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The national care board will be interested in service delivery, and it will certainly have powers to intervene, particularly where there is service delivery failure. That is somewhat similar to what happens in the NHS at the moment, where there is an escalation framework of support to ensure that local NHS boards are helped to deliver as required. On the ability to direct budgeting and so on, I think that the system that we are introducing will enable far better financial scrutiny. Local authorities and the NHS are signed up to that. They are inviting that level of scrutiny and shared accountability so that we can do a better job together.

There would definitely be room for variation on operational delivery. There has to be. As I have said time and again, I live in the rural west Highlands, and the way that care is delivered in the village where I live is very different from the way that care is delivered in Inverness, which is within the same local authority and NHS board. Necessary variation is not what we are worried about.

Yes. I would expect the system to work more efficiently. Public Health Scotland already publishes data on that type of issue. That is the kind of unmet need that we know about at the moment. We can probably furnish you with that published information from Public Health Scotland, to make sure that you are aware of it.

I would expect the system to work more efficiently. At the moment, it is strained and reactive. We have come through a pandemic. The health and social care system in its entirety faces the most challenging times that it has ever faced, but our plans are designed to improve the situation, speed up those decisions and, at heart, ensure that people receive a quality service and are treated with dignity and respect.

We have a commitment to increase the spend on social care. We are increasing the amount of money—the quantum—anyway, and there will be efficiency savings if we do things correctly.

There is a simple calculation. Anecdotally, if a frail elderly person spends 10 days in hospital, that costs them 10 years’ worth of lost muscle mass. If, before they reach crisis point, we can help and support them to live independently in their own home, with a good care-at-home package, we will be able to help twice as many people—they will need half as much care as they would if they reached crisis point and required care on exit from hospital.

That is the type of efficiency saving that there will be if the system works better—if we can genuinely shift the spend to early intervention and prevention. Those efficiency savings will mean that we can help more people. Literally, through that change alone, we will be able help twice as many people before a crisis than we could after a crisis.

Yes. I regularly meet them.

If you mean the voting rights on the local board, we have not decided that; that will be discussed in secondary legislation, including how the local board will be constituted, whether there will be an independent chair—that would be helpful, I think—and whether everyone will have equal voting rights or the chair will have a casting vote. All those things need to be worked out in secondary legislation, but I agree that it is a really important area in which to ensure that we deliver change.

Workforce planning really needs to be done nationally. Our 32 local authorities each need a local pipeline, but asking Shetland Islands Council, for example, to sort out the supply chain of the social work profession would be a big ask. There are certain things that absolutely everyone agrees on, and the idea of national workforce planning is completely uncontroversial.

Yes.

It is very clear that, over the past couple of years, we have faced extreme fiscal challenges. We set our budget in 2022 and within three months it was worth one fifth less because of the impact of inflation. In the past couple of years, things have been significantly more fiscally challenging than at any other time since devolution. I think that everyone is agreed on that. We talk about next year’s budget being the toughest situation that we have ever faced.

I do not think that that is what happened at all. A number of factors have fed in and resulted in a change, not to our ambition, but to the pace of implementation of that ambition.

It is partly about the fiscal environment that we are currently operating in; it is partly about safe management of the change from where we are now to where we need to be. A number of factors have fed into it. Part of the reason for change was, frankly, the level of resistance among our partners in delivery, including COSLA and unions. I could not ignore that.

I came into this role less than a year ago. Since I have been the minister leading on the bill, I have paid a lot of attention to the evidence that has been taken at committee level across the Parliament and to the views of stakeholders who deliver social care. I have continued the co-design process with people with lived experience. I meet them regularly to try to navigate to a consensus and find a way forward, which I think that I have done.