Chamber and committees

To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government’s position is on whether successive changes to national taxation policy in Scottish budgets will support the redistribution of wealth and help sustain vital public services. (S6F-02825)

The bill has been a long time coming. For more than a decade, consumer groups and members of the legal profession, in various forms, have called for reviews, updates or changes to the regulation of legal services, the associated complaints systems and the mechanisms for ensuring that consumers—our citizens—get the services and support that they need. I will therefore be pleased to support the general principles of the bill. That is not to say that I am content with everything in it, as it stands—far from it—but the bill matters for the citizens of today.

I record my sincere thanks to everyone who has contributed to the committee’s work on this important bill over the past six months. The detailed evidence that we received, and the care and commitment that witnesses have shown towards some pretty technical aspects, are very much appreciated.

I am grateful, too, to Esther Roberton for laying the groundwork for the bill, and to my committee colleagues, our clerks and the Scottish Parliament information centre team for guiding us through stage 1.

Some aspects of the bill are very much needed if we are to make things better and fairer for the citizens whom we represent. Indeed, Consumer Scotland told the committee that reform of the current system is necessary and long overdue.

As Fulton MacGregor outlined, when people engage with legal services, they are often going through stressful or difficult situations. They might be vulnerable, experiencing personal tragedy or trauma, or have specific issues relating to illness or disability that require care and compassion. Their having to deal with technical legal language and formal structures can exacerbate their stresses and anxieties. It is only right that those citizens have confidence in the legal system that they need at times of stress and difficulty.

Strong checks and balances clearly need to be in place, and the system must be transparent, accountable, easy to understand and the subject of appropriate oversight. I look forward to discussions during forthcoming stages to ensure that the legislation gets all that right.

I warmly welcome the proposal that regulatory bodies must take into account consumer principles. We know that principles linked to public interest, access to justice, quality and innovation are understood and widely accepted. The need for effective communication across the system is also clear, but the explicit inclusion of the principles of access, choice, equality, safety, representation, fairness, information and redress will, I hope, deliver tangible benefits and improvements in consumer outcomes. We must ensure that there is appropriate monitoring and evaluation to provide evidence of those improvements.

I welcome the widening of the consumer panel’s remit. We all share the responsibility for ensuring that the panel has the resources that it needs to do its job well. Providing clarity for consumers on what they will get when they engage a lawyer is also very welcome.

Others have highlighted the complexity of the current complaints system. I do not have time to go into that just now, but we must work on further simplification, in the coming stages.

In the chamber this afternoon and elsewhere, there has been much discussion of ministerial powers and concerns about the genuine independence of the judiciary. I look forward to working with colleagues in subsequent stages on the amendments that the minister has promised, and I remain—as committee colleagues will know—keen to ensure that we achieve effective and appropriate oversight of the overseer.

I am heartened by Marsha Scott’s recognition that the bill is

“an opportunity ... to pivot the system away from ... the imbalances of power and the privilege ... inimical to human rights for women and children”.—[Official Report, Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, 3 October 2023; c 21.]

There is much for us to do at stage 2, including addressing some things that are not currently included in the bill. I look forward to working with our new committee convener and others on that important work over the coming months.

We all have too many constituents who are struggling with grinding poverty, for whom public services are a lifeline. I am proud that tax changes that the Scottish Greens have championed—tax changes that mean that the better-off pay more and the people on lower incomes pay less—mean that £1.5 billion more is available for those services. Politicians who promise tax cuts must be honest about what services they would cut.

The Scottish Trades Union Congress has argued—and the First Minister has just recognised—that Scotland can and should do more to use tax powers to redistribute wealth and to make the case that taxation is a public good. How does the First Minister plan to build that consensus for progressive taxation as a force for good?

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the fifth meeting in 2024 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. We have received no apologies for our meeting.

As members will be aware, Kaukab Stewart has resigned as convener of the committee, following her appointment as Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development. For that reason, I am chairing this part of the meeting in my capacity as deputy convener. I take this opportunity to put on the record our thanks to Kaukab for her work, and I wish her well in her new role.

Under our first agenda item, the committee is invited to choose a new convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee.

Do we have any nominations for convener?

Congratulations, Karen. I hand over the chair to you.

I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate. There have been inevitable comments about the debate being irrelevant fantasy, given that we are not yet an independent country. However, it is important for us sometimes to lift our sights to outline the better world that we want to have the opportunity to create—a better world that we will not get from Westminster.

I will begin—as did Peter Kelly of the Poverty Alliance at a Fairer Aberdeen event recently—by quoting Raymond Williams, who said:

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”

My goodness, do we need hope. Our social security system in the United Kingdom is commonly depicted as a safety net—although many experts describe it as more of a perilous tightrope over the abyss of poverty—but it is one that now has huge and gaping holes.

For the first three decades of the modern welfare state, from 1949 to the eve of the Thatcher Government in 1979, the equivalent of today’s universal credit standard allowance was usually between 25 and 30 per cent of average earnings. Since then, it has plummeted, falling below 15 per cent in the early 2000s and dropping again over the past eight years until, as the Government paper highlights, it is now at its lowest level ever in relation to average earnings.

That erosion really matters. It means that families who are reliant on those payments—very many of whom are in work—are experiencing shocking hardship. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that 90 per cent of low-income households on universal credit are currently going without essentials. That is not just a few of those people having difficulty in managing their budgets; it is almost every one of them. As others have pointed out, that is destitution by design. That design incorporates not only the plunging levels of universal credit itself, but the many ways in which the toxic sanctions system works to reduce actual payments yet further. Punitive to an extraordinary degree, it offers pitifully little with one hand and then takes away even that pittance with the other.

So, our first task, as responsible and compassionate—or even if we were barely humane—legislators is to patch up the worst of the vast and gaping holes. Some of that work, as the paper outlines, is already happening. It is happening in the different approach that we are taking in Scotland, as set out in our Scottish social security principles, which include an understanding that social security is not a work of charity or grudging generosity, but a basic human right.

The work is happening in the new benefits, including the five family payments, most importantly the Scottish child payment, and in new ways of supporting disabled people and carers. It is also happening in mitigations of the bedroom tax and of the benefit cap and in work towards facilitating split payments that would respect and empower people and, ultimately, save lives.

However, there is much more that could be done only with further powers of independence. I am thinking of measures such as abolition of the brutal two-child limit and the prurient rape clause. I warmly welcome the 10 key actions that are set out in the paper, including scrapping of the vicious sanctions policy and the malicious young parent penalty, but, vital, urgent and essential as those actions are, they are not enough.

The report speaks of a desire to move from a liberal to a social democratic approach. That is movement in the right direction, but as a Green and an eco-socialist, I would go much further.

In my vision of social security, social security would not merely be a safety net. In the image that “safety net” suggests, what matters is what happens on the high trapeze above—it suggests that social security is what happens to those who fall. Instead, I see social security as a seed bed—as the essential nurturing foundation for all the ways in which human beings care, and create for and with, one another, and not just through paid work, but in every aspect of our lives.

I long for a Scotland where people are seen primarily not as employees or consumers, but as citizens and neighbours. Our social security system can help to make that Scotland a reality. I want our social security system to have parity of esteem with our health service. The two must go hand in hand.

I particularly welcome the Scottish Government’s exploration of a minimum income guarantee and look forward to the final report from the expert group later this year. Action on that would see a positive step change in the support that is provided to our citizens.

I am encouraged, too, to see that the paper raises the possibility of a universal basic income being developed by future Scottish Governments. A universal basic income—paid to all, with extra support for those who need it—opens opportunities for a fairer, safer and happier future. It trusts each of us to follow our best path—to work, care and create, to develop ideas, to develop enterprises and to develop and build communities. Along with other policies—including on fair work and pensions and on a radical just transition—a universal basic income could be the cornerstone of the wellbeing economy that we long to create.

In an independent Scotland, we could do things differently; indeed, that is why we want it at all. How we see social security and how we work towards its transformation shows the world the kind of Scotland that we want to be. That time cannot come soon enough.

Good morning. I thank the witnesses for what they have said so far.

I want to follow up on the tension between price sustainability and the different weightings. With the sustainable procurement duty, is there a mechanism by which longer-term value or longer-term outcomes can be incorporated, or, as things stand, is it just a case of the system saying, “This is the value now and this is the weighting now”? We do not or cannot collect data, and we cannot project forward. Colin Smith talked about alternatives. If we took a longer-term look—over five years, for example—would we get those outcomes? Would that help to provide some balance?

Joanne Davidson mentioned fair work earlier. Do we understand what subcontractors and secondary contractors do in a way that allows us to understand the genuine benefits of what we are trying to do?

We are looking at the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 and thinking about what we want to see, given that the world is a very different place now to what it was in 2014. How could we use procurement to tackle things like the gendered nature of different employment sectors or the inaccessibility of different sectors to disabled people, whether as workers or as suppliers? Are there things that we could, and should, look at to make the legislation deliver what we want for Scotland as a whole? Joanne Davidson might want to kick off on that.

Are we missing a trick, especially given the urgency with which we all need to tackle certain issues that are no single authority’s or agency’s responsibility? I am thinking of issues such as reducing inequality and dealing with the climate emergency. Are there issues that we are missing not only because we are asking for the wrong information or too much of certain types of information, but because we are not allowing for weighting flexibility? We have spoken about the 75 per cent threshold. Would you say that that is what needs to change if the environmental, climate emergency or reducing inequality targets are to be much more meaningful?