Social Security Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, September 7, 2017

Official Report 481KB pdf

Social Security (Scotland) Bill (Inclusion Scotland Event)

We move on to agenda item 4. We agreed in June to attend a number of events on the Social Security (Scotland) Bill over the summer. One of those was Inclusion Scotland’s poverty and social security policy panel meeting in Glasgow on 16 August to consider the bill. Pauline McNeill and Ruth Maguire attended that on behalf of the committee and have produced a paper on it. Does anyone have any questions on the paper or do Pauline and Ruth have anything to add to it?

The paper lays out accurately the feedback that we got, which was mixed. I put on record our thanks to everybody who took part. There was a good range of people there with a range of views, so it was interesting and worth while.

Thank you very much. Alison Johnstone was at another event and we will have feedback from that later on. I thank the committee members for giving their time during the recess.

I echo what Ruth Maguire said. It was really valuable to sit and have a chat to people in a round-table discussion. There were two dominant issues. One concerned whether the Government position on overpayment due to an error is that the recipient would not have to pay it back or that they would. There was also quite a big discussion about the balance between the primary legislation and the regulations. We got into a few knots trying to get people to understand why we would not put everything in primary legislation. I thought that it was important to get that across in discussion before people took a view on what should be in the primary legislation and what should be in the regulations.

One of the challenges in getting folk’s views on that is ensuring that there is a clear understanding of the reasoning behind it. We did not quite get there on the table that I was at because we did not have the full information.

When we are speaking to people who will be in receipt of assistance and who have experience of the benefits system, we need to make sure that we have clearly laid out the question, “What difference does it make?” and that we are not just posing what is quite a complex question and then leaving it with them.

Thank you. I thank the committee members for going to the away days during recess. I look forward to following up on those.