Chamber and committees

You make a good point. The Scottish Government and the agencies across Scotland for which we have responsibility collect, analyse and publish evidence and analysis by equality characteristic across a wide range of policy areas. There are many barriers and challenges to collecting, analysing and reporting equality data. Despite improvements in recent years, there are still gaps in the equality evidence base. In April this year, we launched the first phase of our equality data improvement programme in order to take action to make equality evidence more wide ranging and robust. A stronger and more complete equality evidence base will help to support the collective effort across the public sector and ensure that the requirements of the public sector equality duty are fulfilled.

The programme will be undertaken over the next 18 months, and I am hopeful that major improvements will flow from it. You mentioned the issue of sample size. The first phase of the improvement programme comprises a series of projects that will focus on the process elements of equality data collection, including sample size. The programme is in the early phase, but I am happy to ensure that we keep the committee abreast of developments.

On data gaps regarding ethnicity, our “Race Equality Immediate Priorities Plan”, which was published on 14 September, has at its heart the data improvement and systemic change recommendations that have been made to us by the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity. We absolutely recognise that issue.

A lot of improvement work is going on, and we are happy to keep the committee updated on it.

The point about the third sector having a seat at the table with regard to the economic strategy has been raised with me directly. That remains under discussion. The role of the third sector, not least in Covid recovery, is fundamental, and in my discussions with third sector organisations, I have made the point that the Government recognises that.

On the requests from 2019, I might have to write to the committee. That was before my time in this role, but I am happy to write to update committee members on what has been done since then.

There is definitely more work to be done as per the Christie recommendations to focus more resources upstream for prevention. I absolutely agree with that, but it is not the easiest thing to do. We need to find ways, not least through Covid recovery, to work with organisations and local government to look at how that can be done, because we know that spend is more effective in that space.

You asked a number of questions about the size of the budget. In essence, decisions about the balance of the budget are for Government. Decisions about taxation in Scotland, at least to the extent that such powers are within devolved competence, need to be informed by an understanding of the resources needed to address areas of human rights deficiency or a weakness. Taxation is one of the principal means of ensuring that those resources are available, but, with regard to Covid recovery, there is a balance to be struck between revenue raising and supporting businesses, communities and families to recover.

In our spend over the Covid period, you will see expenditure of £2.5 billion on supporting low-income households. Obviously, it was a deliberate policy decision to recognise that the impact of Covid has not been equally felt. Recognising that means that we then have to act in a particular way in following through our policy and budget decisions. Through the Covid recovery strategy, which will be closely aligned to the budget, you would expect to see more of that cohesive thinking across decisions making. Government always has to make tough decisions, particularly on budgets, because there is never enough money to do absolutely everything that we want to do—there never has been. Therefore, decisions have to be made and we have to be more strategic. The task that the Cabinet has set itself is to see what more we can do to tackle child poverty. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority, so we have had to be very clear about the priorities for Government and, therefore, the budget. I hope that that will be clear, once the budget process is properly under way.

The EBAG recommendations that were made earlier this year are important. In the programme for government, which was published last month, we made a clear commitment to further embed equalities and human rights in all stages of the Scottish Government’s budget process, taking into account those recommendations.

The EBAG recommendations were shared with me when I came into my post back in May and they were published just a couple of months after that. We have been giving them careful consideration, including as part of the forthcoming budgetary cycle, and of our longer-term budget improvement and equality and human rights mainstreaming work. I have agreed to renew EBAG’s mandate for another year to allow further development of our collective thinking, and I plan to meet Professor Angela O’Hagan, the chair, in early November to discuss EBAG’s work and its recommendations further. Thereafter, we will seek to set out our thinking on the next steps in spring next year. I would be happy to update the committee at that time.

Members will be aware that the recommendations were presented under the four themes of improving processes, communications, organisation and culture, and knowledge and understanding. There is a lot to consider, but I am happy to come back to the committee with further detail.

It is complex. We have to bear in mind that Social Security Scotland was first established following the passing of the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018; it did not have any infrastructure, so all that had to be built from scratch. If the UK Government decides to bring in a new benefit through the DWP, it has all the infrastructure there to do that. Social Security Scotland had none of that; in essence, it had to start building from scratch, and every new benefit has to be built from scratch. We have an issue in relation to the winter benefits in that regard—if there is not a process of household matching, Social Security Scotland has to build a new system for that one benefit. The committee can imagine the complexities.

On top of that, we have the issue of case transfer. I do not think that it has been attempted on the scale that we will do it, with such a large number of cases being transferred from a department in one Government to an agency in a different Government. The complexity of that alone is huge. There is no room for error, because people need continuity in their payments. All that is very challenging.

The Scottish child payment was delivered within 18 months, which was a very ambitious timescale. In order to deliver it in that timeframe, we used the top-up powers; in essence, we used the entitlement to universal credit to top up that benefit entitlement with the Scottish child payment. Going forward, it would be good to have a different legislative basis for the Scottish child payment. However, if we had tried to do that in the available timeframe, it would not have been possible to get the payments out.

We have a hybrid system that is not ideal. As I said, if we were starting with a blank sheet of paper, we would not build a hybrid system that involved interaction with the DWP, which can bring its own challenges, while simultaneously trying to build platforms for a system here in Scotland.

Alison Byrne will be able to say a bit more about that, because she is closer to the complexities of the system.

Not only the Scottish Government but numerous organisations have done various bits of analysis on the impact of welfare reform.

At the moment, there is a lot of attention on the removal of the £20 uplift in universal credit, which it is estimated will remove £460 million from Scottish beneficiaries. We are fast approaching D day on that and, as I said in the debate last week, I sincerely hope that there is a change of heart on the issue. Apart from anything else, we are in a bit of a perfect storm at the moment, with rising fuel and food costs. It would be the worst time to compound those financial pressures on households by removing the universal credit uplift. For some families that are just about keeping their heads above water, it will be a very challenging situation that will make this winter extremely difficult. That will have a huge impact.

Alongside that, we have raised concerns over the piece about measures such as the benefit cap and the two-child limit, which put pressure on families that are already struggling. It is also worth bearing in mind that many of the recipients of universal credit are already working. One of the UK Government’s responses has been that people should go out and get additional hours, but that fails to recognise that—as the committee knows well from the previous work that its predecessor did on how many people are in in-work poverty—many of the people who are on universal credit are already working but are working in insecure, low-paid jobs.

The removal of the universal credit uplift is huge and will add to a perfect storm that is brewing. It will also undermine the work that we are doing, not least around the Scottish child payment. We are trying to get that money into people’s hands, and our commitment to doubling that payment is shared around the table. Because of the removal of the universal credit uplift, we will be giving with one hand and taking away with the other. That will not help us to get towards our interim child poverty targets, which is a huge concern to me.

I hope that I have given you a flavour of the work that has been done. We can write to the committee with information on the further analysis that has been done—there is a lot of detail in that. Members will be aware of the headline figures, but we can furnish the committee with more detailed evidence on that, if that would be helpful.

Over the piece, there has been a lot of engagement. First, the Scottish Government made many requests to the UK Government for dialogue around testing out the theory of universal basic income. It would be generous to say that the response was lukewarm. There is no joint commitment or agreement to work towards that, so that is a bit of a problem. We have raised the minimum income guarantee with the UK Government and, although its response is not particularly less lukewarm, we will continue to discuss the opportunities.

Clearly, if we had an integrated tax and benefit system, it would be easier to make a lot of the more ambitious changes but, as Paul Tyrer said, the social renewal advisory board has given us a very ambitious series of recommendations, and it would be remiss of us not to try and do what we can, even within devolved powers, to make progress towards them. I will not put much store in getting any support or help from the UK Government—we need to just get on and do what we can ourselves.

Having half the tools in our box is never as good as having a full toolbox, so we will continue to argue that having full control over benefits here makes more sense. We talked earlier about the challenges of a hybrid system and the complexities of the interaction of those two systems. Without a doubt, that will continue to be a challenge, and that is before we get into the policy divergence issues, which are also a challenge. There is a growing political consensus that having employment powers here makes sense; a lot of the trade unions are in favour of that and it would give us the opportunity to make changes around, for example, the statutory basis for the living wage and the issues around terms and conditions. If those powers are devolved here, this Parliament can make the policy choices that it wants to make, and I am optimistic that that will eventually happen.

As you would expect, individual local authorities and COSLA have raised those issues with us. It is about supporting local authorities that have concerns. Making the changes is the right thing to do, but we understand that some local authorities will have more concerns than others. We need to work with them to overcome those challenges.

I thank Jeremy Balfour for recognising my rather large remit, although I should say that it creates opportunities for me to join the dots across the portfolio.

A charities bill will be introduced in this parliamentary session, and there will be an opportunity to look at some of the issues that charities have raised and to which OSCR is keen for changes to be made in the light of experience. Again, I am happy to write to the committee with a bit more detail, if that would be helpful.