Ms Jacqueline Campbell:

First, I will address the point about how does it work with the local-national split. We have a situation in Scotland where we have, obviously, Government Ministers responsible for national policy decisions, we have boards delivering healthcare and there is a statutory relationship between Ministers and health boards where Ministers can direct health boards to do certain things and there will be key performance indicator, KPI, targets that health boards have to delivery. I guess there are levers that govern that relationship. Then we have health and social care partnerships which are joint-funded between NHS boards and local authorities. That was the move in Scotland to recognise that there was a need to bring together that health and social care environment and health and social care partnerships, as the Chairman probably knows, were the result of that. There is a very different relationship with health and social care partnerships that does not have the same kind of statutory backing. It has statutory backing but not in the same way as the NHS boards.

Generally, for the work that we are doing, it is health and social care partnerships that we work with. For example, many members of my team take part in a network which has somebody from each of those health and social care partnership who leads on learning disability and autism locally and they all come together on a regular basis. We take part in that. We share information. That is the operational level. We have quite strong relationships with people.

We find that group of people are certainly very committed to the work they do. There will be challenges and barriers and things they want to raise with us but that is a very positive relationship. There is also a formal network around the chief officers of health and social care partnerships, with arrangements for ministers and officials to engage with those networks regularly. That is all very important to that relationship. There can be issues around funding underlying the relationship, and that is jointly delivered to the health and social care partnerships, HSCPs, local authorities, and boards. That is that environment. As I mentioned, when the review of the autism strategy was done, one of the criticisms was that there was not the accountability there, particularly locally, to make changes. That can often be about funding and some of that is still there. Regional funding has been limited and so people have to make decisions locally about how they do that. We would not necessarily always have a statutory lever through which ministers could direct those HSCPs to ring-fence funding in a certain area. That is not how it would work. The work we do is very much partnership focused, understanding the constraints and trying to work together to address those. That is on that point.

The Chair asked a question about the cross-party group. We engage with a number of cross-party groups in the Scottish Parliament. There is a very active cross-party group network in the Scottish Parliament and quite a large number of those groups. The model is generally that those groups tend to have a secretariat that is delivered through a third sector organisation. The autism cross-party group is, I think, Scottish Autism and the National Autistic Society jointly.