Our second item of business is an evidence session on the research that the committee published yesterday on the local impact of welfare reform.
As a follow-up to research that the committee published in April 2013 on the impact of welfare reform on Scotland, the committee commissioned further research from the centre for regional economic and social research at Sheffield Hallam University on the impact at a local authority ward level.
I welcome the author of that research, Professor Steve Fothergill, who will provide a presentation of his findings, with accompanying slides—there is a copy in our papers—to the committee.
I will give the presentation and then I assume that you will want to fire a few questions at me.
The report is a joint effort: I am one of the authors and Christina Beatty from Sheffield Hallam University is the other. As was the case the last time that I came to the committee, I have not come here to try to pass judgment on the welfare reforms. That is your business. My job is to try to tell it as it is and to trace through, in a hard, honest, objective way, the impact of the reforms that have been introduced by Westminster. I will trace through the impact on Scotland as a whole, on local authorities and on individual local areas within those authorities.
To give some background, this is the second time that I have been in front of this committee. We came here with a report in April 2013, which was the first to try to systematically document the overall impact of the reforms on Scotland. We generated figures for the impact of each of the individual elements of the reform package and, for the first time, we produced estimates for the impact in each of Scotland’s individual local authorities.
The new report is very much a further step along from that original document. The report modestly updates the overall Scottish figures. The key thing—the real innovation—is that, for the first time, we have generated estimates for each electoral ward across the whole of Scotland. There are 353 individual electoral wards in Scotland and we have a figure for each one of those wards.
There are a few comments in the report about the impact on particular types of households and individuals. There was quite a lot of interest in that issue last time, but we did not really address it in any significant way.
The reforms that we are looking at should be familiar to members by now. This particular exercise covers eight reforms in total. If we had been doing the report on England we would have had a list of 10 reforms, but of course in Scotland you have put in place measures to avert the impact of at least two of the reforms that are impacting in England.
As regards the housing benefit underoccupation rules, which, in shorthand, are called the bedroom tax—I know that not everyone likes that term, but it is well understood—you have arrangements in Scotland that avert the impact on claimants. Right from the off, you have had arrangements that have averted the impact of the reduction in council tax benefit grant from Westminster. That reduction in grant is not being passed on to claimants; it has been absorbed within the various public sector budgets up here.
Universal credit is not in the package. It was not in the package that we looked at last time round, because it is qualitatively different; in essence, it is a repackaging of existing measures. The transfer of lone parents from income support to jobseekers allowance does not lead to any net reduction in their benefit entitlement, and the change from the retail prices index to the consumer prices index is not just a welfare reform but something more general across the public sector.
I have to go through the boring bits of the slides about how we measure the impact of the reforms. The key point to note is that everything that I will present in terms of hard-edged numbers is ultimately deeply rooted in the Treasury’s own estimates of the overall financial savings. We also draw heavily on the Westminster Government’s impact assessments and on the benefit claimant numbers and expenditure, authority by authority across Britain.
The crucial step in moving from the level of local authority statistics right down to the level of electoral wards is that we bring benefit numbers and figures on benefit expenditure—right down to the local level and even down to the data zone level—into the package, which allows us to make the transition from the Treasury’s overall estimates, through figures for Scotland and its constituent authorities and right down to electoral ward level. Having said that, you must bear in mind that the figures that we present are ultimately estimates. There is a margin of error on them all, but I would not anticipate them being fundamentally wrong, as we have followed a soundly based procedure.
Still on the boring bits of my slides—I have to go through all the health warnings, I am afraid—you must bear in mind that some of the reforms target households and others target individuals. Housing benefit reforms clearly target households as a whole, whereas changes to incapacity benefit entitlements are about the entitlements of individuals. Some individuals and some households are hit by more than one element of the package. However, the impact is almost exclusively on working-age claimants; little impact falls on people above state pension age. When we present the figures, we present them in terms of the impact per adult of working age.
We also look at the impact when the reforms are fully implemented. The timescale on which different elements of the package come to full fruition varies. In particular, I draw your attention to the fact that there is still an awful lot in the pipeline that is happening now, or is scheduled to happen, around entitlement to disability benefits, employment and support allowance, disability living allowance and its replacement, the personal independence payment. The final boring point to make is that we hold everything else constant. We are not making any assumptions about the consequences of the welfare reforms for employment levels here in Scotland or across the United Kingdom as a whole.
Working down from the Scottish figures to ward-level statistics, we have a slightly revised version of the figures that we presented in April last year to show the impact of the reforms on Scotland as a whole. Now that we know that the impact of the bedroom tax on claimants has been averted, we have been able to take that out of the jigsaw. We also have harder-edged numbers on the impact of the overall household benefit cap, which is a little bit down on what was originally anticipated.
Overall, once the reforms have come to full fruition, we are looking at £1.6 billion a year being taken out of Scotland by the welfare reforms. That financial loss here in Scotland averages £460 per adult of working age per year, and that figure is pretty much in line with the Great Britain average. Scotland will not be hit any harder or any less hard than Britain as a whole, but when you look at detailed regional figures—as we did in last year’s report—you see that Scotland actually escapes rather more lightly than Wales, northern England and London do, although it is hit significantly harder than large parts of southern England are.
The figures for the impact by local authority area are a revised version of the figures that we presented last year. They show that there are big differences between individual authorities the length and breadth of Scotland. We previously identified Glasgow as the hardest-hit place, and on the slightly tweaked figures that members will see in the slide, it remains the hardest hit, with Aberdeenshire and Shetland at the other end of the spectrum.
Among the harder-hit places, the older industrial areas of the central belt figure very strongly indeed. That is consistent with the wider pattern across the UK, in which all the industrial areas with large numbers of benefit claimants are in the firing line of the welfare reforms.
I move on to the new data. First, we looked at the impact by ward across Scotland and the slide shows a list of what we identify as the 20 hardest-hit electoral wards across Scotland as a whole. At the very top of the list is Calton in Glasgow, where we estimate that there will be an overall financial loss of £880 per adult of working age per year once the reforms come to fruition. If members look down the list of the 20 worst-hit wards, they will see a dozen Glasgow wards. The balance is made up of wards in a number of other older industrial areas, including Dundee, Fife, Inverclyde, West Dunbartonshire and Renfrewshire.
At the other end of the spectrum, as members can see, are the 10 wards that we think are least affected by the reforms in terms of financial losses. The geography is very different, and Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire account for five of the 10 least-affected wards. Right at the very bottom of the list, we estimate the least-affected part of Scotland to be St Andrews in Fife. One of my colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University suggested rather cheekily that someone is probably more likely to be hit by a golf ball than by the welfare reforms if they live in St Andrews.
In last year’s report, we examined the relationship between the impact of the reforms and deprivation at a local authority level. The slide that members can see just now presents the results of the same exercise at electoral ward level. Each one of the 353 dots represents an electoral ward. It is not necessary for members to be able to read the scale and the detailed measures, but I point out for information that the vertical scale represents the hit in each of the wards measured in terms of the loss per adult of working age per year, while the horizontal scale measures deprivation from the Scottish indices of multiple deprivation.
Members will see that there is a very clear relationship in that respect. Broadly speaking, the higher the level of deprivation, the higher the financial hit arising from the welfare reforms. We identified that pattern in last year’s report at local authority level. It is not entirely unsurprising, because welfare benefit claimants and recipients tend to be concentrated in the poorer areas. That is one of the things that defines areas as being poorer.
The next four slides use maps to illustrate the impact. In our report, there is a map for each of the 32 local authorities and statistics for every ward. The first map shows the impact in Glasgow by ward; I have already noted that Glasgow is hit particularly hard, and members can see that large chunks of the map of the city are shaded in dark blue, which shows where the intensity of the hit is greatest.
10:15The picture for Edinburgh is more mixed. As members can see in the next slide, there is a very interesting block in the centre of the city where the hit is really quite modest. We—or, at least, the academic literature—used to say that economic and social problems were located in inner urban areas, but that is certainly not the case in Edinburgh. The inner urban area of the city seems to be escaping lightly, while some of its more peripheral bits have been hit hardest.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is not much dark blue or even lighter blue on the map of Aberdeen, because the city does not have large numbers of benefit claimants and accordingly has not been hit hard by the reforms. Finally, by way of illustration, I have included a map of Fife, which shows considerable diversity. I have already flagged up the white area on the right-hand side, which is St Andrews, but there is a considerable area of dark blue in the middle of the region, particularly in the former coalfield area.
As well as highlighting the areas that have been most affected by the reforms, the report makes one or two comments about the groups who have been the most affected. I will whip very quickly through the next two slides, as they simply illustrate the groups in the population who are most exposed to each of the individual reforms. However, we should note how often those who are on low incomes, those with a disability or older working-age people tend to be mentioned.
We should remember that because the reforms are happening simultaneously, some groups are being hit by more than one element of them. That is particularly true for incapacity benefit claimants. As far as financial losses are concerned, the reforms to incapacity benefit are the biggest element of the overall package, and often those who are losing out from the changes to incapacity benefit are the same people who will be losing out from changes to disability living allowance. They might also be losing some housing benefit if they live in the private rented sector or, if they have a grown-up child still living at home, they will be losing out as a result of the reforms to non-dependant payments. Of course, they will also be losing out because benefits are being uprated by 1 per cent rather than by inflation.
In conclusion, the variation in the impact of the reforms is substantial between wards. Indeed, it is greater than the variation between whole authorities, which is exactly what we would expect to find, given that the diversity of underlying socioeconomic conditions at ward level is much greater than the diversity at local authority area level. Broadly speaking, I would say that on a per capita basis the worst-affected wards have been hit about four times harder than the least affected; the deprived wards are being hit the hardest; and unless there is a great revival in employment and labour market engagement as a result of the reforms, the gaps in income and living standards between local communities and neighbourhoods seem set to widen.
Thank you very much, convener.
Thank you, professor. Again, you have provided a very helpful report and we—and, indeed, people beyond the Parliament—value your work in identifying where these issues are affecting people.
As the link between deprivation and the hardest-hit areas does not come as a complete surprise, I think that we will focus on the numbers and the impact of the reforms. Just for clarification, have you done a similar assessment of local ward areas in England or just an overview of the situation in England?
We have not yet done a similar assessment in England. At the same time as we did the local authority work last year that we presented up here, we did a local authority-wide analysis in England, so the full comparisons were available. We know how Glasgow, for example, compares with other big cities in England and in Wales. We have not done the same exercise by ward across the whole of England. In fact, we have been piloting the methods up here in Scotland. We are about to apply the same methods in Wales, in the Sheffield area and in Northern Ireland. However, the number of wards explodes outside Scotland—instead of dealing with 353 wards, we are dealing with several thousand and the task becomes immense.
If I read you right, it would be difficult to do a comparison between, say, Calton and the worst-affected area in England because impacts from two reforms that are not reflected in Scotland will be taken into account in England.
I should perhaps have mentioned—it is mentioned in the report—that all the figures for Scotland are a little bit lower than they would have been without the arrangements to avert the impact of the bedroom tax and the reduction in the council tax benefit grant. If those arrangements had not been put in place, the overall hit to claimants in Scotland would have been about £35 a head higher than it is. That would put Scotland a little ahead of the GB average, but it is still behind some of the worst-hit regions in Britain.
Even though those arrangements are in place in Scotland, we are talking about a hit of £620 per adult of working age for Glasgow, which is still high by British standards. The highest hit that we identified across Britain was in Blackpool, of all places, where the financial loss was £910 per adult of working age for the Blackpool borough as a whole. On those numbers, Glasgow is grim and Calton is particularly grim but there are one or two places in Britain that are worse.
We move to questions from committee members.
I am going to start off down a road that we have been on before but I will try to come to a slightly different conclusion and question at the end of it. Of course, the figures that you have produced are, in effect, only one part of the balance sheet when it comes to overall Government policy. Other Government policies—such as the significant increase in the tax threshold—increase the amount of money that is available to those who are basic rate taxpayers. How do you see that resource balancing out?
Clearly, a lot is going on simultaneously in the world—not only the welfare reforms but wider tax changes, the growth in the economy and the difference between the increase in prices and the increase in wages. All we have been able to do in our research is to look at one element of the jigsaw. I absolutely accept that. There is a lot going on simultaneously that is not in the report. We did not try to monitor the overall wellbeing of individuals or of areas; we simply tried to measure the impact on particular places of a particular set of policies, so I accept your point.
Is it then the case that if, for example, we broke down the impact of other policy changes on a similar basis, it could result in those figures being somewhat misleading—let me qualify that—in so far as the differences could be more extreme or the overall pattern could be affected if we took the full balance of policies into consideration?
It is very difficult for me to comment on that because we do not have the hard evidence—we have not done the calculations. There is always a danger that, even if we added in more factors—if we added in changes in tax thresholds, for example—people would then turn round to us and say, “But you have not allowed for the fact that prices are rising faster than wages.” Where do you stop in this exercise? We have stopped at looking very specifically at the impact of the reforms. It is very hard, in the absence of the calculations, to give you a definitive answer on some of the wider issues.
Thank you for your report, Professor Fothergill. A lot of people found it helpful in understanding what is happening. I was not surprised to find that three of the wards in the area that I represent are above average and that one is below average, but it is useful to have that quantified, and I thank you for that.
You picked up on an issue that I want to explore a little further. You pointed out that, if certain reforms had not been put in place in Scotland in relation to council tax benefit and the bedroom tax, the scale of loss would have been £35 higher per working-age adult than is otherwise the case, so it would have been above the UK average. Can you quantify the split between the two measures, please?
Let us take the impact of the bedroom tax, because I must confess that I was unaware until a late stage in our study that you had put in place measures to avert the impact of the bedroom tax. The figures that are up on the screen at the moment show the overall impact by ward, and we calculated a set of figures comparable to those that actually included the bedroom tax, and we then had to go back and take the bedroom tax out of the overall jigsaw, so I know exactly what the bedroom tax does to those particular statistics. In the worst-hit wards, such as Calton, Springburn, North East Glasgow and Drumchapel, the measures that you have put in to avert the bedroom tax take about £30 per adult of working age per year off the numbers. Calton would have been coming in at around £910 rather than £880, and Springburn would have been £810 rather than £780, and so on.
At the other end of the spectrum, I turn to the figures for the least-hit places. The measures that have been put in place to avert the impact of the bedroom tax make little impact on the places least affected by the welfare reforms, so there is virtually no impact on the statistics for St Andrews, down at the very bottom of the list. I suppose that none of that is surprising. Where is social housing concentrated? It tends to be in the poorer communities where there are large numbers claiming housing benefit. Social housing is not concentrated in the ten wards at the bottom of the list, so the effect of the bedroom tax measures has been to ease the impact on the worst-affected wards rather than to spread benefit evenly around Scotland or even to favour the most affluent and prosperous wards. It is the poorest wards that have benefited most from that measure.
That is helpful. You have identified an average figure of £35 per working-age adult. Can you split it between the two measures and say how much is for the bedroom tax and how much is for council tax benefit?
As I recollect, about £20 is associated with the measures to ease the impact of the bedroom tax, and about £15 is associated with council tax benefit measures, but those are rough and ready statistics. I am sure that if somebody in the Scottish Government sat down with a calculator, they could probably give you a much more precise number, but that is broadly what the impact has been.
I appreciate the rough and ready estimate. Your report states:
“Westminster ministers are keen to claim that the welfare reforms will increase the incentive to work and will therefore lead to higher employment. As we noted, this is a bold assumption based on a questionable view of how the labour market works, especially in less prosperous areas ... the evidence in this report suggests that the gaps in income and living standards between communities in Scotland are set to widen.”
Can you say more about why you reached that conclusion?
10:30
When I say that I would be immensely surprised if the welfare reforms led to much higher labour market engagement and lower unemployment, I am drawing not so much on the research that we have done for our recent study but more on my long experience as a labour market analyst and a researcher on regional economic development. It seems that increasing labour supply by pushing people off benefits and out there into the labour market does not necessarily raise employment levels, except perhaps at certain times and in certain places where the labour market is tight and where firms face a shortage of labour and are crying out for any workers. There are times and places where that applies—it applied in large parts of southern England just prior to 2008—but I am sceptical about whether it really applies in some of the poorer areas in Scotland. I would be hugely surprised if additional labour supply in itself led to greater numbers overall in employment. I do not think that that stacks up in wide parts of Scotland.
Thank you for yet another thought-provoking report, Professor Fothergill. I have a couple of questions for clarification. To what extent does the analysis presented today take account of disability benefit cuts? The PIP benefit is still being rolled out—or not, as the case may be, if you are trying to get it in a pilot area—and it is not yet uniform across the country, so I wonder about the extent to which your analysis reflects that position.
The analysis is an attempt to estimate the impact of the eight reforms once they have come to full fruition. In the case of the shift from disability living allowance to personal independence payments, we have barely started implementing that reform, and it will not really come to fruition until well into 2018, so the biggest part of the DLA reform has not yet happened. A large chunk of the incapacity benefit reform has not happened either, and that encapsulates an awful lot. We are not looking just at the reforms that have been introduced by the present coalition Government in Westminster; some of the things that have been happening to incapacity benefit in the past couple of years were first planned by Labour pre-2010 and have only recently come to fruition.
There is an element of incapacity benefit reform that has still to bite in a major way, and that is the very last part of the package, which affects claimants in the work-related activity group, limiting their non-means-tested entitlement to one year. Because that bites at the back of the pipeline, most of the people who are now moving across on to ESA will find that that has not yet bitten. In terms of the overall welfare reform package, that is probably one of the largest elements of all. There is still an awful lot stored up that will come through in the next couple of years. If we add that to the DLA reforms, which often impact on the same people, those people still face an enormous hit.
By the way, that will affect the worst-hit wards in Scotland, because it is the incapacity and disability living allowance reforms that are the really big ones in the jigsaw, so when I say that a place such as Calton in Glasgow is hit hardest, I suspect that a good 40 per cent of that hit has not yet happened.
That is interesting, because I was going to go on to ask about people with disabilities. It seems, sadly, that the net result of the reforms is that, if you suffer from a disability and you live in one of the most deprived wards in Scotland, you are in effect subjected to a double whammy. It is not good news at all, particularly because, as you have said, the benefit cuts are being rolled out and we do not yet see the full impact of what is coming down the line.
It is not that somebody on disability benefits is hit any harder in some wards than in others, but it is the case that, in some wards of Scotland, the percentage of the working-age population that is out of the labour market on disability benefits is much higher than in other parts of Scotland. Typically, in the Glasgow area there are much higher claimant rates of ESA, IB and DLA than there are, for example, in the more prosperous economies up in Aberdeenshire. When reforms are being made to DLA and IB/ESA, it will therefore impact on places and in wards where there are very large numbers of claimants, which is some of the Glasgow wards, in particular.
I accept that. I was trying to make the point about the other problems that will be prevalent in a community. If someone who is disabled lives in a very deprived ward, other issues will impact on their daily life as a result.
I have one other question. We hear from the Westminster Government—and, indeed, from Westminster parties—that further benefit cuts are planned. Does the research take any account of that?
No. The research is an exercise in looking at what is in the pipeline now and what will hit; it does not include things that are being talked about and might be introduced beyond May 2015. I am afraid that that would be a further exercise.
I hope, from my perspective, that we do not have to get you back for that one.
I thank Professor Fothergill for the report, which makes for grim reading in some regards.
I have a few questions. I do not mean to be critical of the report, but it is an exercise based on council wards. You mentioned in your presentation that you could go down to data zone level. Is that correct?
A lot of the statistics that have fed into the research are at the level of data zones. Data zones in Scotland have a population of between 500 and 1,000. Our judgment is that, although we had to throw that information into the pot, if we were to generate statistics down at that very, very fine grain, they would not be terribly reliable. If we are talking about a specific benefit that only 20 or 30 people in a particular data zone claim, we cannot be sure that those people are hit in an average way, if you like. The statistics are reliable up at the level of electoral wards, when we are typically looking at a population of about 15,000, but at the finer grain there would be a lot of ropiness in the figures.
An additional problem is that if you list data zones, they do not mean very much to a lot of people, whereas wards are a unit that most local politicians, in particular, can relate to very clearly.
Some of the wards in Scotland do not reflect communities, while data zones often do.
One of the things that bothers me is that, although I realise that Aberdeen is not the hardest hit area, areas in a number of wards in Aberdeen will be immensely hard hit. For example, in Northfield—in the Aberdeen Donside constituency—which is shown in dark blue to indicate that it is hard hit, the average hit is £560. It consists of a number of communities that are high on the scale of multiple deprivation or are at risk. However, I give the examples of Hilton/Stockethill, which binds Aberdeen Donside and Aberdeen Central, and Tillydrone/Seaton/Old Aberdeen, which is entirely in Aberdeen Central. The hit for Hilton/Stockethill is £440 on average and it is £350 in Tillydrone/Seaton/Old Aberdeen. In those wards there are socially excluded areas and areas of quite a lot of wealth, which skews the impact on the communities.
I know that I may be being overly technical in trying to drill down as far as we possibly can, but it is quite clearly the case that communities within Aberdeen, which is one of the least affected places, are still taking an immense hit and, within those communities, individuals and families are taking a huge hit because of the reforms.
It is always a question of judgment as to how far down we try to drill with the statistics. If the average ward in Scotland is 15,000 people, to my mind, that is getting fairly close to defining a community.
As I say, I am not entirely convinced that the figures would be hugely reliable at a finer grain. Also, even if we produced them at a finer grain, we would be open to the argument that, even if we identified data zones where there was not much of a hit from the reforms, there would still be individual households and individual people within those data zones for whom you could say, “Ah, but that person will be hard hit,” even though they live in an otherwise really prosperous data zone that is escaping lightly. We are always vulnerable to that argument but your argument is fundamentally correct: we will still find some people who are hard hit, even in the areas of the map that are coloured white to indicate that they are least affected. It is just that there will be relatively few of those people in the context of the ward as a whole.
I am trying to drill down because, obviously, the effects of welfare reform will have a major impact. You said earlier that the higher the level of deprivation, the higher the financial hit for people. For us as policy makers, I wish that we had control over welfare here in Scotland—I hope that we soon will—but in the policy-making decisions that we are taking, we have to be aware of the hits that are taking place in socially deprived communities.
The point that I am trying to get across is that although some areas seem not to be that hard hit, there are areas within those areas that are taking a big hit and there is nothing worse, I find, than poverty amidst plenty, which we certainly have in Aberdeen. As policy makers looking at other areas, we have to take account of those data zone numbers before we implement other policies to try to regenerate communities and resolve deprivation.
You need to bear it in mind that, even for people in a ward that is down in the bottom left-hand corner of the relationship to deprivation graph—in other words, they are in a relatively prosperous ward that is lightly hit by the reforms—the impact of any one of the reforms on a particular individual or on a particular household is not necessarily any less than the impact on a comparable individual or household in a ward at the other end of the spectrum.
All that the relationship to deprivation graph is showing is that at ward level—in this instance, groupings of 10,000 to 15,000 people—the overall impact is much higher where there are higher levels of deprivation. However, somebody who is hit by the bedroom tax—no, they will not be hit by the bedroom tax here—somebody who is hit by the incapacity benefit reforms, for example, is just as likely to be hit as hard in a non-deprived ward as in a deprived ward.
I would never take away from the individual scenarios that are going on, which are having a major effect on people and their families right across Scotland. However, when policy-making, we have to take into account not only the ward level but the data zone level too.
I have just one question—it is a very general one. I was interested in the last point in your key points summary, Professor Fothergill, which Jamie Hepburn referred to. It is the point that
“In the absence of a big shift into employment, a key effect of the welfare reforms will be to widen the gaps in income between communities.”
We started off the evidence session with Alex Johnstone asking for it to be noted that other initiatives that are being taken have not been accounted for in the study. You kindly responded to that from wider experience than just the experience that related to the report.
Is there anything within the wider action that is being taken—the global picture, as Alex Johnstone said—on taxation as well as on welfare reform that would narrow the income gap between communities?
10:45
As I tried to say earlier, I am very sceptical about the idea that if you increase labour supply you automatically increase labour demand. As a general rule, it does not seem to apply. As I also tried to say before, this is inherently just a look at one thing that is going on in the world at the present time, but it is a big, powerful element of the jigsaw. It is not an attempt to measure the changing wellbeing of communities; it is about the impact of a particular set of policies.
I was very interested to hear a former civil servant speak at a seminar that I attended recently. He was an ex-Treasury official, who commented on how the welfare reforms had been planned or dreamed up in their present form. It was clear to me that he was saying that they are driven by financial savings and that, if ministers and others have been going around saying that the welfare reforms will raise levels of employment and rebuild the economy, that was very much a window dressing that was put on after the event. Primarily, it is about saving money. Some people would like to believe that the reforms will raise the volume of employment and the level of economic activity, but I think that deep down, even in the Treasury, they do not believe that.
Thank you.
Thank you, Professor Fothergill. As I said at the start, you have done a very valuable piece of work.
I understand some of the concerns about the fine detail. Equally, to respond to what Kevin Stewart said, you have highlighted local authorities in the area that I represent to show that within areas that are very badly hit there are pockets of wealth that are not reflected in the data. I suppose that there are swings and roundabouts.
Overall, the information that you provided has been hugely beneficial to the committee. It gives us a lot of work to get on with in terms of more analysis and discussion, but our work is now based on firm statistics rather than anecdotal evidence or supposition. That is always helpful when it comes to assessing policy and its impact. You said that the welfare reforms were window dressing in terms of their ambition.
I was quoting a civil servant, who had better remain nameless.
I think that he should.
And he is a former civil servant.
I think that he has also been very kind, but that is a matter for us to judge, not you, and we can now do that based on very firm evidence. Thank you very much for providing that evidence and coming before us to give us more assessment of your analysis; it has been very beneficial.
Thank you.
I suspend the meeting for a few minutes to allow a change of witnesses.
10:48 Meeting suspended.