications are that it should not be. Antony might have the number there, but when we did the social work report last year, I forget the number now, but we did a bit of analysis that assessed or estimated how much more would need to be spent on social work services in Scotland, all things being equal. Just trying to follow the demographic trend that we have just been talking about, we reckoned that there was a need for Antony. The potential cost increase would be £667 million by 2019-20 unless services change. Is that for a reducing number of people? I am cautious about the reducing number of people, because part of the stories is increased use of externalisation of services as well. Not all social work and social care services are provided by local authorities or by IJBs. There is a significant use of the third sector and the private sector as well. When you are talking about social work staff, you are probably talking about social work staff that are employed by local authorities and IJBs. There is a significant proportion of staff that are employed in the third sector and the private sector as well. Would that affect the absolute number of people who are receiving home care and so on? No, but it would affect the point that you are making about the spend versus the number of staff that are providing social work services. The spend would increase because you are still contracting out to third parties? Sorry, I did not make my point very clearly. You were drawing a parallel between changes in social work spending and changes in the social work workforce. I think that you are probably citing a figure in our report that talks about the social work workforce. It is a publicly employed staff. There is a significant portion of staff that work in the private and third sector. That is a point that I was trying to make. If we are looking at the cost dynamic, that needs to be factored in. One needs to look at the overall spend in social work services in the public, private and third sector and also the staffing levels in the public, private and third sector as well. We can come back to you on that if you find that helpful. The interesting thing to bear in mind is that we see this trend in lots of the work that we do. The NHS overview report that the order general produces every year will also recognise the cost of that increasing demographic. The reason that we are keen to encourage Government to make sure that all those things are joined up is that they tend to be the same people in actual fact. The people who are receiving this kind of care are also likely to be the people who are potentially in and out of hospital. Ensuring to use that terrible phrase, the person-centred approach is absolutely the right thing to do. What we are trying to encourage Government is to get the right data and processes and systems in place to ensure that on the ground that is actually happening. I return to just a couple of final questions. I am very conscious that the way social work operates is through commissioning. You have collective services. Take the example of the day centre, where maybe 40 people might attend at different points during the day or indeed the week. If one to three people decide to pursue a choice that is different to that, they are then withdrawing from that service. How is commissioning changed to factor that in? And are there concerns expressed by some, particularly in local authorities, about the sustainability of those collective services? I will ask the team to come in on the specifics of commissioning convener. The short answer to your last question is yes, there are some concerns about that. One of the things that councils recognise as a potential risk of that is that if there are more individualised and personalised packages and people are choosing different things, you need to also think then about the impact on other services and that is something that we heard and that is something that we reflected in the report. Team, do you want to say something about the commissioning end of that? That was a topic that we covered in some detail in the social work in Scotland report, where we highlighted the need for social work departments, which was what we were talking about at that time, rather than IJBs, to think differently about strategic commissioning in the context of health and social integration and self-directed support. We cited some good examples of social work departments working with the third sector, working with service users, to try and work out how services need to change over time, but we also highlighted a number of examples where providers felt a little bit excluded from those decision-making processes. It was pretty clear from our work at that time and previous work that the Care Inspector has done that there is still scope for social work departments and IJBs to get better at really mapping out the change in demographic needs and trying to identify scenarios and models of how services might change. It is a risk, I think, because there is a degree of uncertainty and the need for better data in that area. Did you find any evidence from your previous report that that had been taken on board? The report was only published last year and we haven't really followed it up yet. It is something that we'll be looking at when we do the piece of work next year on health and social integration that Fraser mentioned earlier, because we'll be looking at locality planning via IJBs, so that's been an important part of that story. Sorry, Mr McKinnon. Finally, from me, the committee is engaged in perhaps doing some post-legislative scrutiny and this has been one area and one piece of legislation that's been suggested to us. I'm keen to kind of try and tease out from you. Do you think it's been a problem with the legislation? Perhaps it's too permissive? Do you think it's a problem with implementation? In this area in particular, in social work services, there tends to be a postcode lottery, whether it's differences in charging, differences in assessment, and that becomes very confusing for people trying to access services. Is the guidance that the Scottish Government issues, is it statutory, or again, is the flexibility for local authorities to interpret it in their own way? I'm looking for just a general feel from you. On specifics of the last one, there is statutory guidance that was produced at the time of the legislation, so that is there. Inevitably, it's quite broad, because the whole point of this exercise is to give people the flexibility and freedom to design services around individual needs. That doesn't help to answer your question about, is it the legislation or is it implementation? My sense of it, having been involved in two of those since the legislation was introduced, is a question of implementation, because we really haven't heard anyone at any point saying that either the policy framework is a problem, or the legislation is a problem, or the guidance is a problem. In fact, everyone speaks very positively about all those things. On that basis, everyone who is involved in it seems to be comfortable with all of that. The question is, what are the things that are getting in the way of it happening? We have tried to tease out some of those things in this report, convener. It seems to me that there is always a bit of a balance between when something is a postcode lottery and when something is genuine localisation. The thing for me is that councils and individual social work departments or IGBs need to be able to explain why a thing is as it is. Otherwise, I think that they do open themselves up to accusations of it just being a bit random. I think that is where we are still at. I think that what this report says is that, for no obviously good reason, the way in which these things are delivered, to be fair, both within local authorities and between local authorities, is still too patchy and too different. That is why I think that I am not at all surprised that you have had a lot of interest in that, because it is something that touches a lot of people's lives in very important ways. Of course, people talk to each other, so people will know that somebody they know either in the same area or in the next door area have had a very different experience. They are thinking, well, why is it different from me? On your commissioning point, just an example of that, we talk about the use of framework agreements as one way in which some authorities are operating. We have an exhibit that says that there are lots of good things about that, but the danger of a framework agreement is that it can be perceived as saying that there is lots of choice as long as it is off this list. Again, we come back to those questions of management and leadership and culture, which are the things that, at the end of the day, are going to make the difference, but they need to start making the difference in some places quite quickly. One final point, and I might have missed this, so my apologies. Is it an appeals mechanism? How many have accessed it? That usually is an indicator of whether the process is working effectively or not. Clearly, there will be a complaints process within local authorities. I am not sure whether there is a formal statutory appeals process, to be honest, convener, and we will look into that and get back to you on that. That is helpful. Any final questions from members? No, I thank you very much for your attendance this morning. Do not rush away. The committee will go into private session, but we would like you to stay behind. Thank you very much.