Chamber and committees

I thank the minister for early sight of his statement. The annual report references fossil fuel subsidy reform, and the minister referred to the free trade deals that the UK Government has made with Australia and New Zealand. Will he provide further information about the impacts that those deals will have on our environmental and animal welfare standards, and about how, alongside the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020, they will limit our ability to prevent environmental harm and to maintain high regulatory standards in areas such as food safety, energy, animal welfare and climate?

There is an urgent need for action. People are facing a cost of living crisis now and energy bills are going up from tomorrow—all while the UK Government seems determined to abandon climate commitments and increase the growing profits of oil and gas companies. A crisis of this nature needs a concerted and holistic response. We must deliver, at scale, measures to help those most in need. We must insulate Scotland, retrofit buildings, invest in low-carbon heating and grow our renewables potential.

What is the Scottish Government doing to supercharge renewables and energy efficiency programmes? What plans are in place to ensure that the necessary workforce and skills are in place? Does the First Minister agree that the oil and gas companies should not be profiting from the cost of living crisis?

I begin by thanking the miners, family members and friends who spoke so movingly at the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee in recent months. Please know that your voices have been heard; I hope that we can do you justice.

On behalf of the Scottish Greens, I welcome the bill. It is a whole-hearted welcome but one that is tinged with sadness. The legislation ought to be UK-wide; it ought to represent an apology by those who are properly accountable; and it ought to have come long ago, at a time when it could have provided real redress to those who were so bitterly wounded by a deep injustice.

However, we are here, present in this moment, in this place, and it is our duty and our privilege to speak, once again, for the miners. It may be that the bill is a gesture, but gestures matter. They are how we, as human beings, communicate what is important to us, what we feel and what we share.

The miners strike defined a generation. It was ruthlessly exploited by Margaret Thatcher for her ideological war on the trade union movement but, for the workers and communities who were caught up in the dispute, it was a devastating era of violence, betrayal and division. Local police officers found themselves facing down family members and friends, which created wounds that, in some cases, never healed.

The bill matters because it acknowledges the past and the harm that has been done. In some cases, that harm was deliberate; in others, it was inadvertent, careless or callous, poisoned by a toxic and persistent ideology. We do not have to be personally or institutionally culpable to share, as a society, a common responsibility to address that harm. That is true of many historical and continuing injustices, including colonialism and fossil fuel capitalism, and it is true of oppressions locally as well as globally.

Scotland’s era of coal is over, but the scars from the strike are still raw in our communities. The bill recognises the continuing hurt that is suffered by miners and their families and friends. Such suffering, which involves lives, health, relationships, reputations and livelihoods being broken or jeopardised, does not go away.

The bill and the discussions that we have had about it remind us—sadly, we need reminding—that policing by consent must be a foundational reality, not a comfortable fiction.

The discussion of the bill also reminds us of the importance of trade union solidarity. Trade unions exist to protect their workers, and they will rightly protect jobs and terms and conditions whenever they can. We must allow that right to be exercised without fear of violence. That means that we, as leaders, and all those who are employers, must remember the obligations that we have to employees—the bosses of P&O would have done well to remember that recently.

Although the collective and posthumous pardon that the bill seeks to offer is welcome, as we remember and look back on the events and actions that made the bill necessary, we must learn from the mistakes that were made and pledge to never repeat them.

Mining communities were left with no source of hope. Where was the rebuilding and the investment in those areas and their communities’ assets as the mines were closed? Where was the job creation and the retraining for people who were left on the industrial scrap heap? There was none. In fact, quite the opposite was the case—at the time, it was engineered so that many of the workers concerned would never work again.

That is a serious dereliction of duty by any Government, and the Conservatives should hang their heads in shame for willingly creating whole communities of people who were unable to work. They were the victims of a Government ideology that put markets before lives. We cannot allow that to happen again.

As we begin the next energy transition that we must undertake, we must ensure that we take a strategic approach that recognises industries that are in decline and invests in alternative jobs and retraining before the crisis point. It is a pernicious lie to tell workers in those industries that their job is forever. As we move beyond the era of high-carbon industries, as we must do to survive, further industrial decline must be pre-empted by investment in a just transition, community assets and an alternative future. It is up to us to bring hope.

Although we still have work to do on the scope of the bill and on its provisions on financial redress and public inquiries, the fact that we will all vote for it at stage 1 today should, I trust, give us all some hope.

I start by congratulating Kaukab Stewart on giving us the opportunity to discuss benefit sanctions and I thank the University of Glasgow researchers for their very important work.

When a new drug is developed, it must go through careful testing and it will not be approved unless there is clear evidence that it does what it claims to do, and does so safely. It is strange, then, that we do not apply the same principle to benefit sanctions. Hundreds of thousands of benefit sanctions are issued each year, yet there is little evidence that they have significant positive impacts. On the contrary, there is strong evidence to suggest that they have a range of highly negative outcomes for individuals and for society at large.

I want to highlight the mental health impact of sanctions. Take some of the poorest people in the country, make them live on an income that does not stretch to putting three meals a day on the table and heating the house properly, and then threaten to remove even that meagre amount at any moment. That is a recipe for a mental health crisis, and a reality that too many people face, such as Charlie whose electricity was cut off on Christmas day because of sanctions. He told University of Essex researchers:

“There was this image which will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. On Christmas day I was sat alone, at home just waiting for darkness to come so I could go to sleep, and I was watching through my window all the happy families enjoying Christmas and that just blew me away. And I think I had a breakdown on that day and it was really hard to recover from and I’m still struggling with it.”

A University of Glasgow study tells the same sad story: every 10 sanctions applied per 100,000 people were associated with an additional eight people experiencing anxiety and depression and an additional one person receiving mental health treatment. It is therefore no wonder that the National Audit Office found that receiving an employment and support allowance sanction resulted in reducing disabled claimants’ time in employment, which is precisely the opposite effect to that intended.

Meanwhile, the DWP refuses to acknowledge the harm that it is causing.

All that is also before we consider the equalities impacts. An LSE study found that

“Independent of age and gender, White claimants were less likely to be referred for a sanction, and less likely to ultimately receive a sanction, than were claimants from other ethnic groups. Black claimants and claimants of Mixed ethnicity were ... more likely than claimants from other groups to be referred and sanctioned.”

Benefit sanctions, quite simply, are racist.

However, there is another way. I am proud that it was Greens who first pointed out that the devolution of employability programmes to this Parliament was an opportunity to reduce the number of sanctions. That is why fair start Scotland has been, from the outset, entirely voluntary. Moreover, it works. Participants benefited from “not feeling pressured” by the service and felt more able to engage with the support on offer willingly and more effectively.

Finland’s nationwide trial of universal basic income—something that the Scottish Greens have long supported—removed all requirements to seek work and, in doing so, did not reduce a person’s likelihood of becoming employed and led to less mental distress and fewer feelings of depression and loneliness. Those are the things that we should be talking about and focused on.

Benefit sanctions are not only dangerous and a form of violence against some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our communities; they do not help people find work and, indeed, can make doing so even harder. Most fundamental of all, they contravene basic human rights. We all have the right to live in a warm safe home, to have food and to have clothing. It is what we pay social security for—and it should never, ever be taken away.

To ask the First Minister what changes the recent shifts in fossil fuel prices and the need for energy security have made to the Scottish Government’s plans for decarbonisation. (S6F-00957)

No, that is okay. It was about the need for a focus on other planning reforms and, linked to that, planning powers with regard to the resilience, recovery and liveability of our town centres.

Good morning, Professor Sparks, and thank you for your comments so far this morning. My questions follow on from Colin Smyth’s questions about planning, community engagement and bottom-up participation. In your opening remarks and in your answers to Colin, you talked about the policy strengthening that is needed in planning, with a moratorium on out-of-town developments, but you have also spoken about the need for alignment across all the different actions—the delivery plans, development plans and strategies—with an understanding of the place principle at its heart. I am interested in how, beyond the moratorium that you have talked about, we can use NPF4 to deliver some of that alignment for us.

You have also spoken about our transport systems, the need to shift away from the car and the importance of green spaces. Given that town centres are much more than just high streets, what aspects of planning reform are needed if we are looking to focus on resilience and recovery, but also on liveable town centres where communities feel that they can stay, live, learn, grow and play? That is a big question.

Thank you. I will leave it there, given the time.

You touched on the work that has been done to improve the data collection that we do. The equality data improvement plan is under way, but you have spoken about the work that Lesley Irving will be doing. I am interested in joining the dots between the data that we get and how we fund third sector and other organisations to deliver support and other services. As you will know, one of the key challenges for many third sector organisations is project-focused funding, which does not necessarily allow for full cost recovery, full backroom support and a trauma-informed approach.

How is your thinking developing when it comes to joining the dots on the data that we know we need to collect, which evidences need and therefore allows us to provide the expert support organisations that are out there with the full funding that they need, rather than just covering the front-line service delivery costs?

Thank you both for those answers. Nick, I might pick your brains about that in future, outwith the committee.