Chamber and committees

Indeed, it reduces the Scottish Government’s flexibility to spend the money on anti-poverty measures and other measures. Of that £1.1 billion, £614 million is for new benefits that are unique to Scotland, including the Scottish child payment, which will cost £457 million in 2024-25. We also have £110 million for other social security benefits, such as the welfare fund and discretionary housing payments. The spend above the BGA for social security is around £368 million, of which £300 million is for the adult disability payment.

I hope that that gives the committee a sense of the decisions that are taken on new benefits and the policy changes that we have made to other benefits that have been devolved, which have led to that £1.1 billion additional expenditure above the BGA.

As I said to Mr Doris, that is part of the wider discussion that we have in Government about how best to support people. You will be aware of the action that the Government has taken to increase eligibility for the best start foods payment, for example, which we estimate will increase eligibility by 20,000 people. That is an important measure that we have taken to increase our support, but it does not involve uprating.

Again, it comes down to decisions that the Government inevitably has to make about how best to support people. That can be about changes to eligibility or uprating or, as I said, it can involve aspects that will support people but that sit not within social security but in other parts of Government.

As Mr O’Kane rightly hints, that uprating is not in the bill as a statutory requirement. I will continue to keep that under review as the bill develops.

It is fair to say that the provisions on childhood assistance and care experience assistance in the bill are at the early stages of formation. The committee will be well aware that other consultation is going on—for example, on care experience assistance. We continue to consider what that benefit will look like and how best to deliver it, so it would be unwise to make decisions about some of the other details of the bill until that is done and we have more concrete policy formations.

I will keep that under review as the bill develops. After the bill, if Parliament chooses to pass it into an act, we will do everything that we need to do in secondary legislation, as it is sometimes more important and more reasonable to do things in secondary rather than primary legislation.

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics shows that food prices had a large downward trend effect on the overall annual inflation rate under the consumer prices index including owner occupiers’ housing costs—CPIH—in January 2024. No official forecasts are available for energy and food inflation, so this a challenging area to consider.

With the greatest respect to Ms Clark, I would say that the whole point of the debate on Tuesday was to point out that there will be no change at Westminster to assist with energy prices or to help people with the continuing cost of living crisis. It was therefore important to have a debate on the fact that there is an opportunity for change, but it can come only with independence.

The First Minister is keen to continue to look at that, as he has said previously. The real challenge that limits our ability to do that will be that we continue to have to mitigate some of the worst excesses of Westminster policies. For example, there is already £127 million in the 2023-24 budget to mitigate some of the UK Government’s welfare reform. Quite frankly, I also class the Scottish child payment as mitigation, because if the UK Government took forward an essentials guarantee, for example, and universal credit and other benefits were at a fit and proper rate to allow people to live with some sort of dignity, the Government in Scotland would not be continually asked to protect people from the poverty levels that they are experiencing.

We will continue to look at what can be done, but it is difficult when we continue to mitigate Westminster welfare policies. It is difficult to see how that will change, given the restrictions on the Scottish Government budget. However, we will continue to do everything that we can, and we will continue to look at that as part of each budgetary process.

The main and, indeed, only purpose of the bill is to remove that redundant definition. As I said in my opening remarks, following the court’s action, the definition does not have any legal standing, but we gave a commitment to the court that we would remove the definition, so it is important that we do so.

You raise an interesting point. The process of introducing a bill to Parliament can be time consuming, but it is the process that we have to go through. This is an example of the way that it has to be done for a very small technical fix.

That raises another interesting point. When we all consider what should be in primary legislation and what should be in secondary legislation, a discussion about getting specific details in a bill is quite rightly sometimes had. I am not saying that that is the case for this bill, but Mr Stewart raises a wider point about how quickly we can make changes. Obviously, changes to adapt to circumstances, events and so on can be made more quickly if they are made through secondary legislation.

However, as I say, that is not the case with this bill. The bill deals with a specific issue that originated in the courts and needed, rightly, to be dealt with through primary legislation. I will ensure that colleagues are made aware of that wider point.

I touched on that point briefly. It was important that we considered whether we could use another legislative vehicle, such as another bill that was going through Parliament. In many ways, that would have been an easier process than introducing a whole bill to do just this one thing, but that was not possible. We were very aware that we had made that commitment as a Government, so it was therefore important to move forward with it. We endeavoured to find another way, but, once we found that no other routes were open to us through primary legislation, I felt that it was important that we took the decision—unusual though it is to have such a small bill—to do it this way, rather than continue to wait to see whether the change could be attached to another bill.

As Meghan Gallacher rightly points out, there was no formal consultation. The bill is a technical fix to fulfil a commitment that we made in court, so the Government did not feel that we needed to go through a full consultation process. In the time that has elapsed since the court ruling, the Government has had discussions with a variety of stakeholders who have differing opinions on various equalities issues. If those stakeholders wished to bring the matter up, we would have had those discussions with them. In the context of the bill, we felt that there was no need to have a formal consultation, given that it is a technical fix.

Yes.