Chamber and committees

That is interesting. You have all described and the committee heard earlier this morning and previously the failures of commissioners, other structures, support organisations and Governments to deal with some of the inequalities—you talked about the abuse, discrimination and continued injustices that disabled people face. Given all that, you therefore think that this focus—this office, person or resource—would be really instrumental in transforming that.

It is easy to get channelled into a particular form of communication and to miss much of what else is going on.

I could go on, but I know that the convener wants to move on. Thank you all.

Thanks, Lyn. That is very clear.

Tressa Burke spoke very powerfully and said that disabled people are betting on the commissioner. How do you see the potential overlap or duplication of effort, and the complication in respect of which route a disabled person who is looking for a remedy goes down? Would they go to the SHRC, the disability commissioner or the EHRC? Where would they go? How do you see all that working out?

Thank you—that was very clear.

Jenny, I am interested in the answer that you gave to the convener’s earlier question on the breadth of the role that the commissioner could and, arguably, should cover. How would one organisation, or one commissioner with a commission behind them, deal with the complexities and the variation across the range of needs and requirements that disabled people have, given the overlaps in the landscape and the issues that we have touched on?

That is very clear. Thank you. I will move on to Heather Fisken. I have a similar question for you, Heather, about the duplication and overlap of potential mandates and powers and how you see that working out.

Good morning and thank you all for joining us and for your comments so far.

Alice Struthers talked about the cluttered landscape and the potential confusion for people, which we have heard about in previous sessions. If a disabled person is not able to realise their rights and wants to go to somebody to seek redress, would they go to the Scottish Human Rights Commission, the Equality and Human Rights Commission or the disability commissioner? What are your views on that cluttered landscape and the different commissioners potentially working alongside one another, with overlapping or maybe duplicated mandates? How do you see that working out?

Thanks. Eddie McConnell, I will come to you with the same kind of question. How do we deal with the potential problems and confusions around that duplication of work and mandate and the overlap that might result if the decision is made to go ahead with a disability commissioner?

I thank all the organisations that have provided such thoughtful and informed briefings for this debate.

In the First Minister’s foreword to “Best Start, Bright Futures: Tackling Child Poverty Progress Report 2023-24”, which is the latest progress report, he wrote that eradicating child poverty in Scotland is his

“top priority”

and that he will

“leave no stone unturned”

in seeking to achieve that aim. I and the Scottish Greens share that commitment, and I would like to suggest some substantial stones that we might usefully lift together and look underneath.

For this is a critical moment. As we have heard already, according to the Poverty and Inequality Commission’s scrutiny, as highlighted by Save the Children, achieving the interim targets is “possible, but not probable”, and the commission says that work towards the crucial 2030 target is

“not at the scale necessary to deliver the transformation required.”

We have been here before. Let us at least learn something from our shared experience with Scotland’s climate targets, which began with congratulation on their ambition, but which were allowed to coast and plummet from challenging to improbable to practically impossible, and were left so late that they ultimately had to be abandoned. We cannot let that happen again, because to abandon the child poverty targets would mean abandoning many thousands of children to the pain, hunger, exclusion and stigma that poverty brings. However, as with the climate targets, business as usual will not enable us to reach them.

That is why the proposed amendment that I had hoped to speak to this afternoon called on the Scottish Government not just to consider the commission’s scrutiny but to act on its recommendations. Ultimately, this is a crisis not of shortfall but of inequality. We know that, above a modest level, it is not the average income in a country that affects children’s wellbeing but the level of equality. We do not need to wait for more economic growth to carry out active redistribution. That is why one of the commission’s recommendations is specifically about tax policy and using the fiscal tools that we have to build our children’s future.

The Government has pointed out that Scotland does not have the powers that it needs to do that easily or to do it alone. I agree that we need independence in order to grow the future that children deserve but, in the meantime, there is much that we can and must do. First, we can put pressure on the Westminster parties, especially from within, so it is heartening to hear some degree of consensus across the chamber this afternoon.

A new report that came out just this weekend—the latest update to the “Local indicators of child poverty after housing costs” statistics, produced by the centre for research in social policy at Loughborough University—shows the devastating effect of the savage two-child limit. The next UK Government, if it is to have any credibility as a caring alternative to the brutalities of the past 14 years, must abolish that limit as one of its most urgent priorities. I know that many members here agree that that should be done, and I am disappointed to see nothing about the two-child limit in either of the two Opposition amendments. There is, of course, much more that a UK Government could do, including abolishing the benefits cap and taking action on the Child Poverty Action Group’s call for an increase in child benefit.

Secondly, we can and must give real support to local authorities and put an end to policies that make it harder for them to meet the needs of children in their areas. Never again must the comfortable win council tax freezes while neighbouring families are out in the cold.

Thirdly, we must act here, wherever and however we can, including by increasing the Scottish child payment to £40 a week, recognising its transformational impact. The child payment is transformational. We should congratulate ourselves on that, but we should not stop there; we must go further. We must dare to implement effective taxation and targeted spending, holding child poverty before us as a clear and focused lens for absolutely everything else that we do.

We need to know what would make the greatest difference by actioning the work on priority family types recommended by the Poverty and Inequality Commission, the disaggregated data called for by the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, and the gendered approach advocated by Close the Gap. We need to listen—really listen—to those who know, and cannot help but know, exactly what they are talking about.

This situation is not new. In 1999, the Child Poverty Action Group published a book called “Poverty First Hand”, which was based on the understanding that

“poor people, like other oppressed groups, have a right to speak for themselves; that it is important to ask them what they think and that discussions and developments which include people’s first hand views are likely to be more effective and make more progress than those which don’t”.

It is time that we began to place that insight not just in discrete lived experience panels but at the heart of all that we do here. Each decision that we take, whether on policy, priorities or budgets, makes a tangible difference, either directly or indirectly, to real children and real families now and to those in the future, too. That difference can mean sufficiency, comfort and celebration, or it can mean deprivation and despair—and no hope. The choice is ours, but the consequences are very much borne by others. It is imperative that we act.

Poverty is a slow violence that strikes children and those who care for them in the heart and in their bodies, their minds, their hopes, their dreams and their futures. However, it is possible to change that for hundreds of thousands of children in Scotland, and if it is possible, we must do it.

Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in his afterword to “A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age”, the original landmark report for the Children’s Society, that love is at the centre of a child’s needs. By love, he explained, he meant not just warm feelings, but

“long-term commitment to someone else’s wellbeing as something that matters profoundly to one’s own wellbeing”.

By that definition, what we are called to do here is to love, because our commitment to the wellbeing of Scotland’s children matters profoundly to us—to each of us as individuals and to the collective moral legitimacy of this Parliament.

We must not treat challenges as exceptions and excuses for failure. A just, UK-wide response to the Covid pandemic could have lessened inequality instead of increasing it. The so-called cost of living crisis, popularly blamed on war in Ukraine, is in reality a cost of greed opportunity, with both energy and food corporations making record profits.

We are now in a permanent state of exception. Our climate-changed future will bring more shortages, more extremes of cold and heat and of rain and drought, more conflicts and, quite possibly, more pandemics, striking the unprotected with the hardest blows. All are reasons to act, not excuses for failure.

The co-benefits of principled action, investment in children’s futures and preventative spend—instead of dealing only with damage—are all potentially immense. We can heal our planet as we heal the wounds of poverty-ridden childhoods.

It is a daunting task, but we must act now and act together; we must be brave, radical, creative and revolutionary. Again, I commend the commission’s final recommendations, which we have heard so much about in the debate. They are recommendations for cross-party action and consensus building with civil society and, crucially, with the ultimate experts: the families, parents, children and young people who know, in their own lives, what it is to live in poverty.

We must do all that we can now, while we are here, but we must also give children and their carers—present and future generations—the tools that they need to hold successive Governments and public bodies to account. A human rights act for Scotland can contain those tools. Human rights are not only about voting, fair trials and freedom of protest or speech. They are about the most fundamental aspects of human life: health, housing and food; education and being at work; the air that we breathe and the water that we drink; and the rights to learn and to play.

I could not let this afternoon’s debate go by without asking the Scottish Government to reaffirm its commitment to introducing the promised human rights bill. We need to make use of all the levers that we have to tackle child poverty, but we also need to ensure that we have routes to remedy when a child’s right to food, education, a home, a family life or any of the other rights that we hope that the bill will include are not realised. We must have mechanisms of enforcing the provision of basic standards for all. Further, we must ensure that we support children and young people—and their families and communities—to understand and know what their rights are, so that they might better realise them. A human rights act for Scotland can be central to delivering all that, and not living in poverty must certainly be one of the ultimate goals of us all achieving our human rights.

I will finish with some stark words from the very end of the 20th century. They come from a member of a lone parents’ group in Glasgow and were quoted in “Poverty first hand: Poor people speak for themselves”. The children whom the speaker was talking about will be adults now—perhaps still in Scotland, perhaps with children of their own, perhaps flourishing or perhaps not. The speaker was possibly their mother, perhaps their father or maybe another lone caregiver. They said this, about those children:

“they should have a childhood and they don’t have a childhood now.”

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on any discussions that it has had with universities across Scotland about how public money is used, including in relation to any activities that may impact the on-going conflict in Palestine. (S6O-03535)