Official Report 619KB pdf
Welcome back. Our next item is the first evidence session on the Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill—the SEIAC bill, for short. This member’s bill was introduced by Mark Griffin on 8 June 2023 and is currently at stage 1. The bill seeks to establish a new body—the Scottish employment injuries advisory council, or SEIAC—to provide expertise about support for people who can no longer work because of workplace injury or disease.
SEIAC would have three functions. It would replace the Scottish Commission on Social Security’s role in reporting on draft regulations for employment injuries assistance; report to the Parliament and ministers on any matter relevant to employment injuries assistance; and carry out, commission or support research into any matter relevant to employment injuries assistance.
I welcome our panel for the first evidence session on the bill, who join us remotely: Dr Lesley Rushton, chair of the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council, and Dr Mark Simpson, interim co-chair of the Scottish Commission on Social Security. Thank you for accepting our invitation.
I have a few points to mention about the format of the meeting before we start. When answering questions, please wait until I or members have said your name before speaking. Do not feel that you have to answer every question; it is okay if you have nothing new to add to what others have said. Please allow our broadcasting colleagues a few seconds to turn your microphones on before you start to speak. You can indicate with an R in the chat box in Zoom if you wish to come in on a question. I ask everyone to keep questions and answers as concise as possible.
I invite members to ask questions in turn, and I remind everybody that the questions for this panel should be purely on the context and setting of the bill. I invite John Mason to ask the first few questions.
I am new to the committee, so this is a completely new subject to me. My questions might be a little simplistic, but I hope that that will help others who are also less familiar with the subject.
As I understand it, we currently have several bodies. We have the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council, the Scottish Commission on Social Security and the disability and carer benefit expert advisory group, and we are now talking about establishing the Scottish employment injuries advisory council.
I will start with Dr Rushton. Can you give a brief summary of how all those bodies relate to each other and how that would change if we had this new body?
10:00
I can tell you about IIAC. According to my understanding, we do not have any direct discussions with some of the other bodies that you have mentioned.
I will briefly tell you what we do. We are responsible for giving advice to ministers on industrial injuries disablement benefit—IIDB—which, as you know, is part of our social security system. There has been some kind of worker compensation since the 1920s, and more officially since the 1940s, following the war. The relevant act of Parliament was passed in 1946, but IIAC has been going since 1948, so we have been doing our work a long time.
We do reviews and we collate and write various reports on different issues concerning IIDB. Most of our work concerns diseases and occupations, but there is a very important accident provision under IIDB, too. We consider all sorts of different occupation-related ill health. That ranges over everything from musculoskeletal conditions to infectious diseases, viruses and so on. We get our work, if I can put it that way, from constantly monitoring the literature on what is coming up. We might, for example, examine the reports of the International Agency for Research on Cancer. We get a lot of requests from individuals and from MPs. We might get requests from parliamentary groups, such as the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee.
That is what we do. We write various different types of reports. We issue information notes after we have had a quick look at something. We produce position papers, which are a very detailed review of a piece of disease and occupational data, but without making recommendations. Then there is a command paper, in which we undertake a detailed review of the evidence and make recommendations to ministers. Both of those last two types of paper are published. Everything is published on our website, in fact, including all our detailed minutes of every single meeting. We have eight meetings a year, including four of the main council. We also have more of a research working group, which meets between those four times.
After we make recommendations, if the minister is willing and approves, those are laid before Parliament as command papers, as they potentially have a direct impact on the legislation, which is built into the Social Security Administration Act 1992. When a command paper has been published, the Department for Work and Pensions does a lot of work to give information to ministers on the impact that a particular recommendation would have. That would concern the financial impact of a recommendation, the numbers of people it would affect and so on. That is all done within the DWP.
IIAC does not have direct influence on that at all—we are not a lobby group. We have a lot of observers at our meetings, however, including from the policy side and from the decision makers group in Barnsley. We have medical assessors, we have people from Northern Ireland, and we have an observer from the Health and Safety Executive. The committee is made up of about 11 people. It varies, but we are in the middle of starting another recruitment round. It consists of between 10 and 12 independent experts who are scientists of various kinds, such as respiratory people, musculoskeletal experts and epidemiologists, like me—I am a statistician epidemiologist. We have equal representation from members who represent employer organisations and members who represent unions and worker organisations.
That was a bit of a long answer, but it sums up exactly what we do, I hope. Please do ask more questions.
My colleagues will probably have more questions, but that was helpful. It certainly helped me to understand a bit better what is going on.
I turn to Dr Simpson. It seems to be a complicated landscape, and we have just heard that one of the bodies has a pretty wide remit anyway. Do we need all these bodies? Are all their remits clear? You can obviously speak for your own organisation.
It is a complicated landscape, as you say, but that is partly because of the nature of social security devolution. I will come on to the role of SCOSS within that in a minute, but first I will give a wee bit of context.
At least part of the reason why SCOSS exists in the first place—and, I presume, the reason why Mark Griffin sees a need for the additional body—is that, as part of the process by which parts of social security were devolved to the Scottish Parliament following the Smith commission, the UK Government took the decision that the Social Security Advisory Committee and the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council would not be authorised to advise the Scottish Government or Parliament on devolved benefits. SCOSS was created, therefore, with a view to filling the gap with regard to the scrutiny function that SSAC provided at a UK level.
I will outline what that means in practice for our role as SCOSS. As some members will be aware, we have three—or, depending on how you look at it, four—central functions. The one on which we spend most of our time is pre-legislative scrutiny. The Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 requires the Scottish Government to refer most major sets of social security regulations to us for scrutiny before they are laid before the Parliament. We report on them and make recommendations; somewhere in the region of 80 per cent to 90 per cent of those recommendations have, up to this point, been accepted by the Government. Some of those recommendations have resulted in changes to the regulations before they are laid, whereas others are more about administrative practice, guidance, communication or things to consider in future reviews.
We also report on, essentially, any matter connected with social security when the Parliament or the Scottish Government asks us to do so. The final piece of the jigsaw is our role in monitoring the devolved system as a whole for compliance with the commitments in the social security charter.
If there is a major difference between our role and the role that is envisaged for the new body, it is that the majority of our functions are very much reactive. We report on regulations when they are referred to us, and we write a report on something that is connected with social security when we are asked to do so by the Parliament or the Government. The only proactive part of our role is that we get to decide, to some extent, which aspects of the charter we want to look at. However, there is a reactive element even in that regard, because we are required to do a report if there is evidence brought to our attention of systemic non-compliance with part of the charter. Our role is largely reactive, whereas the role that is envisaged for the new body in the draft bill has more proactive elements to it.
You also asked about the disability and carer benefits expert advisory group, which has had a different role in the system and has now completed its role. That was a much more forward-looking role that involved making policy recommendations for the developing devolved system, so it was quite different from ours, and—I think that I am right in saying—reasonably different from the role of SSAC at UK level. I hope that that is a useful overview.
Yes, thank you. That is useful. I am learning as we go along.
You said that, in one sense, you are reactive, but, on the other hand, you could look at almost anything that you are asked to. What would have to happen in order for your role to be changed? Would it require legislation at the Scottish level or at the Westminster level, or would legislation not be needed?
That is something that could be in the pipeline to some extent, because a review of SCOSS has just been carried out, which could potentially result in a few changes to functions, depending on what the Government and the Parliament decide. The main functions that I have described are set out in the 2018 act, so any changes to those would need to be made in primary legislation through the Scottish Parliament. The UK Government does not play a role in determining what SCOSS does.
That is great. Thank you.
I will leave it at that, convener.
I invite Roz McCall in.
My questions are for Dr Rushton.
Thank you for the overview that you have given. I am also reasonably new, although not totally new, to my role, and this is the first time that I am getting an understanding of what it is that both bodies actually do. Having said that, I am aware that IIAC can commission literature reviews. Can you give me a rough idea of what IIAC spends on those reviews?
Traditionally, the work of reading all the papers, putting everything together and writing the reports has, for years—decades—been done by the members themselves. I have been chair of IIAC since 2018, and I have been going on about how we need funding for research, so I was interested to see what figure had been put on research for the proposed committee.
To answer your question directly, IIAC currently has one commissioned review, which is on selected respiratory diseases—both malignant and non-malignant—and cancer. We are looking, in particular, at lung cancers and silica, at cleaners and lung cancer, and at pesticides and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. That work has been carried out by the Institute of Occupational Medicine, which is in Edinburgh, and the budget for it is just over £50,000 for an 18-month gradual project.
We are just about to accept a proposal with a six-month timescale—it is probably about a month’s work—for a scoping review on women and occupational health. Women have not had the opportunity to apply for IIDB, partly because of its traditional heavy industry background, and one of our recent campaigns has been about that.
From a regular annual budget for research that is for getting people to help with the work, including writing reports, we got a regular sum of £25,000 a couple of years ago. I do not think that it is wrong for me to tell you that they have now managed to up that to £100,000 a year. If you talk to those at the UK Health Security Agency or the Food Standards Agency about the committees for which they are secretariats, such as the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment, you will find that the amount is roughly the same as it would be for one of those committees, so it is considerably more than it was. I do not think that the Department for Work and Pensions calls that strictly a research budget, but it is—that is what it is for.
10:15
Thank you. That is very helpful.
In what other ways does IIAC get the information that it needs to advise ministers? Obviously, ministers do a lot of work themselves, but in what other ways does IIAC get information?
We commission and we do our own research. Our scientific secretary does research on the literature to give us lists of papers and so on—he helps with that and with the editing.
We also often take advice from experts who are not on the council when we need that. For example, one of our command papers was on cutaneous malignant melanoma in pilots and air crew. That paper recommends that IIDB should apply to that. We had a lot of help from the Civil Aviation Authority and the British Airline Pilots Association. We had a lot of help on cosmic and ultraviolet radiation from radiation experts at what was Public Health England and is now the UK Health Security Agency. We also had toxicological help from a member of the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment on the mechanisms by which the excess risk occurs. We use experts where we can if we have not got them.
That is very helpful. Thank you very much.
Dr Rushton, you said that you commissioned a review, which I think you said cost £50,000. Can you co-commission research and reviews? Mr Griffin is talking about setting up a new body for Scotland with a very modest research budget. There is also SCOSS, which, as we have heard, is not necessarily proactive in the area, because of its other commitments. Can IIAC co-commission research jointly, whether that be with SCOSS or another Scottish body, even though you are making recommendations not at the Scotland level but at the UK level?
I am afraid that I do not know the answer to that question, but it is a very interesting one. The commissioning is actually done by the DWP, so I imagine that that would need discussion. From a scientific point of view, there is absolutely no reason why there should not be joint commissioning, and it makes economic sense. If more than one body is interested in an issue, it is worth working together. However, I am afraid that I cannot answer that from the monetary point of view or talk about the way that one would draw up contracts and so on.
That is very helpful.
We have focused on eligibility for industrial injuries disablement benefit. You may have said some of this other stuff already, but will you say a little more about the work of IIAC on wider issues around workplace health and safety that you are involved in, separately from making recommendations or presenting evidence to the UK Government about whether we should extend eligibility for industrial injuries disablement benefit?
That is a pertinent question. As I said, we have an observer from the Health and Safety Executive at every meeting, and the HSE actually helps us quite a bit. For example, we always have a small prevention section at the end of our command papers, and we always check with the HSE what its advice is. It sometimes has relevant data and can help us with that. There is a bit of to and fro between us and the HSE.
On the wider community, many of our members are nationally and internationally known experts in their fields and more generally. We have discussed the fact that IIDB and IIAC’s role are very much not known about by the people who really need it, by which I mean employees and employers. Therefore, this year, we are thinking about how, individually, we might write articles in journals and so on and present.
I should also mention that we always have a public meeting every year or every two years. This year, we had one in Cardiff. Since Covid, we have gone hybrid. We had our first hybrid meeting in the summer and it was good. Quite a few people from across Wales and elsewhere attended it.
We do our best to spread our work and to draw attention to particular issues. For example, one of the reasons why we have been looking at the pneumoconioses is silicosis, which is often underdiagnosed. We hope that industries such as the construction industry will be more aware of the issue as a result of some of the work that we do.
Thank you. I think that you must have read the question paper, because you are pre-empting my questions superbly. That answer was extremely helpful, because I was going to ask you about any on-going work programmes with the Health and Safety Executive. That goes back to Mr Mason’s question about whether there is duplication or overlap in what you do, work that is complementary, or a combination of all three.
I am conscious of the fact that, earlier this year, the Health and Safety Executive produced some research on Covid, although not long Covid. It also looked at cancer in the construction industry, although not among firefighters—cancer among firefighters is very topical at the moment. The Health and Safety Executive is already doing a lot of work in the area, and you have helpfully put on record that you observe some of that and work in partnership with it, which is important, but do you want to say any more about your on-going work or partnership work?
I am particularly interested in long Covid, neurodegenerative disease in footballers and cancers in firefighters, but please do not restrict yourself to that list simply because I have asked about those issues. I am trying to understand the dynamic between what you research, what you commission, what the Health and Safety Executive does and how that all fits together.
You are right. There is duplication—or rather, in some cases what we do duplicates and in others it complements what others do. That is the case not just nationally, but internationally. Therefore, one of the things that we do is keep an eye on what the Health and Safety Executive is doing, what other people in the UK are doing, and what is being done internationally, because a lot of the information that is being collated internationally is also very useful.
I want to mention Covid. Covid has taken up a lot of our time. We started monitoring the data from April 2020, and we missed only one meeting. We have produced two reports, one of which is a command paper. That has been laid before Parliament, and work is being done in the DWP. We are continuing to look at that. Our command paper focused on health and social care workers. We are now thinking about whether we can add education workers and some transport workers—not the van drivers, but the bus and coach drivers and so on.
Long Covid is a really difficult issue because, at the moment, there is no clear diagnosis. IIDB really needs there to be a way of diagnosing long Covid; self-reporting is not an easy thing for IIDB, so we are looking at that. As I have said, we also have the commissioned review.
We are looking at neurodegenerative diseases in footballers. I did not mention the fact that we get a lot of letters and people pushing their own papers, which is fair enough, as they draw attention to issues. We are also widening our consideration of neurodegenerative diseases in footballers, because we think that it is important to include other sports—more generally, athletics, for example.
We have looked at the diseases and have decided that the best way forward is to look at some of the serious diseases one by one. We started with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is a form of motor neurone disease. A review of the literature is under way. On the magnitude of the literature, around 50 papers have been identified as relevant. There seems to be some evidence that extreme physical exercise might increase the risk of developing motor neurone disease.
Do you want me to mention firefighters? They are a tricky issue.
I am keen to say yes, but I know that time is probably against us, so we would really appreciate it if you could follow that up in writing. I say to any Fire Brigades Union colleagues who are watching that that is due to time constraints. We are keen to hear what Dr Rushton has to say about firefighters, but we would appreciate it if she could provide that in writing. I suspect that the convener will have my guts for garters if we do not move on.
That is correct.
I have a few questions for both witnesses in relation to membership and expertise, which we have touched on already. What knowledge and expertise are necessary to advise on social security for industrial disease and injury?
Members will not be surprised to hear me say that expertise in social security and expertise in industrial injuries are two quite distinct things.
A number of areas are relevant to any social security payment, including employment injuries payments. The SCOSS remit includes scrutiny of regulations that are relevant to conditions of entitlement and level of benefits. However, it is hard to package that up neatly and separate it from other aspects of benefits, so we end up offering comment on things such as application processes, supporting evidence and durations of award—things that would be common to a range of different social security benefits.
Then there are distinct areas—some of which you have just heard about—that are particularly relevant to social security for industrial disease and injuries, which include medical and scientific considerations and engagement with the employer and employee perspectives. The expertise that is needed to bring those together to give good advice on social security for industrial disease and injury will depend on what aspects of social security and industrial disease will be advised on.
Based on our experience of the devolved system to date, as functions are transferred from the DWP to Social Security Scotland, I would imagine that it is likely that we will see a devolved employment injuries benefit introduced, on the basis of a safe and secure transition, with relatively minimal changes to the diseases and injuries that confer entitlement.
However, in the future we could see new diseases and injuries added—or at least considered for addition—and scrutiny of the appropriateness of those decisions or the proactive provision of advice on which conditions ought to be included would require a different kind of expertise than the SCOSS board, as it stands, is set up to provide.
Although we look at disability benefits, for example, the various forms of disability assistance are concerned with the impact of an impairment on a person’s daily living, mobility and care needs, and scrutinising that kind of thing does not necessarily require specific expertise on specific conditions, but scrutinising employment injuries presumably would.
10:30
Thank you, Dr Simpson.
Dr Rushton, how do IIAC’s membership and expertise differ from those of the Social Security Advisory Committee? Can you comment on that?
I would imagine that they are quite different. Occupational health and medicine is rather a specialist field. We have people like me—I am a statistician epidemiologist—whose field of experience is wider than just occupation; for example, it might be environment and, within that, lifestyle.
At present, we have three really good practising occupational respiratory physicians, one of whom runs long Covid clinics. We also have musculoskeletal experts. In addition, one of the most important requirements for a committee such as ours is to have an expert in the exposure side of things. We do not currently have a toxicologist, although I was on IIAC previously, until around 2004, and we did then. However, I am encouraging collaboration with our sister committees—we do not need expertise in everything. We have a couple of people who are experts on mental health in occupation, including one from King’s College London. We also have an observer from the military scheme, which is very useful in enabling us to see the parallels there.
There is a mixture of science expertise. The make-up of IIAC is, I think, very different from the make-up of the current Social Security Advisory Committee, apart from the medical side of things—some members are medically qualified, as I am, and some are not.
Thank you. That is really interesting.
My question is for Dr Rushton. It has been incredibly useful to hear about IIAC’s work and the skill sets of those who are involved. Could you give an indication of the time commitment that is required of your board members and of the secretariat? It sounds as though you are involved in a great deal of hands-on work—is it fair to say that?
Absolutely. It is all done by the members at present, apart from the commissioned review. However, because we now have some—substantial, we hope—funding, I am hoping that we will be able to release members from some of that work.
A lot of time is required. Officially, we have four council meetings where everybody comes together, and there are four meetings of the research working group, which is a sub-group of about six or seven of the scientists. In between, the sub-groups that are working on particular issues get together a lot online. Outside that, however, there is an enormous amount of work. That does put people off—when we recruit, the time commitment is one of the first questions that is asked about.
Getting something into legislation is also very time consuming. It is not done by the committee itself, although we help with that if we are asked, and we scrutinise the legislation if it ever comes into being. This does not directly answer your question, but I was hoping to be able to comment on it. Once we have made a recommendation in a command paper, it goes to the rest of the DWP and to all their colleagues and to the ministers, who take it through the legislative process. That can take a long time—I just wanted to say that. I do not know what this committee has planned—it is nothing to do with me—but I ask you to bear in mind that, once the advice has been received, it can potentially take a long time to turn it into legislation. That is one of the other things that is quite difficult for members.
Yes—I am sure that the way that the system works can be very frustrating.
In these situations, there are often different perspectives. I was previously a personal injury lawyer, so I am aware that the employer can have a very different perspective from that of the employee and their representatives. How do you deal with the fact that there are those different perspectives, and how is that represented in your work?
That is a good question. We have a person with legal expertise on the council—we keep an eye on the court cases, and the courts keep an eye on IIAC.
I should have mentioned at the start that we answer to the legislation, which says that we have to be reasonably certain that the connection between work and the disease is real—that there is that link—because it is a no-fault compensation system. In comparison with a lot of international systems, that is an advantage—very much so—for the claimant, so that is something to bear in mind with regard to the current system.
However, we are often hidebound in the decisions that we make because of the need for reasonable certainty. The example of firefighters is a very good one. Where we have good human data—and increasingly, we do not have the studies—we look for a high relative risk, such as a doubling of the risk. That is the easiest approach. However, we often do not have that data, or the risk does not quite reach that level.
Up to now, IIAC has been very strict in what it does. We are starting to think about ways of getting round the problem when we do not have the data or when we have good data but we are faced with the fact that, while there is a link, it is not sufficient under the legislation. That is quite hard for people such as unions and employees and employers to take on board. It is quite hard for us, too, but we are set up to do one job, which is to advise on that legislation.
I will ask this question of both witnesses, but I will turn to Dr Rushton first. How do the bodies consider the views of those who have relevant lived experience? Is that part of your consideration? How do you capture that in the work that you do?
We get a lot of letters from individuals, and we certainly respond to them. They are very useful and important to us—they draw attention to particular issues or particular aspects of a situation that we may not have considered. What we do not do is deal with individual claims; we are an advisory council. We always write back to people and, with some of the issues, people will want to come and talk to us. However, when it comes to helping them, we, as a council, cannot do that. We can take on board what they say, but we cannot directly have an impact on them. Does that help?
Yes—you have answered that question. Thank you.
I put the same question to Dr Simpson. How do you take into account the views of, and what is said by, those who have relevant lived experience?
When we carry out our scrutiny work, which has made up the vast majority of our work up to this point, we try to take account of the views and the expertise of a range of stakeholders and people with experience of the area of social security that we are examining at that time. We are always trying to up our game on how we work with that group.
I will give a short example from one of our recent pieces of scrutiny work on the Carer’s Assistance (Carer Support Payment) (Scotland) Regulations. As part of that, we held a round-table session with carers, working alongside a carers organisation to convene the event. We also spoke to a range of stakeholder organisations that work with carers. As part of that, we asked the organisations to speak on behalf of themselves to give a corporate view, but also to try to give us a flavour of what their clients, users and members had to say about the subject. We contacted 12 different organisations as part of that process.
In addition, our secretariat did some desk-based research to find out what information had already been published on carers’ experiences of social security. Finally, we held a round-table discussion with a number of academic researchers. Some of those researchers, although not necessarily all of them, would have been involved in working with people who had lived experience of caregiving, carer benefits, or both.
The information that we draw from such encounters does not determine what goes into our reports or what recommendations we make, but we certainly draw on those insights both to inform the content of our reports and to provide examples to illustrate some of the points that we make. Sometimes we draw recommendations fairly directly from the process. At other times, we gain insights that, while we think that they may not be so relevant to the current report, may raise an issue that we can come back to in the future when we are thinking about which aspects of the charter we want to look at. That engagement can be fruitful in all sorts of ways.
I invite Marie McNair in.
Good morning. I support the points that Mark Griffin raises. However, is his bill proposal not putting the cart before the horse, given that the Scottish Government has not yet consulted on the plans for a new employment injuries assistance scheme? Is there not a reasonable argument that the principles and rationale should be considered as part of a wider, full-scale consultation with regard to the Scottish Government’s intentions? I simply put that out there for your views.
I remind members that the question is purely about their views; it is more for context setting.
I am asking about the timing of the bill, as I think that that is relevant.
I do not know that I can give a particularly clear answer on that. I am not clear, at the minute, on what the likely timeline will be for employment injuries assistance.
I know that set-up can take a bit of time. For example, I can talk a little about the establishment of SCOSS. The Social Security (Scotland) Act was passed in mid-2018, and work on recruitment for setting up SCOSS commenced pretty quickly after that. We held our first board meeting in February 2019, and we published our first pre-legislative scrutiny report in May 2019, which was on the draft Carer’s Assistance (Young Carer Grants) (Scotland) Regulations 2019. We were able to go from a standing start to producing a report fairly quickly, but we were also trying to juggle some of the business of setting up a new body alongside that, which brought its own challenges. There had also been some legislative activity in social security before we were established.
I am not going to give you a straight answer on when the right time would be to set up the kind of body that you describe, other than to say that setting up a body can be a challenge in itself.
10:45
Dr Rushton, do you want to express a view?
In terms of IIAC?
In terms of the bill that has been proposed by Mark Griffin. Do you not think that that should wait until the Government has set out its intentions?
IIAC is an independent advisory committee, so we would continue our work. If a Scottish body was set up, I think that we would certainly want to ensure that we did not duplicate anything—I can see that there might be duplication.
I think that it would depend very much on how you set up your legislation. At the moment, we are working to the Social Security Act 1998, and the “reasonably certain” issue. That makes us very different from other countries, and that is why our so-called lists are different from those of other countries.
Covid is a good example. As a country, we did not include Covid as part of the industrial injuries disablement benefit list until we had the evidence. It took a long time for that to happen. Other countries have different systems. I think that we would want to work together—partly, anyway—and perhaps have representatives on both bodies. We might end up with the same scientists on each of the committees—IIAC and the proposed committee—because there is a very small group of people in the UK with the necessary expertise. I do not know whether that helps.
No, that is fine. You have raised concerns already about the timing of legislation and getting it passed.
To go back to the timescale, industrial injuries disablement benefit has been largely unreformed since its creation many years ago. You mentioned the situation in the 1920s and up to 1948, and how complex that benefit is. Do you feel that that is due to the lack of research or the lack of political interest in bringing the benefit into a new, real-world setting? You said yourself that women have been excluded from applying. Can I get your views on that too?
The reason for the exclusion of women is largely historical. The benefit goes right back to the 1920s and before, in relation to miners and so on, so many of the current prescriptions on the list no longer exist, but they have not been taken off. They are certainly a reaction to the very heavy industry that we used to have, and hence they were not applicable to women. We are well aware that women are not covered. They apply for the benefit, of course, especially on the musculoskeletal side of things, which is why we are making that issue a priority.
As far as the proposed legislation is concerned, I do not think that I or IIAC would be qualified to give direct evidence on that, because we have not formally considered it. You are absolutely right that we have to follow the legislation’s meaning, and that restricts us. There are one or two good articles that compare different schemes around the world—there are huge differences and it is a political matter, really, how a country feels about industrial injuries and accidents.
Thank you. I really appreciate your comments.
Dr Simpson, do you want to share anything before I hand back to the convener?
Yes, please. I want to pick up on some of the points that Lesley Rushton made about recruitment. I do not know how big a pool a future SEIAC would be fishing in, with regard to finding people with the expertise that it would need. That has been an issue for SCOSS at times, when we have had vacancies, and it could be an issue for the proposed new body.
I should also add that the DWP does not allow dual membership of the Social Security Advisory Committee and SCOSS, and it may well take the same position on IIAC and SEIAC.
Thank you for that.
I thank you for your indulgence, convener.
I am conscious of time, so I remind everyone to keep their questions and answers as concise as possible.
Jeremy Balfour, who joins us online, will ask the next questions.
Good morning. I will be brief, because a lot of my questions have been dealt with.
I will put a question to you, Dr Simpson. In the absence of the proposed bill, what additional resources or expertise would SCOSS need in order to consider regulations to create employment injuries assistance? We know that that is coming, probably in 2025, and it will require regulations to be made. What would you need in order to be able to scrutinise such regulations properly?
The starting point is that, in a sense, scrutinising the draft regulations for setting up employment injuries assistance would be in line with the remit that SCOSS currently has. The expertise of the current membership reflects the role that SCOSS was set up to undertake. If that role were to be widened to incorporate additional areas of responsibility in the future, the membership would have to be widened accordingly, or we would need to make more use of sub-committees than we have done up to now, in order to ensure that we could do what was required.
I mentioned earlier that we can probably assume that the priority will be—as it normally has been with the introduction of a new devolved benefit—safe and secure transfer. In that context, if changes were being made in the future to the set of conditions that confer entitlement, that might be more of an issue, although it might not be a huge challenge.
In general terms, the expertise that SCOSS needs to fulfil its responsibilities may, in any case, change over time, depending on what we are scrutinising. Our membership changes too. I have mentioned the stakeholder engagement work that we do—we have the ability to set up committees and sub-committees to bring in additional expertise if we need it, so I guess that we would make use of some of those opportunities if we needed to do so.
That is helpful. Having read all your reports since SCOSS was set up, I know that one of the issues has been the timing, in the sense of how much time you have had to scrutinise regulations, and the resources. It is difficult to put a figure on it, but how much more resource would you require in order to take on yet another piece of work?
It is really hard for me to say—I am probably not sufficiently on top of that side of our operation to be able to give you a useful answer. It would also depend very much on what was being asked of us.
If we were scrutinising a set of draft regulations, we would follow our normal practice, but we might need a bit of time or money to appoint people to sub-committees or to commission external research if it was a very complex set. That could be difficult in the context of the legislative timetable, which can—as you know—be very demanding.
Speaking hypothetically, at the minute, the more proactive functions that are envisaged for SEIAC in the bill are not functions that SCOSS currently has. Nonetheless, I can imagine, given some of the figures that Lesley Rushton talked about earlier, that, if we were being asked to give more forward-looking advice on what conditions to include, any cost would be significantly higher than the amount of money that we have budgeted for external research in the current year. You can probably draw your own conclusions on that aspect.
Thank you. Dr Rushton, regardless of whether the bill passes, you will continue to publish your reports, which contain advice to UK ministers. To what extent do you consider a wider audience when publishing your reports? They are perhaps not for the average person on the street, but how widely are they read? Do you monitor who reads them?
That is a really interesting question. Everything that we produce, including our reports, is on our website. Many people read our minutes, which are quite full, because they can then see exactly where we are going with our thoughts. All our reports and, as I mentioned, the position papers and command papers are in the House of Lords and House of Commons libraries.
At the moment, we do not write papers aimed at laypeople, and we do not do regular updates in the general scientific press. However, we are well aware of that gap in our approach. At our next meeting we will discuss how we might improve our reach in both the scientific and employee communities, beyond the public. We are considering finding an employee journal and a scientific journal where we could have regular little slots for giving such updates. We are very well aware that many people do not know about such matters. The difficulty with all worker groups is in getting to the small and medium-sized groups who probably do not even read the HSE’s website. However, we are starting to do something about that.
You have picked out a point where, to be honest, given all the work that we have been doing, we have not had the time to consider what we do about that gap. However, we publish everything that we produce.
Thank you. I will leave it there, convener.
I invite Paul O’Kane to close our question session.
I will follow on from where Jeremy Balfour left off. I am not sure whether I am pronouncing the acronym correctly, but DACBEAG—the disability and carer benefit expert advisory group—has essentially already advised ministers on EIA. I am keen to understand Dr Simpson’s view. If another non-statutory group were to be created, would it be able to provide the required advice on any detailed policy development for EIA, or would that have to sit somewhere else?
That is a wee bit of a challenging question. Policy advice can come in many forms, both solicited and unsolicited, and I would expect that to continue.
The notes accompanying the bill set out a number of possible avenues for obtaining such guidance. If Mark Griffin’s preferred option of setting up the SEIAC were not adopted, undoubtedly more than one model could be made to work. If the right expertise were there, the advice would be useful. The policy memorandum itself notes that, if a body were to be set up on a statutory footing, with a formal requirement for it to be consulted, it would be harder for such expertise to be ignored.
I do not really want to go beyond that, because I am not here to offer a position on the correct model, but I point out that various options are available.
Thank you. I appreciate that today’s evidence is for context, convener, so I will leave my questioning there.
I thank Dr Rushton and Dr Simpson for taking part in our meeting and sharing their valuable expertise. We will continue to take evidence on the bill in the coming weeks.
That concludes our business in public.
11:01 Meeting continued in private until 11:29.Previous
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