Chamber and committees

You will be comforted to note that we plan to return to that issue early in the new year.

That would be helpful. We all understand and appreciate the difficulties that carers have been going through during the pandemic. We took evidence on that during the passage of the Carer’s Allowance Supplement (Scotland) Act 2021. I take your point about the fact that the number of unpaid carers has grown during the pandemic. The Scottish Government appears to have recognised that point but we would be interested in finding out more about the extent to which it will meet demand, so any supplementary information that you have on that would be gratefully received.

Do you have a further question, Marie, before I bring in Jeremy Balfour, who indicated that he had some questions in this area?

The child poverty targets are a key theme in the committee’s early work, particularly our scrutiny of the Scottish Government’s budget. You mentioned in your submission, and you have said this morning, that women’s poverty and child poverty are intrinsically linked. Single parents are most likely to be women, and women are most likely to work in part-time or low-income roles. To what extent are the changes to universal credit having an impact on child poverty rates in Scotland? The investment in work allowances is obviously very welcome, but there is also the £20 per week cut to the standard allowance.

Thank you. Thank you very much for your time this morning. The discussion has been very helpful and insightful for us in doing our work. I wish you all a very safe and merry Christmas, and all the best for 2022.

I will suspend the meeting as we switch over from panel 1 to panel 2.

Your flexibility and ambition on behalf of us all is admirable, and we appreciate it.

Lovely. There are no further questions for the panel—nobody has indicated in the chat box that they wish to come in. I do not know whether colleagues on the panel have anything further that they wish to add.

Conscious as I am of time, my final question is an area that we have not covered as yet. It is first for Richard Gass and it is about short-term assistance. The Scottish Fiscal Commission has made an assumption—with many caveats, it has to be said—that as many as 90 per cent of people in receipt of ADP could be accessing short-term assistance. Is that assuming that the changed assessment process in Scotland will continue to make the same award mistakes as the DWP makes with PIP? Do you share those concerns?

Ed Pybus finally, please.

I am pleased to say that we are joined by our second panel of witnesses. We have with us Craig Smith, senior policy and research officer for the Scottish Association for Mental Health; Frank McKillop, head of policy and research at Enable Scotland; Keith Park, policy, public affairs and campaigns manager at the MS Society Scotland; Trisha Hatt, Macmillan Cancer Support strategic partnership manager; and Bill Scott, senior policy adviser at Inclusion Scotland. Welcome to you all. We are very grateful for your presence.

We will turn immediately to questions, the first of which is from Jeremy Balfour.