Agenda item 2 is on our Parliament day in Craigmillar. On Monday 18 May, the committee hosted as part of a wider Parliament day a meeting in the Jack Kane centre in Craigmillar in Edinburgh to listen to residents’ experiences of welfare reform. Around 50 people attended the event; some had been directly affected by welfare reforms and others were involved in the administration of support for those affected. Some of the attendees were accompanied by representatives of local support organisations.
The session was organised around a series of tables hosted by members or other committee representatives. Members will see in their meeting papers a note that draws together the output from each table and sets out some of the overall themes that emerged. This document is currently being produced in an easy-read version and will be distributed to all the organisations that attended the meeting for onward transmission.
I will give committee members who attended the Craigmillar meeting or who have read the report and want to ask questions about it the opportunity to discuss the experiences that we picked up there. Craigmillar is one of the areas of Edinburgh that has been worst hit by welfare reform, and that message came through very clearly. Finally, I put on record the committee’s thanks to all the organisations that worked with the Parliament’s outreach services and the committee clerks to support the people who came along on the day.
Does anyone who was there want to kick off, or does anyone have a specific question about the paper in front of us?
I will say a few words, convener.
It was a very informative and relaxed event. Everyone seemed comfortable in the setting, and the way in which it had been put together was very good.
There was a mixture of experiences in the room. At the table at which I was sitting, there were people who had had various levels of engagement with DWP, social security and welfare, which made the discussion very informative. There was also a volunteer from the citizens advice bureau who, as a service user and a volunteer at CAB, was very well informed about some of the pressures that are coming to the third sector. Some of the people at my table were supported by voluntary organisations from the area and they were also able to contribute quite a bit to the discussion.
I do not think that we learned anything particularly new from the event. It just reaffirmed everything that the committee has been doing in this area and some of the testimonies that the committee has taken about how difficult people are finding their lives under the current regime and their nervousness about the impact that welfare reform might have on them in the future.
I agree with that point.
I totally agree with what has been said. The event really brought home to me just how much stress people are under. I was at the same table as Heather Lyall, and I found that people were feeling really quite stressed; in fact, one of the girls said that she was stressed about just coming along to meet us. That brought home to me the stress of having to go to all of these meetings and appointments and jumping through all of these hoops and the effect of all that on their mental health.
The table that I was at was dominated by people who support others who are going through the system; they either worked for organisations or were carers. It was evident that the amount of pressure that is being put on organisations to try to support people who are being impacted on is in some respects becoming unbearable. It is not just the volume of work but the technicalities that people have to work with in order to support someone, given the way in which the system is administered, and the amount of pressure that that puts on the individuals and organisations came through quite strongly.
We have heard about that impact from some of the third sector groups that have given evidence to us, but to hear it from people working directly at the coalface with individuals gave me a sense of the change in the pressure that is being brought and which those people are experiencing. We have heard lots of evidence about the impact on organisations, but it was important for me to hear about the impact on individuals who work for those organisations, and that is something that I took away from the day.
Are members content for us to use the paper as we move forward? We will get it circulated as widely as we can.
Members indicated agreement.