Chamber and committees

Good morning, cabinet secretary, and to your team. Could you give us an update on the expected opening date of the safer drug consumption facility in Glasgow? It was due to open last month, so where are we with the timescales?

Thank you.

Will the member take an intervention on that point?

It is good to have you here, cabinet secretary. I have a couple of questions. Looking forward to next year, when the presumption is that Social Security Scotland will take on delivery of the pension-age winter heating payment, will it be able to do that? I seek assurance on that. Further, will that have to be delivered under a universal system only?

I appreciate that, cabinet secretary. I am just asking whether you tried to have that discussion, or did you simply think that there was no point in having it?

Can Mr Doris point to one occasion on which I have said that in this committee? I must ask him to clarify his comments, because I have never said that we do not need a social security system in Scotland; indeed, I was proud to be on the committee that brought forward our system. Can he point to one occasion on which I have said that?

I wish that we were not in this position, and I agree with a lot of what the cabinet secretary has said. The UK Government has made a bad, and very strange, decision, which will have a real effect on many of our constituents’ lives.

I understand why the regulations have been introduced. However, I am concerned with the bigger picture and how Social Security Scotland works and the systems that it has in place. From what we have heard this morning, it seems that, if the Scottish Government had wanted to look at different criteria for doing things in a different way, that would have been simply impossible, because the system is designed in a particular way. That gives me some concern, because it suggests that that system is fixed and has no flexibility in it.

What happens depends not only on the decisions that the UK Government has made in this year’s budget but on any decisions that it might make in future. It might change the criteria, and I am concerned about how quickly Social Security Scotland could respond to that.

I would welcome the cabinet secretary writing to the committee on how quickly Social Security Scotland could redesign and amend the system. How long would that take? Would it be weeks or months? We do not want to get into a position next year in which we have to go back to reach another agreement with the DWP, because that would have a financial cost to us all.

I am disappointed that we are having to make these decisions, which will affect real people, but there is also the bigger picture, as we move forward, regarding how Social Security Scotland works and whether it can deliver what we, as a Parliament, want it to deliver.

That is helpful. Thank you.

Did you consider applying different eligibility criteria for the benefit or was that simply ruled out immediately because the system would not let you make changes?

That is helpful. Did you have any discussions with the DWP about the agency agreement and doing something slightly different here in Scotland? Did the DWP come back and say that it does not have the resources to do that, or did you have that discussion with it?

Many of the questions that I have been wanting to ask have already been addressed, but I would like to go back to Karin Earl to get the Robertson Trust’s perspective on dependency or locking out other groups in the sector that might come in. After all, the trust gets lots of applications from lots of different people. What if you were providing funding for three or five years and I were to come along with an entrepreneurial idea? Would I be frozen out? How would I persuade you that I would be worth funding, given that you are already funding X groups?

I must ask you to keep your response fairly brief, so that I do not get on the wrong side of the convener, either.