Social Security Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, November 1, 2018

Official Report 724KB pdf

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Public Petition

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Welfare Cuts (Mitigation) (PE1677)

Item 6 on the agenda is PE1677, which calls on the Scottish Government to make more money available to mitigate welfare cuts through reassessing spending priorities and bringing in more progressive taxation. I refer members to paper 5 and the petition from Dr Sarah Glynn.

In the light of the evidence that has been taken by this committee, the correspondence from the Scottish Government to the Public Petitions Committee and the fact that the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 makes provision for new forms of assistance and uprating, the committee is invited to close the petition.

If we wish to close the petition, we might wish to acknowledge that policy and expenditure considerations such as those raised in the petition are embedded in the work of this committee. That should give the petitioner confidence that her concerns form part of our day-to-day concerns. We might also note that the committee will soon consider a pre-budget letter to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Economy and Fair Work, which will give us an opportunity, should we wish to take it, to raise with him the petitioner’s concerns in the context of the forthcoming budget.

Following those assurances to the petitioner, does anyone have any comments?

I think that the proposal to close the petition is slightly premature, particularly because we are yet to consider and agree the letter that we are going to send to the cabinet secretary. We should at least wait until we have agreed what the contents of that letter will be, and we should ideally wait until we hear oral evidence from the cabinet secretary during the budget process.

Dr Glynn has spoken to me on a number of occasions about these and other issues. There is a process or timing issue here, and I have some sympathy with the suggestion that it might be helpful to consider the petition in the light of discussions about the budget. I do not have strong views either way, but there might be a logical order there. Dr Glynn appears to be asking for the welfare fund to be expanded—that is certainly what she raised when she spoke to me—and we will discuss that matter in the context of the budget letter.

We are the lead committee on the issue, and I agree that there is an issue of timing. Dr Glynn represents a strong coalition of those who want the Parliament to do all that it can to ensure that people’s lives are worth living. I would like us to wait until we have discussed the letter and, perhaps, heard from the cabinet secretary, and until matters have progressed, so that the petitioner and her colleagues will feel that the Scottish Parliament has urged the Scottish Government to do all that it can in that regard.

I do not see anyone disagreeing with the proposal that we hold the petition open until we have addressed our own budget scrutiny approach.

It is worth putting it on the record that, day to day and week to week, this committee will look at the connectivity between the UK social security system and the Scottish social security system, the protections that are in place and how the arrangements impact people on the ground. We want to give the petitioner the assurance that the point that the petition makes has not been lost on us, that it will be part of our regular work and that, in the future, it will not take a petition to ensure that it is embedded in the committee’s working practices.

Given that the issue is one of timing, do we agree to keep the petition open?

Members indicated agreement.

We move to agenda item 7, which we have previously agreed to take in private.

10:25 Meeting continued in private until 11:16.