Just over a week ago, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued interim findings from his 12-day visit to the UK. He did not pull any punches in his devastating critique of the UK Government’s deeply flawed approach to welfare reform and the damage that is being done to the wider social safety net.
Professor Alston’s report is a damning indictment of the systematic failings of the UK Government, which has overseen the first sustained rises in poverty in recent years. Those sustained rises in poverty threaten to engulf almost four in every 10 children in Scotland by 2030—a prospect that Professor Alston described as
“not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.”
I agree with that assessment.
Professor Alston’s message is clear: in a country as wealthy and prosperous as the United Kingdom, current levels of poverty and deprivation are already completely unacceptable, and the projected further increases would be an attack on the very fabric of our society.
The rapporteur set out very clearly that welfare changes have been a political choice rather than a necessity. As he pointed out, the UK Government could have made the choice to end austerity in its recent budget. He said:
“Resources were available to the Treasury at the last budget that could have transformed the situation of millions of people living in poverty, but the political choice was made to fund tax cuts for the wealthy instead.”
The Resolution Foundation has said that next year’s proposed spending of £2.8 billion on tax cuts will disproportionately benefit higher earners. For £1.5 billion—almost half that cost—the UK Government could have ended the benefit freeze. In Scotland alone, the four-year benefit freeze has been the biggest reduction in welfare spending—it reduced spending by around £190 million in 2018-19, and it will have reduced spending by around £370 million by 2020-21—and is impacting on 930,000 children.
Professor Alston said:
“the Department for Work and Pensions is more concerned with making economic savings and sending messages about lifestyles than responding to the multiple needs of those living with a disability, job loss, housing insecurity, illness, and the demands of parenting.”
He also pointed out that the savings that were supposed to have been delivered have just been transferred to other public services.
The costs of austerity have fallen disproportionately on people in poverty, women, minority ethnic communities, children, lone parents and disabled people. Professor Alston spoke of the gendered nature of the cuts that have been imposed and their detrimental impact on children. He called for regressive policies, such as the benefit cap and the two-child limit—with its abhorrent rape clause—to be reversed. I hope that his remarks will add weight to the repeated calls of Scottish ministers and many others for exactly the same changes.
Professor Alston’s findings add to the weight of evidence of fundamental flaws at the heart of universal credit. Those defects have been well aired in this Parliament so I will not repeat them all, but I want to pick up on one: the initial problem that people face, which is the in-built minimum five-week wait for payment of universal credit. The wait can be much longer for some people. Advance payments that are intended to bridge that gap are required to be paid back at a rate that substantially reduces household income. That is austerity by design: it pushes people into debt and rent arrears and towards emergency funding and food banks, just as they start receiving the benefit.
Again, the human cost is on people’s health and wellbeing. No one should go hungry because they cannot afford to eat, no one should be anxious because they need to borrow money to put the heating on, and no one should worry about being made homeless because endless delays mean that their rent might not be paid.
Professor Alston’s findings are the latest in a long line of reports that evidence the damage that universal credit is inflicting on people and the communities in which they live. When the UN rapporteur, the National Audit Office, the UK Work and Pensions Committee, devolved Governments and countless charities and other stakeholders keep telling us the same thing, we must listen.
I welcome the comment by the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions that she wants to deliver
“a fair, compassionate and efficient benefits system.”—[Official Report, House of Commons, 19 November 2018; Vol 649, c 567.]
However, warm words are not enough. Change is needed to end austerity and to make universal credit fit for purpose. As the rapporteur pointed out, the choices are political choices that can be reversed easily. Amber Rudd must take heed and take the decision that her predecessors failed to take. She must stop universal credit now and fix the problems. To do otherwise and ignore the repeated warnings is to risk condemning a generation of children and their families to a lifetime of poverty that they will struggle to rise out of.
That is before we even start to consider the unknown impacts of Brexit. The rapporteur has highlighted that those on low incomes appear to be “an afterthought” and that no consideration has been given to what will happen to poverty levels following departure from the European Union. That is one of many impacts that the UK Government has given no consideration to.
We have called on the UK Government to publish an impact assessment that sets out the impacts of various Brexit scenarios on poverty. It is essential that the UK Government has a fully formed plan for the potential futures that it is considering. It must set out robust action to ensure that those on low incomes are fully protected against the negative impacts that will be delivered by any form of Brexit—in particular, the disaster of no deal.
I turn to Professor Alston’s findings regarding Scotland. As part of his visit, the rapporteur spent two days in Scotland, meeting ministers including the First Minister and me, key Scottish Government officials, organisations that represent a wide range of interests, and children and disabled people. I welcome the rapporteur’s recognition of the fundamentally different approach that Scotland has taken to poverty, social security and, of course, human rights.
We have much to be proud of. We have established a new social security agency with dignity, fairness and respect at its heart; we have already delivered a valuable top-up to carers allowance; and we will commence the first enhanced best start grant payments before Christmas this year. We have launched fair start Scotland, which is a dignified approach to employability support that does not rule by the fear of crippling sanctions and is backed by up to £20 million each year on top of the levels of funding that the UK Government provides. Our Scottish welfare fund, which provides much-needed support for individuals in crisis, is backed by £38 million of investment each year. That funding is not provided across England. In 2018-19, we are spending over £125 million, which is £20 million more than last year, on welfare mitigation and supporting those on low incomes.
However, I would prefer to be investing that money in pulling people out of poverty. We can only mitigate the worst of the cuts, because welfare spending in Scotland is expected to have reduced by £3.7 billion in 2020-21 as a result of UK Government welfare reforms since 2010. The fact that we have to spend any of our resources to protect against another Government’s policies is, as the rapporteur rightly said, “outrageous”. He also noted:
“mitigation comes at a price and is not sustainable.”
The price of mitigating that full cut for this year alone would be equivalent to three times our annual police budget or the entire annual budget of both NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian.
As the special rapporteur has made clear, austerity and welfare cuts are not a necessity—they are a political choice. In Scotland, we are making a different choice. As a Parliament, we have united in saying that the current levels of child poverty are unacceptable and that we will take the radical action that is needed to change the fortunes of the 230,000 children in poverty today and the generations of children to come. That radical action starts with our first tackling child poverty delivery plan, which outlines the range of actions that we will take to lift children out of poverty, including working towards introducing a new income supplement, investing in intensive key worker support to help parents to enter and progress in the labour market, and our significant investment in early learning and childcare across Scotland.
Through those measures and the wide range of other actions that we are taking, we are using the powers of this Parliament to demonstrate to those at Westminster that there is another way forward that puts fairness, equality and human dignity at the centre of our approach. We are not doing that solely because it makes economic sense; we are doing it because it is the right thing to do. I ask that parties across the chamber unite in calling on Westminster to make the necessary changes or to devolve the powers to allow us to make the changes ourselves.
When Theresa May became the Prime Minister, she spoke of the urgent need to tackle the “burning injustices” of the UK as a top priority. The rapporteur’s report shows that it is high time that she started to deliver.