Chamber and committees

I thank those who work to support the distribution of social security to many people across Scotland. I also thank those who support recipients in voluntary sector organisations, local authorities and elsewhere. We see you and we value you. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the personal testimony that we have heard here today. It makes a difference, as Emma Roddick has just said, that people see us standing here with lived experience.

Scotland is re-investing in our vital social security system after more than a decade of cuts. The child payment, which the Greens will fight to at least double as soon as possible, could invest more than £320 million in our children by the end of this parliamentary session. The young carer grant, which we have championed in the Parliament, is providing thousands of young carers with yearly grants to help them enjoy some time away from their caring roles.

Those and other extra supports will be of no use to people who are not aware of their entitlements, to those who need a bit of help to apply or to people who are too embarrassed to apply because of years of shameful attacks on them by Governments and others.

The child payment could not come soon enough, but the Scottish Fiscal Commission estimates that 25 per cent of children—86,000 children—will not receive the support that they are entitled to. That figure does not include the children who will miss out because their families do not claim the qualifying UK payments.

Those are just the payments that we know about. Scotland will soon deliver disability and carer payments to hundreds of thousands of Scots, with no official estimates of how many people might be eligible. I urge the cabinet secretary to explore how such estimates could be produced. Fighting poverty with social security payments that do not get to everyone they target is like fighting it with one hand tied behind our backs. It does not have to be that way, though. Child benefit take-up is regularly above 90 per cent, reaching 97 per cent in some years recently, and around 96 per cent of new families apply for their baby box.

What can we do? First, we must tackle head-on the stigma created by 40 years of lies about benefit claimants by successive Westminster Governments and the media.

Secondly, we need to expand high-quality income maximisation advice. Some evaluations show as much as a £20 return for every £1 invested. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s healthier, wealthier children project, championed by the Greens in the Parliament, has over 10 years got an estimated £36 million into the pockets of new parents by supporting midwives and health visitors to signpost to money advice services. That is why I am so pleased that the shared Scottish Government-Scottish Greens policy programme commits an additional £10 million for such services. I really look forward to seeing how that will be spent as soon as possible.

Thirdly, we need to be proactive in getting money to people. When people approach Social Security Scotland or local government for support, we should be actively checking what other payments may be on offer that they can claim. With the right information and the right information technology, we can make automatic payments to people without them even having to apply in the first place. Glasgow City Council has proved that that is possible, with school clothing grants, and I am very pleased that the shared policy programme commits to expanding that approach.

We must also make progress in making disability payments more accessible. Regular face-to-face assessments, which were not necessary in 20 years of disability living allowance, were introduced by the UK Government to make disability payments harder to access, demonising and stigmatising the people who tried. Applicants have been forced to travel many miles, sometimes to inaccessible buildings, to attend assessments conducted by assessors who have been entirely ignorant of their condition. In some cases, applicants’ health conditions have been significantly worsened—entirely the opposite to the intention of the disability benefits system.

Our new Scottish adult disability payment could be transformative. Some decisions may be reached using the application form and accompanying information without the need for further assessment—a Green win from 2018 and something of which I am very proud. When a conversation with the applicant is needed, the new client consultation system promises to be less intrusive and more respectful. We need to ensure that people who have those conversations have the information that they need about the people to whom they are talking. I also urge the minister and the cabinet secretary to address the concerns about the 20m rule. When the new payment launches next year, disabled people, their organisations and the Greens will be watching developments carefully to ensure that the promises are upheld.

For too long, Governments have been deliberately putting up barriers to people accessing social security. It does not have to be that way. All of us, but particularly the Scottish Government, should be tearing those barriers down, and I am pleased to see the Greens playing a vital role in that.

I thank my colleague Gillian Mackay for lodging this important motion for debate. I echo her remarks, and those of other people, about the work that Back Off Scotland and others have done to raise awareness of the issue. I am of course delighted that she will lodge a member’s bill on the issue and take it through Parliament—well done, you.

Earlier this session, I asked the minister what the Scottish Government could do, other than support local authority byelaws, to create protest-free buffer zones outside clinics that provide abortion services. The answer that I got was a little bit disappointing, because it simply reiterated the local authority byelaw mechanism. Although I am pleased that the programme for government outlines a clear commitment that the Government will support any local authority that wishes to use byelaws in that way, we have to do more.

As a Green, I believe passionately in the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most local level that is consistent with their resolution. Local decision making and local empowerment are central to my politics. So, on the face of it, it may seem appropriate for local authorities to have the powers over the issue that we are discussing today. However, the key part of the definition of subsidiarity that is relevant today is the bit about the appropriateness of the level of decision making.

As Gillian Mackay and others have outlined, this is about access to healthcare. It is about a fundamental right. I do not want that right to be contingent on geography. If we believe—as it seems that most of us do—that all people in Scotland should have the legal right to make choices about their reproductive health and must be able to access health care without intimidation, coercion, harassment or stigmatisation, then we have the obligation to act, regardless of the views of any local authority. We would not find it acceptable if people of colour in one part of Scotland were protected by anti-racist legislation while people of colour in another part of Scotland were not.

To pick up on the comments that were made in a previous contribution, just because Police Scotland does not have a long list of examples of harassment or intimidation, it does not mean that it does not happen. We know that it does. We also know only too well that, sometimes—especially on issues that affect women, such as this one—women do not go to the police and do not report things. That is therefore not an excuse not to act.

We need a national approach. We need buffer zones outside all hospitals and clinics, and we need them urgently. It should never be acceptable for people to be harassed, bullied or stigmatised as they access healthcare. Such buffer zones will also allow the healthcare professionals who work in those facilities—whether or not they have anything to do with abortion services—to go to and from their work without harassment, bullying or stigmatisation. That is a right that all workers should be able to rely on.

I look forward to supporting Gillian Mackay as she works with people across the chamber and across Scotland on her member’s bill. We must legislate to protect the rights of people to have their safety, wellbeing, privacy and dignity protected.

Yes, Presiding Officer.

The minister said that she and her officials would do everything possible to reduce the risk of defendants appearing without representation, especially if they have vulnerabilities associated with mental health and addiction. Can she set out what those provisions and actions will entail, particularly over the next 10 days?

That defendants could be in a situation in which they are without representation is appalling. A foundation of our justice system must be the right to representation when needed.

The current situation is the consequence of long-term underfunding and insufficient support of our legal aid system. I express solidarity with solicitors who are taking action because of that and I thank them for the vital work that they have done, often in difficult circumstances.

The minister said that she and her officials—

Thank you very much for your opening statement, and for bringing the proposed bill to us. As you know, the Scottish Greens supported Johann Lamont’s bill in the previous session, and we are pleased to see that you are taking up the issue this session.

Without prejudicing our consideration of your statement of reasons today, we have to determine what is different between the approach that Johann Lamont took and what you intend to do. Could you outline some of the key differences between the previous bill and what you intend to introduce?

Like others have done, I thank the panel very much for coming along this morning, for sharing their personal and powerful testimonies and for trusting us with those. I appreciate that that is not always an easy thing to do. Like others, I have supported the campaign for a full ban, and I remain committed to that—as Pam Duncan-Glancy and Fulton MacGregor have already said.

I have a couple of questions. One is about the medical profession and one concerns the issue of wider support for people exploring their sexual identity.

There have been suggestions that medical practitioners might be criminalised if they do not affirm a young person’s gender identity. I appreciate that this is not an issue only for the medical profession, but how can we ensure that we work across the piece so that people are able to support young people?

In some ways, that leads into my second question, which is about how we can support people to have the safe and secure spaces to explore their sexual and gender identity if they are expected to conform but feel that they do not. How can we ensure that we genuinely have those open spaces that are not curtailed by any legislation that we bring in?

To follow that up, can we ask the Scottish Human Rights Commission that question directly as part of the additional evidence that we gather? If we have Scottish legislation, would the relevant body be the EHRC or the SHRC? We need both their views on that. I know that they have already spoken to us about the ban but enforcement is an important issue.

When I think about this issue, I see two elements, one of which involves the legislation and the ban. What would you like us to do about the other element, which involves education, training and awareness raising? That will not necessarily make its way into legislation, but if we do only the legislation, we are doing only half the job. We need to be clear about what else needs to change. From your religious or faith perspectives, is there anything that you really want us to do or anything that you would argue should not be done with regard to the broader support structures and mechanisms such as education and training that we will need to develop and resource alongside any legislation?

By pursuing community benefit, human rights and community wealth building, we can transform our communities. I sincerely hope that in this session of Parliament we can abandon the legacy and mindset of Thatcherism in public services and embrace community wealth building, because that way lies social and economic justice.

Thatcherism featured many crimes, but perhaps one of the greatest was to hand over the budget of public bodies for predation by private profiteers. Compulsory competitive tendering was a fantastic way to transfer wealth from communities to the balance sheets of corporations, very often reducing the quality of services and leaving the more complex, and therefore more expensive, services for local authorities and other public services to deal with. That made the public sector look less efficient, and, as the fair work convention found, led to downward pressures on public services’ budgets.

We need a root-and-branch approach to eliminate that attitude to our public services. Our public spending should support public bodies’ aims, not the aims of people interested only in plunder and profit.

I am delighted to see the rise of community wealth-building approaches that use public spending to create better communities and more employment, and which do so in a way that does not undermine the shared aims of fairness, equality and social justice.

Procurement has been my guilty pleasure across my public service. One of the first things that I did when elected as a councillor many moons ago was to identify ways in which local authorities could use their spending to better effect.

In 2008, I joined the calls for a living wage—the first Scottish politician to do so. I am pleased that we have won that argument, even if, at the time, some of my colleagues thought that it was not worth the hassle, or could not see the difference between a living wage and a minimum wage.

I am proud of the commitments that the Greens secured in the co-operation deal with the Scottish Government on the living wage, and that we have already seen action on that. Requiring all Government procurement contracts to pay the living wage will make a big impact on driving up pay and improving people’s lives, embedding the fair work agenda in Scotland’s economy more than ever before.

I will not name any names, but some of those same colleagues, 15 years ago, thought that they were doing such a good job on three-year funding that they refused calls to move to five-year funding for the voluntary sector. Instead, they regressed to single-year funding—a disaster for the third sector and something that must end. We must renew our relationship with the voluntary sector, with sustainable funding relationships. We need to update the Scottish compact that, some 20 years ago, gave hope to so many.

What I was doing then has now been wrapped up into community wealth building, which is an approach that can transform our public services and deliver for our communities. Sustainable procurement is key to that—procurement that means that public kitchens, including school canteens, source food provided by local businesses and organic producers, and which bases decisions about public sector capital and revenue funding on targeted social, economic and environmental outcomes.

The debate is not just about procurement, however; it is about treating workers with dignity and respect, and compensating them accordingly. Fair work principles must be the norm: payment of a real living wage, no precarious contracts, decent conditions, democratic engagement, including trade union recognition, and transparent, supportive management. All procured services should be centred on ethical commissioning and fair work, which will be quality and individual outcome focused, collaborative, person centred and human rights based.

We must also acknowledge the global impact of our commissioning and procurement activities. Our supply chains too often include child labour, slavery and actions that drive climate breakdown. In the worst cases, such as in the illegal occupation of the West Bank, they support human rights abuses. Purchasing goods and services made in the illegal settlements in Palestine supports the illegal occupation, and no Scottish public body should be acting in support of that. I would welcome a statement from Scottish ministers on what actions are being taken to ensure that such purchasing ends.