What Mr Balfour said was directed at least partly to me, so it is perhaps appropriate for me to start off.
I am very grateful for Mr Balfour’s question, which touches directly on the principal issue for us that can be tackled during the parliamentary passage of the bill, albeit that it is not answered in the bill, as it is one of the issues that will be left to regulation.
I will answer the second question first, as it is, in a sense, much more clean and straightforward. We strongly support the idea that the current system is indefensible in its effect on people of different ages—not in terms of their age now, but in terms of the age at which they are able to qualify for disability-related support. As Mr Balfour explained, if a person is over the age of 65 when they first establish that they have a disability that would entitle them to financial support, the question whether their mobility needs are such that they would deserve a higher level of support is never even asked, because that level of support is simply not available. It does not matter whether the person would meet exactly the same test that they would have met a week, a month or a year before—that support is simply not available. We consider that to be a form of discrimination, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission seems to agree with us. It has pointed to the fact that there will be a difficulty around the public sector equality duty if the Scottish Government goes through the process of reviewing the eligibility and does not tackle what seems to be a very clear case.
Other recent examples have gone to litigation. For example, there was a case involving the Student Awards Agency for Scotland in which the approach was ruled to be illegal and had to be addressed.
A substantial amount of money is involved. At the higher rate, which is about £57 a week, it can mean a difference of well over £3,000 a year to the claimant, yet the award is made purely on the basis of their age, not their condition or its impact. We would very much like the Government to tackle the issue and the Parliament to continue to have a strong focus on it.
We acknowledge that there would be substantial financial effects simply to abolish the distinction or to extend mobility component availability to all attendance allowance recipients. We did some analysis that suggested that we are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds. However, because the question is not asked, we do not have very reliable bits of data.
In some respects, the cleanest and most satisfactory approach might be to abolish altogether the distinction between attendance allowance and the working age disability benefits but, again, because of the nature of the bill, it is not clear from the bill whether the Scottish Government is contemplating that. It would allow the possibility to think about, for example, how paying for care needs, as well as for the additional costs of living with a disability, might be treated in a more coherent and holistic way. We have not articulated a very specific costed-out proposal about how that could be done within current funds.
The most important thing is that the age discriminatory element should cease. Age should cease to be a factor in the quality of financial support that someone gets based on disability. If the committee can keep a focus on that and the Government can respond to it, we would be delighted.