Meeting of the Parliament 18 March 2026 [Draft]
We want to ensure that local services are retained, and that is of course the responsibility of local partnerships. I am sure that my colleague Neil Gray will be well aware of the issues that Katy Clark has raised.
To go back to the point that I made earlier, we have gone beyond the commitment to increase funding for social care by 25 per cent over the course of this session of Parliament—by £500 million. We must recognise the funding that is going into local services, in addition to the record funding to local government.
In my previous answer, I said that we needed to look at the local systems of delivery. I will go further than that: we perhaps need to revisit whether local health and social care partnerships are the right model for delivery of this critical service across Scotland.