 Maen nhw lawer, dweud o'r adeilad uchelafio y cyfriliadau cwestiwn armor i gyflafoddiu ceisio yn ddeg chi gfawr i ni-deg, neu yn olygu chi'n gweithio. Pwysgag fan y Prifetio Richard Baker. Thank you. A fyddwch i Gwladdfodolfoedd, mae'n ddigon i'n mwyaf o ymwyaf o'r panfaith cyfriliad cyfriliad o'r panfaith yn y Nôl East? Sechstri John Swinney. The recruitment of staff is a matter for individual public sector organisations, for which the Government provides a strong level of public funding to support this task. The Government also has a range of policies to support those who are finding times difficult financially. Our pay policy focuses resources on the lower paid by promoting the Scottish living wage alongside distinctive measures to address low pay. Richard Baker Given that the cabinet secretary agreed to discuss Nabadean waiting in salaries with public sector employees in the city in region last May to aid recruitment, can I ask what steps have been taken as a result of that undertaking? As I understand, one Scottish Government agency in the city has already uplifted wages to reflect the high cost of living in Aberdeen. Does it not make the case for Scottish Government to support other public sector employees in the city in the same way? Richard Baker There is an existing element of Scottish public sector pay policy that enables public sector organisations on the current arrangements to make specific arrangements where they find it challenging to recruit individuals because of a particularly competitive labour market. Those provisions exist already. They have been exercised. I know that this has been the subject of public comment from within Aberdeen in relation to Marine Scotland. Those arrangements exist for public bodies who operate under the Government's public sector pay policy for them to take appropriate steps if they can demonstrate the market issues that have to be addressed as a consequence of paying the particular support that is required to recruit for key vacancies. Richard Baker Thanks, Christian Allan. Christian Allan Does the cabinet secretary agree with me that the development of affordable housing as a credentials prison site with a target market of public sector workers demonstrates the Scottish Government's commitment to the recruitment and retainment of public sector staff in the north east? Richard Baker I think that Mr Llarr makes a very good and strong point. The Government has acted in collaboration with NHS Grampian to ensure that the site of the former Craig Inches prison is identified and is taken forward in concert with the local authority into the bargain to provide accommodation for key workers in the city, recognising the challenges that will exist in relation to access to the housing market. That is, of course, in addition to the £47.6 million for affordable housing support that is made available by the Government to Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire councils to assist in developing a broader range of affordable housing units. However, the former Craig Inches prison site was a particular initiative that the Government took to recognise the difficulties and challenges that will exist in access to affordable housing for key public sector workers. I am delighted that we have been able to make progress on that question. Annette Milne I am sure that the minister would agree with me that a very important area of concern in Aberdeen in particular is the difficulty of recruiting particularly senior health professionals and then retaining them in their posts once they discover the cost of housing in the area. I know about the Craig Inches proposals, which I do not think would be necessarily uniformly what is wanted. I know that the Government has been considering what could be done to alleviate the situation. Can the cabinet secretary give me any information on whether suitable housing might be available for incoming staff to either purchase or to rent? Clearly, there will be a range of housing providers that are active in the market in the north-east of Scotland. The investment that the Government is making in the Aberdeen western peripheral route will also open up new opportunities for housing development significantly on the periphery of the city into the bargain. I reiterate to Annette Milne the points that I made in my response to Christian Allard that, where the Government has been able to take forward an opportunity to expand the availability of affordable housing through the Craig Inches site, we have acted quickly and decisively to secure that for the public good. In addition to a strong programme of investment that the Government has made in supporting the housing market in the north-east of Scotland. To ask the Scottish Government how it ensures that consistently high standards are maintained by staff in the care sector. Consistently high standards are maintained through the regulation of the social services workforce by the Scottish Social Services Council. Social care staff must register with them and comply with the council's code of practice, which sets out the standards that workers must meet. The quality of staffing in care services is also assessed as part of all care inspectorate inspections. The care inspectorate has a range of enforcement powers which services must comply with or face closure. In 2013-14, 91 per cent of care services were awarded grades of good, very good or excellent for the quality of staffing. I thank the cabinet secretary for her response, which of course deals directly with the quality of staff, but in the second of the 2014 Wreath Lectures, Dr Attle will go under, focused on systems in healthcare from simple health checks, sorry, simple checklists to complex mechanisms and processes. He argued that they could be better designed to transform care from the richest parts of the world to the poorest. Does the minister agree with me that simple systems of checklists in our care setting for elderly patients would have a significant impact on their well-being? For example, from my constituents, a mother who suffers from a month's dementia does not receive regular and adequate hydration, while her caregivers have regular and legislated respirers. We have in place a range of national care standards that describe what individuals can expect from a care provider. They focus on the quality of life that the person using the service experiences. The standards for care homes for older people, for example, cover day-to-day life, including keeping well and eating well. On the issue of hydration, that includes a standard that an individual can have hot and cold drinks whenever they like. It is up to the service providers to ensure that they are meeting such standards. That could include the use of checklists, but the focus must be on caring for the individual and their needs. Does the cabinet secretary think that it is fair that many councils in Scotland fund the council care sector at a rate of up to 80 per cent higher than the independent sector, yet the same high-quality standards are rightly expected by all care providers? I am aware of this being a very long-standing issue. When I was Minister for Public Health, it was an issue that was regularly raised. What I can say to Mary Scanlon is that we have some very good discussions going on through Scottish Care about how we can better support the sector to respond in the way that we need it to respond, not just in terms of care homes, but care at home as well. I would be happy to keep Mary Scanlon updated on how those discussions are going. To ask the Scottish Government what action it will take as a result of the statutory follow-up to the Accounts Commission report on South Ayrshire Council of February 2014. Local authorities must use resources as efficiently as possible and deliver services effectively to ensure that taxpayers get the best possible value. The Accounts Commission published a best value report on South Ayrshire Council in February 2014 and a further report on December 2014. The latter report notes that the council has made a good start in developing an improved framework to help to demonstrate best value. The council now needs to continue the improvements that has started in order to help to deliver improved services and achieve better outcomes for the people of South Ayrshire. The local government minister normally writes to the council leader when a best value report is published, and I did so in the case of South Ayrshire. In that letter, I noted the progress that has been made and reiterated the Accounts Commission's findings in relation to the need for effective implementation and sustained improvements. I will be taking a close interest in the council's progress and in the further report that the controller of audit has been asked to prepare within 18 months. I thank the minister for his answer, and I too welcome the December update of the Accounts Commission review, which indicated some improvement in the council's performance. Will the minister agree that South Ayrshire Council might also be applied to all other councils? That the council should have a limited number of key performance outcomes, which are made more widely known to its citizens, and that it all would benefit by ensuring its performance against those key indicators that are produced quarterly and communicated appropriately to those same citizens. Councils have to publish performance information that is specified by the Accounts Commission, and, under the 2014 direction that was published in December, there are three headline indicators of corporate management, service performance and how much reporting is taking place against the requirements of the local government benchmarking framework. A lot of that is published online with support from councils, and the Scottish Government supports that approach, but certainly any council is free to be proactive in publishing and promoting performance data of this sort, especially when it is already collected, and that can only help to ensure that there is greater transparency and that local citizens have an idea of how their council is performing and ensures that local government is paired with an informed local democracy. To ask the Scottish Government what recent discussions it has had with the UK Government regarding the publication of draft legislation arising from the recommendations of the Smith Commission. There have been a number of contacts with the UK Government at official and ministerial level to take forward implementation of the conclusions of the Smith Commission. I have been assured by the Secretary of State for Scotland that the Scottish Government will be fully involved in further work to develop draft clauses for publication later this month. Can I ask what plans or discussions have already been taken by the Scottish Government regarding early action on transferring powers that do not require primary legislation? The Scottish Government has set out to the UK Government a number of areas where we believe it is possible and practical for powers to be transferred in early course. One of the most significant priorities that was advanced by the First Minister in her discussion with the Prime Minister in December was the issue around 16 and 17-year-olds being able to vote in the 2016 general election for this Parliament, and progress has been made in that respect. There are, of course, a number of other areas of activity where we would like to see swifter progress, not least of which is on the devolution of the work programme, which the Smith Commission said should be the subject of early devolution and which the Government is concerned with is the subject of contract extension, which we believe breaches the spirit of the Smith Commission report. The cabinet secretary will, I am sure, be aware of the Scottish Labour's call yesterday for section 106, order to be brought forward to transfer the responsibility for the job creating powers of the work programme to the Scottish Government ministers. We have had some positive comments of support, particularly from Glasgow and Edinburgh City councils, on that. Can I ask the minister that the Scottish Government will also support that call? With the greatest respect to Duncan McNeill, he obviously hasn't been listening for some considerable number of weeks, because we have made the point to Parliament consistent with the Smith Commission report in which the Smith Commission said that the work programme was one of the areas that could be the subject of early devolution. We as a Government have been concerned that, at the same time as that report was finalised, the DWP was consulting about extending the existing work programme contracts and not enabling early and timious devolution of the responsibility to the Scottish Parliament. I welcome Mr McNeill's support for what the Government has been trying to do. I encourage him to use every opportunity that he has to say to the United Kingdom Government consistent with the spirit of the Smith Commission that there should be early devolution of the work programme, so that we can ensure that that work programme is configured in a fashion to meet the needs and the expectations of individuals that want to access employment in Scotland. Like many in Scotland, I look forward to the launch and the publication of draft clauses later this month. I hope that the Cabinet Secretary will respond in a far less cummergently manner to that exciting development that he did to the Smith agreement, which seemed to frazzle in his hand within 24 hours of the agreement being published. Can I ask the cabinet secretary, Deputy Presiding Officer? Everybody now accepts that the political debate in Scotland has moved on from what powers this Parliament has or will get to what we do with the powers. Can I ask him, for example, on the relation to air passenger duty about which he is so enthusiastic in bringing forward as a devolved facility here? Will he, given that power, abolish that duty, or is he just going to reduce it? Being accused of being cummergently by Annabelle Goldie is a bit like the pot being called the Kettle Black. If I could be so un-gallant on a Thursday morning to Baroness Goldie, on the issue of air passenger duty, that is one of the topics that we have said to the United Kingdom Government that we think merits early devolution. We also made clear in the white paper exactly what our proposal would be on reducing air passenger duty. I have reaffirmed that position, as other ministers have to Parliament, and I urge the United Kingdom Government to take speedy and timious action to devolve the responsibility to allow the Scottish Parliament to do something different to the regime that is currently put in place by the United Kingdom Government. To ask the Scottish Government, I might thank her after her answer. I hope that what progress has been made in integrating health and social care in Lanarkshire. Good progress has been made in South Lanarkshire to integrate adult health and social care. A shadow chief officer and shadow integration joint board have been appointed and are making significant progress in line with their agreed work plan. May I say to the cabinet secretary, thank you for her answer. There is real concern in my constituency of East Kilbride about hospital discharge delays because of the lack of home care packages. I have many constituency cases just now where people are being disadvantaged in their sense of wellbeing. Is she confident that things are moving forward well towards the date of 1 April for full implementation? What dialogue is being held with South Lanarkshire Council and NHS Lanarkshire to make sure that that is really working towards an integrated package? I thank the member for her question. The health board and the local authority in South Lanarkshire are making good progress towards submitting their integration scheme for approval by the 1 April. I am confident that they are on track to put in place their integrated arrangements during the coming year. I have said many times and I will say again that tackling delayed discharges is absolutely the top priority for me. We have been working very hard with partnerships over the past few weeks and we will continue to do so. I can tell the member that we recently allocated £300,000 to the partners in South Lanarkshire, which has been matched by the council and the health board to make sure that they have the services in place to be able to make sure that patients can flow through the hospital and either back home or into a care home place. I could also say to the member that, at the latest delayed discharge census, there were 16 South Lanarkshire residents delayed in hospital for more than four weeks, but I can say that the local information recently indicates that this now is considerably reduced. I hope that that is something that the member will welcome. I can say to Linda Fabiani that the delayed discharge is not just a problem in her constituency, but can I ask the cabinet secretary whether she will meet with the opposition health teams to give us an update on the progress on health and social care integration, particularly in relation to budgets? Will she ensure that the integrated resources framework for each local authority and health board area is published now so that the budgets can reflect those frameworks? I am very happy to provide that briefing. There is a lot of work going on with individual partnerships to help them through the winter period, where there are obviously significant challenges, but we also have to make sure that we take absolute advantage of the integration coming forward from 1 April. I am very happy to give Richard Simpson and the other Opposition spokespeople a full update on the plans that are being put in place to make sure that we do that. To us, the Scottish Government, when it lasts, some representatives of NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Forth Valley. Regularly with representatives of NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Forth Valley to discuss issues of interest. Is she aware that many NHS health boards like NHS Lanarkshire are giving a directive regarding a cheaper drug to be prescribed for certain routine complaints and infections rather than a tried and tested drug to patients with repeat prescriptions? That frequently results in the patient then experiencing side effects, having to make a follow-up appointment and the original repeat prescription having to be issued. Given all of that and the cost implications involved, does the cabinet secretary consider that this is an issue that should be looked into? I say to Margaret Mitchell that these are clinical decisions, but I am more than happy to look into the case that she cites. If she wants to write to me with more information, I will certainly have a full look at the detail of the issues that she raises. Many thanks, and we now move to the next item of business, which is