Chamber and committees

Various discussions are taking place about what might replace them, such as urban regeneration plans and so on. I appreciate that it is a very moveable feast. What will your priorities be in your discussions with the UK Government around the consequences for Scotland? If we are not going to have investment zones in the low-tax, low-regulation space, what will your priorities be with regard to equivalent support in Scotland?

I join my parliamentary colleagues in welcoming the work that has gone into the automation of Scottish social security payments, the proposals to extend that further and the acknowledgement that there is more work to do. Those payments are vital to the wellbeing of people across Scotland, both in supporting their day-to-day expenses and at critical times, especially in the lives of young families.

I also welcome the work that has been done previously in development and, over the past year, in implementation of the second benefit take-up strategy. The principles that underpin that strategy are worth reiterating, especially now, when the existing challenges of child poverty and Covid recovery have been so heartbreakingly deepened by brutal food price rises, terrifying energy costs and Westminster policy that swings between incompetence and outright cruelty. The principles are focusing on real people and their actual needs; speaking and listening with clarity and sensitivity; reaching people where they are and not where we assume that we will find them; co-operating with those working for the same common good; and learning from both successes and mistakes. Those are principles that we can usefully apply not only to social security but to all the issues that we face as a Parliament, a country and a world.

The strategy also identifies barriers to the take-up of social security entitlements. One of those is the ways in which access can be so complex—and so costly in terms of time and energy as well as money—that the process itself acts as a wall instead of a doorway. That is a challenge to policy makers and to systems, and it can be addressed, in part, by the automation that we are focusing on in the debate.

Another barrier is lack of information. That, too, is an issue for those who make and implement policy—not just at national level but in local government and other agencies—and here we should remember and celebrate the crucial role of the third sector.

However, it is clear from evidence from other European countries that, even with very slick and integrated systems such as those that Pam Duncan-Glancy and other members have urged Social Security Scotland to develop, take-up remains below 100 per cent. That is why the final barrier identified in the strategy matters, and it involves us all: it consists of the complex and often hidden and deep-rooted social obstacles that still stand between so many people and fulfilment of their rights.

The Scottish campaign on rights to social security, which represents key organisations, has written wisely about institutional stigma from official processes, social stigma from the attitudes of others and self-stigma—a person’s own feeling that it is somehow shameful or negative to be receiving what they are entitled to. We know only too well the role that toxic media and poisonous politics have played in creating, extending and embedding the discourse of shame, stigma, othering and demonisation. We know how it interrelates with other forms of bigotry and prejudice, and with other expressions of hate and hostility—not least that of the current Home Secretary, just this week, towards people who were seeking the protection of the United Nations Refugee Convention, which lays down a solemn obligation that it is her particular duty to uphold.

One of our most serious responsibilities as members of this Parliament is to challenge the language of stigma, exclusion and hate. We have a secondary responsibility as well. It is to tell different stories, based on evidence and experience, of why and how social security supports and builds the common good and helps to create strong communities, thriving families and healthy, confident, informed and compassionate children who are ready to take their place in the society of the future—one that will need them more than ever before.

I think that we have a third responsibility: to think not only about how we talk about those who are in, or at risk of, poverty, but also about how we talk about the rich. How does our language—phrases such as “philanthropist”, “wealth creator” and “business leader”—together with our concepts of aspiration and success and the speed with which our doors are opened reinforce hierarchies that are based on money, privilege, status and profoundly ableist conceptions of competence and contribution? In a world where net subsidies to the fossil fuel industry were more than $4 billion in 2019, it is not social security recipients who are taking more than they give.

I reiterate my welcome for the automation measures and for the on-going work that is being done at many levels and in many sectors to improve rates of social security take-up. However, that is not just work for policy makers, institutions and advice providers—vital though all those actors are. If we are to build the fair, resilient, compassionate and creative Scotland that we long for, we need to dig deep, uncover and challenge the assumptions that we have brought with us, and recognise and celebrate our interdependence. This is a work in progress. We need to keep going, and we need to keep going better.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us, minister, and thank you for your opening words.

I hear very strongly the commitment to human rights and equalities budgeting and to embedding and mainstreaming that across all processes. The holistic approach that you talk about is, of course, important if we are going to see genuine action in the prevention agenda across the elements that you have highlighted.

I am interested in how we make connections between the equality impact assessments that are done once budgets are determined and the outcomes. Often with equality impact assessments, it seems that a desktop process is gone through. That has meaning, but it always looks back the way. What is your assessment of how we are doing in doing that as a continuous thing? As we start to talk about the budget that we will agree in the next few months, how are assessments around equalities and inclusion, for example, being done now so that we do not have to look back at things when everything is done in February?

Sorry, Pam.

Thank you; that is really helpful. Part of my question is motivated by comments that have been made by service providers that are funded through different strands of Scottish Government funding around the resource spending review. They are looking at some of the directions of travel that were laid out in the review. I know that matters have moved on—sometimes in the wrong direction, for the reasons that you outlined—in the intervening six months; however, there is concern around decisions being taken without an understanding of the consequences in terms of material outcomes. Other members might want to pick upon that.

You mentioned the national performance framework. Linking that to where we consider we should be, how do you see the national performance framework giving us the outcomes that we want? Pam Duncan-Glancy will come in later to talk about the issue of minimum core outcomes when we are dealing with such questions, but it seems to me that we do not always understand the consequences of the decisions that we take here. I am curious to know whether you think that we are moving in the right direction, because I do not think that we have everything in place yet.

Where do you see the pressure points, and where we need a bit more intervention to better understand the consequences of financial decisions?

Presiding Officer,

“Britain and the United States are poor societies with some very rich people.”

Those are not my words but a headline from that well-known radical left-wing broadsheet The Financial Times. That is the reality that we are living in. There are communities where most people are, to a greater or lesser extent, struggling. They struggle to eat enough of what they need to stay healthy, to stay warm and to give their children what they need to get through the school day. They struggle to sleep without experiencing that terrible jolting thump of the heart as they wake and remember the looming bills.

For the poorest people, it is even worse. Last year, the lowest-earning 5 per cent of households in Britain were 20 per cent worse off not only than their counterparts in Norway, Germany and Switzerland, but than those in Slovenia.

Those households—families, couples and single people—are not doing anything wrong. On the contrary, most of them are doing exactly what they have been told to do. They are doing what they have been told will be their route out of poverty and their pathway to the sunny uplands of prosperity and peace of mind. They are working.

However, as the committee’s report so vividly shows us, that work and the social security to which our citizens are rightly and fully entitled are just not enough to keep our neighbours, our constituents and our friends out of the chilling chasm of debt. That debt is not incurred frivolously through expenditure on the luxuries that the rich take for granted; it is incurred through spending on food, rent, council tax and school meals.

The committee has made wise and sensitive recommendations about changes to processes, attitudes, resources and regulation, but wider reforms are needed—reforms to work, social security and taxation, along with consideration of the fundamental question of what our economy is for.

We need decent pay for everyone. We need not a situation in which people can just about manage if they take three jobs and never see their children, but pay that means that families can thrive, that they can pay their bills and still have a little left over, and that they can enjoy the short years of childhood instead of merely enduring them. That means having a genuine living wage, so I am proud that we are making good progress on that here, in Scotland.

We need decent conditions and work that brings security, respect, fulfilment, equal opportunities and an effective voice for workers. That is what the fair work agenda means. Sooner rather than later, all work in Scotland must become fair work.

We need wealth distribution. Yes: that means taxing the rich. That might make some of us nervous, but our constituents are way ahead of us. The Scottish social attitudes survey that was published yesterday shows that 68 per cent agree that Government should redistribute income

“from the better-off to those who are less well-off”.

More than half of that 68 per cent agree strongly, while only 4 per cent of those surveyed strongly disagree. The Westminster Government—whatever its iteration is today—likes to talk about having a mandate: that 68 per cent sounds like a very clear mandate to me.

Inequality is not just bad for the poor, it is bad for everyone. It is bad for individuals’ health and wellbeing, for communities, for educational outcomes and for economic success. During the fleeting fiasco of the Tory plan to scrap the 45 per cent tax band, even City of London traders were not dancing on their desks; rather, they were warning how pointless it is to be privately rich and publicly poor.

We need social security that is dignified, respectful, humane and sensitive in terms of both its levels of payment and its processes. We have endured years of toxic rhetoric from Westminster and the media, deliberately inadequate systems and consciously cruel implementation. All of that has literally cost lives. I am thankful that we Scottish Greens have successfully argued for mitigation in Scotland of some of that bitter cruelty, including the bedroom tax, the benefits cap and the obscenity that is the rape clause. However, there is much more to do. I and, I know, others are determined to do it.

One thing that we really need to progress faster is implementation of a universal basic income, which the Greens have long supported. That measure would place dignity at the heart of our economy. One’s worth should never be measured by one’s ability to contribute only economically. Our worth as humans goes far beyond being cogs in a labour market machine. A universal basic income would also prevent people from being penalised by the clawback of money for late payment or non-payment of debts. The Scottish Government’s work on a minimum income guarantee is very welcome, but we need to go further as soon as we can.

Finally, we need opportunities for people to build better and to co-create a shared future, as well as securing their own livelihoods now. A truly just transition to a future economy will be one that brings everyone along, with support for responsible small and larger businesses, with green jobs in the caring and creative sectors as well as in renewables sectors, and with employment that recognises that we are, first and foremost, human beings and not human resources. This is what our economy is for; it is to sustain us, as people, and the earth that we stand upon. If there are wealth creators, they are certainly not the billionaires. The wealth creators are the people whom we should support.

I thank the minister for his statement and the briefing that he gave earlier this afternoon.

The review that has been published today is welcome. It contains helpful information and guidance, including on the 16 interventions and the seven criteria for reopening the supersponsor scheme. However, given that the seven criteria are not simple tests, can the minister say a little more about how they will be interpreted, assessed and applied? What other information will he use before taking a decision on whether to reopen the scheme?

No.

Before I close, I want to put on record my heartfelt thanks to my fellow committee members for their thoughtful work over the past months. I thank Joe FitzPatrick, the clerks and SPICe researchers for guiding us through the stage 1 process with consideration and care. Most importantly, I thank all those who gave evidence to us—in person or in writing—even those with whom I profoundly disagree. I especially want to mention the trans people, and their families, who spoke and wrote to us so movingly. I thank them for making themselves vulnerable, and for sharing their experiences and their lives with us.

The bill does something simple: it makes it easier than it is under the current process for trans people to be legally recognised as who they are. Ellie Gomersall, a young trans woman who gave evidence to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, said at the rally held outside Parliament this afternoon:

“Sometimes it feels like the hardest thing about being trans is the admin”.

The bill changes that, and only that. As others have said, the bill has been a very long time in coming. We know that there is a long way still to go, but today—together—we set our path in the right direction. We do so in solidarity, with gratitude and with love.

In the history of this Parliament, today will be remembered. For the first time after far, far too long, we have the opportunity to do something that is, on one level, rather ordinary but which is immensely precious. Today, we assert the simple right of all trans people, with dignity and respect, without unnecessary intrusion, expense, medicalisation or stigma, to ensure that their documents of identity accurately record that identity, so that, if they choose to marry the person they love, they can stand beside them as who they really are, and, at the end of their lives, they know that that life, and that death, will be recorded as their own, not those of a non-existent stranger.

That is something ordinary, something simply human, but which has been brought about by some extraordinary human endeavours. We owe a great debt today to our trans and non-binary friends, colleagues, comrades and relatives; those who have campaigned and explained, written, sung, painted, marched, prayed and believed. Today is for them. We see them and we thank them.

Today is also for all those trans people we have never met, never heard of or from; those who have never been able to write to their MSP, respond to a consultation, perhaps never told anyone that they are trans—maybe scarcely even told themselves. Wherever they are, today is for them. We acknowledge them and we keep a place for them.

Today is for our children and young people—those with supportive families who struggle alongside them and those whose relatives have turned away. We look to the future, to a time when being trans or being cis is simply a facet of being human, like being gay or straight, left-handed or right-handed. Today is for them. We welcome them and we stand with them.

Today is also for our trans friends and neighbours, those known to us and those unknown to anyone, who are no longer with us, who chose not to live in a world that could not, or would not, see them for who they were. We grieve for them, and we hold them in our thoughts.

We do not forget those elsewhere in the UK who have had their promises of reform cruelly trampled by a toxic Government that would rather play at culture wars than keep its word. Today may not be for them, but I hope that tomorrow will be.

This bill has been assailed by a tsunami of disinformation, a heartbreaking moral panic manufactured and disseminated by a small number of people who should know better. I believe that many will come to know better and will bitterly regret the part that they have played in this process. I implore them to show courage—not the empty bravado that dresses in appropriated colours, delighting in the discourse of disrespect, but the real courage that looks with meticulous attention at our history, sees the patterns of oppression recreated, recognises shared experience and is not afraid of difference. Today is not for them, but it could be. There is still time to join us.

We are not yet where we want to be. The bill itself does not do everything that we want it to do. Some of those gaps can potentially be filled in the stages ahead of us. I make no secret of—and no apology for—my call for the three-month waiting period and the three-month reflection period to be taken out of the bill, for a reconsideration of the problematic person of interest provisions, for the removal of the redundant and stigmatising new criminal offence and for proper end-of-life provisions to be secured.

Some of the gaps will take longer to fill and will need new laws and processes. However—I say this particularly to people in the public gallery and those who are listening online who are directly affected by the issue—I am determined that appropriate gender recognition for under-16s and for non-binary people will be part of our shared future. To them I say, “You are not forgotten.”

Of course, gender recognition is not the only imperative. We must and we shall, with urgency and resolve, ensure that trans healthcare is available to all who need it, when and where they need it. Further, we must and we shall comprehensively ban the despicable practices around so-called conversion.

You have all mentioned the people shortage in different ways, but the fact is that some of that is not within our control. What would you like us to do to try to make welding and other fabrication jobs more attractive?