Chamber and committees

That is very helpful and a good conclusion to this morning’s session. On behalf of the committee, I appreciate your time, the answers that you have given and the briefing that you provided in advance. Thank you very much indeed. We will no doubt be in touch very soon to discuss these matters again.

We now move into private session.

Good morning. Welcome to the seventh meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee in 2021. Apologies have been received from Natalie Don.

Our first item of business today is a decision to take items 3 and 4 in private. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you very much, Lawrie. Eilidh Dickson, I think that you want to come back in briefly.

Thank you very much indeed to all our witnesses for taking the time to answer our questions in such an informed and helpful manner. We are grateful for your time and for your written submissions, which will form a large part of our consideration over the coming weeks.

I now suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

I welcome to the meeting our next panel. Claire Murdoch is head of social security and public funding at the Scottish Fiscal Commission, and Professor Alasdair Smith is a commissioner at the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Professor David Ulph, who is joining us remotely, is also a commissioner at the Scottish Fiscal Commission.

I invite Professor Smith to make a brief opening statement, after which members will ask questions.

I appreciate that, Professor Smith. That will help our timely progress through this session. Our first set of questions are from Pam Duncan-Glancy.

The video feed is struggling a little bit, but we can hear you.

I am conscious of time, but I have a brief question for Satwat Rehman and Eilidh Dickson, sticking to the theme of employability and child poverty targets. Starting with Satwat Rehman, how much of an impact will extending universal free childcare to most one-year-olds and two-year-olds have on employability and on the child poverty targets?

I see Eilidh looking to come in.

That is very helpful.

I have a brief follow-up to Mr Balfour’s questions before I bring in Marie McNair. From your perspective, the large additional spend is associated with the smoother, better supported application process—that is before we look at policy change. Given that, and given that the additional amount for the “safe and secure” transfer that Mr Balfour talked about has to come from elsewhere in the Scottish budget, how important was it, from a fiscal perspective, that the Scottish Government took the approach of transferring cases first, rather than changing eligibility for ADP?