Chamber and committees

I would like to withdraw amendment 3.

We know that one key way to support asylum seekers and refugees to settle and become part of their new country is to give them access to work. We know, as we have already heard in the chamber today, that we need workers in Scotland, as many sectors are under immense staffing pressure. Employers that want to consider refugees for employment in sectors that are crying out for more staff have contacted many of us. What support can we make available for people who are resettled via the Afghan relocation and assistance policy to find employment, and what can we do to provide support for employers, such as care homes in my region, that want to support refugees into employment?

Does the cabinet secretary agree that, as well as refugees, people who are seeking asylum should be given the right to work? Despite the Prime Minister’s 2019 promise, the UK Government has refused to review its policy on the matter.

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on Afghan refugee relocation and resettlement with reference to the different elements of the new Scots strategy. (S6O-00219)

I hear your commitment to consult and engage with the trade unions. Will you say a little more about that? There is a commitment to

“consult on applying conditionality to public funding”,

and to consulting businesses, including discussions on a requirement for public disclosure on climate change and its impacts. What work is on-going with workers and the trade unions? Sometimes they may be closer to understanding the levers that we need to have access to and which we need to use.

Good morning, cabinet secretary. I thank you and the rest of the panel for being at the meeting.

Cabinet secretary, you spoke earlier about some of the challenges in using metrics such as the number of jobs that are created to track the success of the economy or as criteria for eligibility for financial support. You also spoke about some of the constraints in our ability to build resilience because of restrictions in relation to procurement law, for example. On the programme for government’s commitment on conditionality to drive the changes that we need to see in respect of net zero, fair work and wellbeing, what are the barriers to ensuring that the pace of change in those areas is fast enough? Are we doing enough to ensure that we get the outcomes that we hope conditionality will deliver?

Thank you, minister, for outlining the Government’s position. You mentioned engagement with regulators. Are you aware of any concerns that either the regulators or other stakeholders in Scotland have about the bill’s provisions?

I thank everybody for their comments so far—it has been an interesting discussion.

I want to pick up on and maybe tease out some of the issues and the connections between them. We have talked about the problem of data and the issue of being cautious about the shiny new thing, which I totally get. Chris Birt talked about the need to have a clear vision of where we want to get to. We have the technical language of a minimum core or what it means to live in dignity, but do we have a shared understanding of that? If not, what work do we need to do to ensure that we have an understanding of that across the different sectors and priority groups or other demographics, so that we can make sure that we collect the right data and deliver the right kind of vision, and that we are not sidetracked into the mysticism of it all?

I thank the panel for joining us and for their contributions so far. My question extends some of what underlay Karen Adam’s question. You have all picked up in different ways on how we look at rights as they apply—or should apply—to different groups. We know that we lack some of the data that we need and we know that we lack a common understanding. As we develop this work—we are only starting it—over the next few years, and as we incorporate other human rights obligations through the incorporation into Scots law of the international conventions and treaties that we desire to incorporate, how can we use that to give us better frameworks or tools for analysis and delivery? I understand that there is a mismatch, as you have all said in different ways, between the rhetoric, the ambition and implementation. What does the incorporation of additional human rights frameworks allow us to do, and to do differently?

The social security system is the sign and signal of our responsibility to one another. It should be there to help us when we need it most, to support all of us to live well and with dignity in a society that cares. However, for too long, UK Governments have undermined our social security system not only by cutting support but by consistently misleading the public about benefit recipients.

The £20 cut to universal credit that we are debating today is one of the biggest social security cuts ever to be made in British history. Not only that, it is the latest in a long line of cuts that have torn more and more holes in our social security safety net, hitting the poorest families hardest. The benefits freeze reduced incomes as costs were rising, cutting around 6 per cent of overall income; the abhorrent two-child limit has removed about £2,900 from 18,000 Scottish households; and the benefit cap prevents thousands of Scots from getting the benefits that they should have.

The £20 increase was a welcome reprieve from some of those cuts. Indeed, the Institute for Fiscal Studies described it as

“the first significant real terms increase in entitlements for out-of-work claimants without children in half a century, though earnings have doubled ... in that time.”

The fact that the £20 increase was needed could not be a clearer admission that our social security system had been fatally weakened long before the pandemic came along. The increase was not an act of benevolence but an admission of failure. It was an admission that the system had been so damaged by cuts that it was no longer able to perform its basic function of providing adequate support for people who need help with their incomes for reasons beyond their control.

The Conservative amendment, which we cannot support, displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of universal credit, because it focuses heavily on the importance of work. The DWP has argued that the cut will act as a work incentive, but universal credit is not exclusively an unemployment payment, as many millions of recipients are either working or have been assessed as being not required to work. Like the bedroom tax, which tries to force people to move into smaller properties that simply do not exist, this cut, which is being forced on people who cannot work or who cannot work more, is simply inhumane. Also, the cut is not a work incentive if it means that people can no longer afford to use public transport to get to work or that people become ill because they cannot eat well enough.

If the cut goes ahead, it will pull as much as £460 million out of the economy instead of that money being spent in our high streets, supporting local jobs. It will mean that people will skip meals as they face the choice between heating and eating. Independent analysis by the Scottish Parliament information centre suggests that withdrawing the uplift would move more than 50,000 people, including over 10,000 children, into relative poverty at a time when we know that poverty is already unacceptably high.

This regressive cut is symbolic of a UK Government that knows the price of some things but the value of nothing. The cut will temporarily save the Government a few billion pounds a year, but the ripple effects of poverty and the associated societal costs will reach far into the future, adding burdens on future generations. It reflects the stark difference between the UK Government’s coercive approach to welfare and the human-rights based approach that we are trying to build in Scotland. It is symbolic of a Government that ploughs on with its plans, no matter what evidence is presented to show that they are going to actively harm our society’s poorest people.

We cannot support that. With additional powers, we could do so much more, but, for now, we want that lifeline retained.

I am pleased to pledge the Scottish Green Party’s support for the bill, and I echo the thanks to unpaid carers that has come from previous speakers.

Before the pandemic, it was estimated that there were around 800,000 unpaid carers in Scotland, the majority of them women. We have heard this afternoon that that figure now stands at over 1 million people.

Let us do the maths. The average unpaid carer does 26 hours of care a week. The Scottish real living wage is £9.50 an hour. That means that 1 million unpaid carers are doing unpaid care worth £12.8 billion.

The Fraser of Allander Institute said earlier this week that, according to its sample of carers, the support delivered by each unpaid carer saved the taxpayer £114,000 per year. That is 1 million people who are providing incredible and loving care to a family member or friend, saving us money but going under-recognised.

They, too, feel that way. According to a Carers Trust Scotland survey that was conducted this summer, 36 per cent of people caring unpaid for family members or friends feel unable to manage their caring role; almost three quarters of unpaid carers have not had any breaks from their caring role during the pandemic; and only 23 per cent are confident that the support they receive with caring will continue following the end of the pandemic. That makes the modest extra payment being made through the bill welcome—“like winning the lottery”, according to one respondent to the national carer organisations survey on the bill. Another said that it would allow them to send gifts to their kids,

“which would be really difficult otherwise.”

They continued:

“It sounds like luxuries but it makes the winter look bearable.”

Those responses show just how little support carers allowance currently offers. Welcome though it is, therefore, the extra supplement that we are discussing is a tiny tweak to an unfair and inadequate system. Of those 1 million unpaid carers, about 90,000, as we have heard—less than 10 per cent—currently receive carers allowance, and only those carers will receive that supplement.

Some of the more than 90 per cent who do not receive carers allowance provide many hours of care yet fall short of 35 hours and so get nothing. Yet more will fall foul of the overlapping benefits rule, and some will lose out because they want to work just a few more hours a week.

Those who care for more than one person receive, at present, no additional support or recognition. Submissions to the committee’s evidence sessions on the bill relayed the sad story of a person who cared for 10 years for their elderly mother and father who suffered from dementia and other illnesses. When their father died, they had to reapply in respect of their mother, as not a single hour of their loving care for her had ever been formally recognised.

That is the result, quite frankly, of decades of neglect of carers allowance by both Labour and Conservative UK Governments. However, it does not need to be that way. The Scottish Parliament now has powers to totally transform social security for carers. We can simplify the rules and widen the embarrassingly narrow eligibility criteria. We can increase the amount that is paid—which, even with the supplement, is still shockingly low—and we must do that, because, at the moment, we are expecting carers to live off less than some members would happily spend on a restaurant meal.

The new social security system was founded on the principles of dignity and respect, but paying carers support at that rate does not allow them to live in dignity; nor is it respectful. The forthcoming consultation on carer’s assistance is a real chance to create a fairer deal for carers. It must look at every option for improving support for carers and be genuinely open to hearing what carers have to say about how support can be improved.

Greens will support the bill today, but we do so in full recognition that the extra supplement is only the first step—and a small one—towards a fairer social security system for carers.