Chamber and committees

That is why we have given flexibility in the membership. We have said that there should be a range—between six and 12—to give the council the flexibility that it needs to recruit a range of members while maintaining the balance on gender and between employers and employed members, with the membership criteria that we have set out. That gives the flexibility to recruit people with the level of expertise that we need.

You will have seen from five weeks of evidence that passionate people with a lot of expertise are desperate to get around the table and start doing the work, so I do not think that there will be a shortage of volunteers.

Absolutely. We need the membership to be clearly defined. It is important to look at the comparator body in the UK system. Although, as I said to Marie McNair, the set-up and the relationships of IIAC are not ideal, at least it has worker voices on it, and it was set up by primary legislation, so it cannot be disbanded.

Normally, we devolve things so that the decision makers are closer to the people who are affected and to be more progressive. In this case, the benefit has been devolved but we are cutting out lived experience. We will cut out workers’ involvement and trade union involvement if we do not establish a council. We need to fill that gap, irrespective of whether we do that now or later.

Let us not reinvent the wheel. As I said in my opening statement, and as the cabinet secretary has said, a lot of work has been done on the proposal. We could end up in a situation in which the Government replicates that at pace right up to the deadline, spending a lot more money in the process, rather than our just working together on the bill when it comes to stage 2 to get something that we can all agree on.

The council would purely make recommendations; it would not control the Scottish Government’s budget. It would be for the Scottish Government to decide whether to accept the recommendations and then to decide whether to find the funding. Governments make choices on priorities every single day of the week. It would be up to the Government of the day to decide whether to accept the recommendations on the basis of costs. The council would investigate, commission the research and make recommendations. It would then be for the Government to decide on those and how they were funded.

That will be the choice of the Government, which can choose to change or not to change it. That is not for anyone but the Government or Parliament to decide.

We modelled the information-requiring powers on those in the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. We felt that it was a good place to start. We also listed other organisations.

It is important to give the council teeth so that it can go after information and fill the data gaps that currently exist, to support its work. That said, I hope that it would have good working relationships with the organisations that are covered by the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, so that it is able to get information voluntarily and does not have to require it.

That was the initial thinking behind the provisions in the bill. They were modelled on the 2002 act, which we felt worked well. I know that you are doing work on freedom of information legislation, which might be updated at some point in the future.

The cabinet secretary said last week that she did not know what the new benefit would look like. If the cabinet secretary herself does not know what the new benefit will look like, I would say that the Government needs expert advice, which is what the council will provide.

The bill would put the council in place in advance of devolution of the benefit. Through its expertise and lived experience, the council will be best placed to tell the Government what the new benefit should look like. We are not simply devolving industrial injuries disablement benefit and introducing it like for like. The Government is changing the name and, I expect—

This bill, in and of itself, would not deliver a reformed benefit; it would be up to the Government to do that. However, if the Scottish Government were to consider the devolution of an inherently unfair and discriminatory system, in creating a new benefit, which you would hope would be in line with the Parliament’s progressive ambitions on devolution, it would surely want the people who were sitting round the table advising it on the new benefit to have lived experience—that is, people who have been left behind and discriminated against by the current system. That is where many of the stakeholders who are desperate for change are putting their argument. The best thing to do would be to set up the council, have it exist independently of the Government and get those people round the table to advise the Government on the set-up of the new benefit.

As I said, we are running out of time. There is less than a year and a half for the Government to put in place its plans for the new entitlement. To my mind, the best approach would be to have the experts and the people with lived experience design the new benefit from the get-go. Last week, the cabinet secretary said that she felt that an advisory council was a part of the jigsaw of EIA. To me, that is completely wrong. The advisory council would design the jigsaw, set it up and ensure that it best meets the needs of the people of Scotland who are becoming ill or injured in the course of their work.

I am a bit frustrated. It feels like I have been waiting for the consultation since 2019. The Parliament and the committee have been told almost on an annual basis that the consultation will come this year. I think that the Government told the committee that it would come this year, and the cabinet secretary said last week that it would potentially come next year. We have been waiting and waiting, and that is frustrating.

Introducing the bill in the absence of a developed policy of what employment injury assistance looks like is crucial, because we would want to have the expertise of the council. We would want to have the medical expertise, the trade union expertise and, more important, the lived experience of those who have been injured or have become ill because of their work and are not being supported by the current system. We want the council to be in place to advise on the development of the policy and the new entitlement in advance of the Government taking over full responsibility for the benefit.

On the timescale, the Government has its agency agreement with the DWP, and the DWP has said that there will be no extension to that. It has been fairly firm and robust with the Government that the Government must take over responsibility for the benefit by the end of March 2026.

The Government needs to have a business plan in place, as per the agency agreement, by the end of March 2025. That is less than a year and a half away. By that time, the Government will need to have set out its plans in full, including its business plan for how it will transfer the existing case load over to the new benefit and what the new benefit will look like in terms of levels of payment, entitlement and everything else.

It is important that, before that happens, we get the expertise in place to advise on how all of that is done. We are less than a year and a half away from that point, so we are running out of time.

Again, that relates to how the bill was drafted. The closest comparator that we had when we were drafting it was the creation of SCOSS. We mirrored a lot of its provisions, but I appreciate that, since the bill was introduced, legislation has been proposed to change SCOSS’s status and it has given evidence that the current system is overly burdensome. I am open to amendments at stage 2—if we get that far—to change reporting requirements, given the new body of evidence that we have received from SCOSS.

We did, but, given the nature of the entitlement that we are looking at, which is about giving workers who have been injured or have become ill at their work support through the social security system, it is important for workers with lived experience that the body is given permanence and has a statutory underpinning. As a sub-committee of SCOSS, the body could simply be disbanded whenever SCOSS felt the need for that to happen.