The next item of business is a Welfare Reform Committee debate on motion S4M-11840, in the name of Michael McMahon, on welfare reform and the Smith commission.
14:45
I will attempt to set the scene for the debate, which focuses on three interlinked topics: the Welfare Reform Committee’s report on the new more severe sanctions regime that is being operated by the Department for Work and Pensions; the committee’s report on food banks and the link between the growth in their use and welfare reforms; and the Smith commission agreement on further devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament.
Although this is the last debate before Christmas, I am afraid that some of what I have to say will not be very merry. The tone will perhaps be a little Dickensian and more in tune with “A Christmas Carol” than with any Christmas cheer.
Let us look first at sanctions and the view that the committee came to in its report. However, before I start, I should say that the views that I will express were agreed by the committee and published in the report, although members will be unsurprised to hear that committee member Alex Johnstone demurred on the findings.
In late 2012, the Department for Work and Pensions introduced a new benefit sanctions regime that increased the severity of sanctions for people who are on jobseekers allowance and employment support allowance. Under the regime, claimants may be sanctioned for up to three years. You heard me right, Presiding Officer: they can be sanctioned for up to three years. Before members think that that is just a notional level of sanction, the last time we checked the figures 79 people in Scotland had been sanctioned for three years.
The new regime has led to a significant increase in the number of sanctions that are being applied, despite the fact that numbers of people on the relevant benefits have dropped. The rate of sanctioning for jobseekers allowance increased rapidly through 2013 from 3 per cent at the start of the year to 5.7 per cent at the end of it.
As part of our inquiry, we invited a senior DWP official to give evidence on their views of the sanctions regime. In fact, we have invited DWP ministers but, over two years, we have failed to convince any of them to give evidence in public to the committee. That rather saddens me. Perhaps in the post-referendum era we will be more successful.
We took evidence from Neil Couling, who is the most senior United Kingdom official responsible for jobcentres. I think that it would be fair to say that his evidence rather took us aback. He reported:
“many benefit recipients welcome the jolt that a sanction can give them ... Some people no doubt react very badly to being sanctioned—we see some very strong reactions—but others recognise that it is the wake-up call that they needed, and it helps them get back into work.”—[Official Report, Welfare Reform Committee, 29 April 2014; c 1452.]
He also suggested that jobcentres receive thank you cards from sanctioned claimants.
I have to say, having taken significant evidence, including at first hand from people who have been sanctioned, that the committee does not recognise that description of the sanctions regime. Instead, we see many weaknesses in the regime and in its application. Those are leading to a climate of fear around jobcentres, rather than one that encourages people to engage with them and find their way back to work.
In our report, we list seven weaknesses in the system. I will repeat them. There has been
“A consistent failure to notify people that they are being sanctioned and why.”
I will come back to that. There has been
“A lack of flexibility”
in the application and, indeed,
“misapplication of sanctions reducing the likelihood of people finding work.
There has been
”A failure to appreciate that many people on benefits just do not have the necessary IT skills ... to use the DWP’s Universal Jobmatch facility”
which is often a condition of benefit.
There was also
“A failure to make those sanctioned aware of the availability of hardship payments”
The DWP is apparently unable to provide figures for the number of people who receive hardship payments. There has been
“The consistent triggering of a stop in housing benefit as a result of a sanction, which should not happen”,
but does,
“and can lead to significant debt being incurred even for a minor sanction.
There is
“The lack of a deadline for decision-making on DWP reconsiderations, leading to delays in redressing wrong decisions”
and finally, there has been
“shunting of the costs of dealing with sanctioned claimants on to other agencies: local authorities; health boards; third sector agencies; etc.”
Perhaps the most serious of the weaknesses is the first—the failure to tell people that they have been sanctioned. We learned that it seems to be a common occurrence that people first realise that they have been sanctioned when they go to a hole in the wall and cannot get any money.
It turns out, that for some sanctions, there is not even a duty to tell people that they have been sanctioned. How on earth can sanctions work to encourage patterns of behaviour if people are not told that they have been sanctioned or why?
The weaknesses of the current sanctions regime are reflected in the outcomes of reviews of sanctions decisions. The statistics can be read in many ways, but four in 10 decisions to apply a sanction are overturned on review. There has been some debate about whether formal targets for the number of sanctions exist—some people argue that they do, but the DWP is clear that they do not. What is clear to the committee, however, is that whether or not formal targets exist, there is now a deliberate policy to drive up the number of sanctions to previously unheard-of levels, through managerial pressure on jobcentre staff.
The committee is not automatically opposed to a benefits system that incorporates conditionality, but we share the view of Citizens Advice Scotland that sanctions must be used only as a last resort for people who have consistently and deliberately refused to engage with jobseeking requirements without good reason. We believe that if sanctions are to be used they should be applied appropriately, consistently and with greater levels of discretion and support. We believe that the current operation of the sanctions regime is not in line with those principles.
Sanctions are also disproportionately affecting some of the most vulnerable groups of claimants—in particular, the disabled, single parents and young people, including those who have recently left care. In many cases, rather than being the driver to get people back into work that the DWP claims they are, sanctions are getting in the way of people getting back to work. In its report, the committee makes a number of suggestions for improvements to the operation of the sanctions regime. More important than those, however, is the need for a sea change in the culture of the policy from being punitive to being supportive.
Another key aspect of our recent work has been food banks. We found that welfare reform is a significant cause of the rise in demand that is being experienced by providers of food aid. We strongly contest the United Kingdom Government’s assertion that the growth in use of food banks is due solely to increased publicity and people choosing to use food banks as an economic choice. We found that there was a 400 per cent rise from the previous year in the number of people who were receiving assistance from food banks. A staggering 71,000 people—more than 49,000 adults and 22,000 children—were using Scottish Trussell Trust food banks. That is 22,000 children asking, “Please, sir—can I have some more?”
Our views have been supported by recent evidence. The Trussell Trust’s most recent figures for Scotland, covering the period from April to September 2014, show that food bank use has increased by 124 per cent over the previous year’s figure. Benefit issues are a major contributor to that increase, with 28 per cent of those who attend food banks doing so because of benefit delays and 18 per cent doing so because of benefit changes. Almost half the people who are attending Trussell Trust food banks in Scotland are doing so because of welfare issues.
Westminster refused to engage with the fund for European aid to the most deprived people. Would it have been a good idea for Westminster to engage with it, considering that Spain received €500 million? That would have helped with the cost of food banks.
I am sure that that would be worth considering, but I cannot, as the convener, comment on that because the committee did not take evidence on it. Anything that I would say would be a personal opinion, and I cannot give personal opinions in my speech.
The link must be acknowledged by the UK Government, which can no longer ignore the evidence. The Government must recognise that people are struggling to meet their basic need for food directly because of its actions. To be fair to Alex Johnstone, he was not supportive of that view. However, we all believe that it is important that food bank provision does not creep into welfare state provision. Food banks should be recognised as a community charitable response for individuals who are in crisis; they should not be welded into the infrastructure of the welfare state. They are a sign of a Dickensian model of welfare that should have no place in a prosperous nation. Ultimately the necessity for food banks should be eliminated.
That said, we have seen on visits to food banks in our local areas the current need for their vital support among individuals who are often desperate. We praise the dedication and commitment that is shown by food bank volunteers and we support the action that has been taken by the Scottish Government to provide support through the emergency food aid action plan.
I want to introduce members to Denis Curran. Denis runs Loaves & Fishes, which provides food aid in East Kilbride and Glasgow, and he is just one example of volunteers’ dedication and commitment. He spoke passionately at the committee of the desperate need of the people who turn to food banks, and he spoke of people with wee children coming to him after walking three or four miles in need of food. He told the committee:
“They are frightened and insecure, and they have no money.”—[Official Report, Welfare Reform Committee, 4 March 2014; c 1282.]
People in Scotland care about these things. There is a YouTube clip of Denis’s appearance at the Welfare Reform Committee, which almost 200,000 people have now viewed. I do not know whether that is a record for a Scottish Parliament appearance, but it tells me that Denis is not the only one who feels passionately about this issue.
I turn to the Smith agreement. I do not want to say too much about the agreement: I will leave others to talk about the ins and outs, and I am sure that there will be many views. The committee has yet to examine the agreement and therefore does not have a view on it. However, it seemed to us that it would be fruitless to have in Parliament a debate about welfare without acknowledging that the Smith agreement is likely to lead to substantial changes in this area and to greater responsibility for Parliament.
In November, we took from academics some evidence on devolution of welfare benefits, prior to the publication of the agreement. The academics’ views were very mixed; some believe that devolving welfare benefits is an all or nothing proposition, whereas others believe that it would be possible to devolve areas of activity provided that their devolution was thought through and coherent. I guess that we are about to test that proposition.
In the future, we will have responsibility for a range of benefits including attendance allowance, carer’s allowance, personal independence payments, industrial injuries disablement allowance, severe disablement allowance, the regulated social fund and discretionary housing payments. However, we will not, of course, have responsibility for the white elephant—if I can call it that—that is universal credit. The new responsibilities will result in expenditure of £2.5 billion to £3 billion a year, which is equivalent to our current budget for education and lifelong learning.
We have some major responsibilities to take on and some hard thinking to do on how we will manage them. I hope that as well as looking back to some of the work that the Welfare Reform Committee has undertaken, this debate will look forward to the work that we will all have to do to make a success of our new welfare responsibilities.
I move,
That the Parliament notes the Welfare Reform Committee’s 2nd Report 2014 (Session 4), Food Banks and Welfare Reform (SP Paper 537), its 4th Report 2014 (Session 4), Interim Report on The New Benefit Sanctions Regime: Tough Love or Tough Luck? (SP Paper 552) and the welfare proposals contained in the Report of the Smith Commission for further devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament.
14:57
I am grateful to the members of the Welfare Reform Committee for their work over the past year. Their evidence sessions have allowed us to hear directly from people who work on the front line about the damaging impact of the UK Government’s welfare reforms and, which is important, from people who have been affected by the benefit changes, as Michael McMahon said. Because of that work, issues such as the rise in the use of food banks and the unfairness of the sanctions regime have been brought into the public domain.
As I have told Parliament, the Scottish Government is doing everything that it can to tackle the inequalities that continue to blight our society, and to ensure that everyone in Scotland has a chance to share in our country’s economic growth. However, our efforts are being hampered by the UK Government’s welfare reforms. We estimate that the price that Scotland has to pay as a result of the UK Government reforms is about £6 billion in the six years to 2015-16, which is £6 billion out of the pockets of some of our most vulnerable people.
On top of that, our analysis indicates that the cuts have a disproportionate impact on groups including disabled people and lone parents. More than £1 billion of the cuts will relate directly to children. If the cuts were not enough, the UK Government has also seen fit to introduce an oppressive sanctions regime that is clearly not fit for purpose, as Michael McMahon illustrated very well.
Last year in Scotland more than 54,000 individuals on jobseekers allowance were sanctioned, with some receiving multiple sanctions. In the year to June 2014, almost 2,000 people on employment support allowance—people who are ill or disabled—were also sanctioned. Our analysis has also shown that those who receive a sanction suffer on average a loss of income for four weeks amounting to about £270. That is a huge amount of money for people who are already battling to survive on low incomes.
In all too many cases, the first time that a person is aware that they have been sanctioned is when they go to the bank and find that they have no money. They sometimes do not know why. That is totally unacceptable.
Those cuts and punitive policies do absolutely nothing to tackle poverty and inequality. Instead, as the committee’s report highlights, sanctions are leading to huge rises in the number of people using food banks. More than 51,000 people visited Trussell Trust food banks between April and September this year and, worryingly, more than 15,000 of them were children. It is a disgrace that so many people in Scotland are unable to put food on the table.
That is why the Scottish Government set up the emergency food fund. The fund is providing more than £500,000 over two years to projects throughout the country that not only provide emergency food but help people to support each other in their communities. In that way, the projects build capacity to tackle the causes of food poverty and to develop solutions.
That is only part of the Scottish Government response to the UK Government’s welfare reform agenda. We are working closely with our partners to do all that we can within the powers and resources that we have to help people who are affected by the changes that have been imposed by Westminster. In our draft budget for 2015-16, we focus on three key objectives: to make Scotland a more prosperous country, to tackle inequalities, and to protect and reform public services.
To help us to tackle the poverty and inequality that blight our society, we will maintain our spending on mitigating welfare reform at about £296 million over a three-year period in order to ease the worst impacts of the reforms. We will also continue our efforts to stop in-work poverty, which include our commitment to the living wage. In addition, we will appoint an independent adviser on poverty and inequality who will engage with the people of Scotland to make recommendations to the Government on how we should collectively respond to the challenges and who will hold us to account on our performance.
We will also continue to lobby the UK Government for fairer welfare reform and take action to ensure that safeguards are in place for those who need them most. That will include acknowledging the link between welfare reform and the increased use of food banks, and quickly implementing the recommendations of the Oakley review on sanctions.
Because of issues such as those that we are discussing, the Scottish Government wanted full control over our social security system so that our ambition to move beyond mitigation could create a system that was much more suited to Scottish needs. The Smith commission has now made its recommendations. We are, of course, disappointed that it did not go as far as we or the majority of civic Scotland wanted. Organisations including the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, One Parent Families Scotland, Unison, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Children in Scotland and Engender have outlined exactly why the measures fall short of what is needed to tackle the big issues that are facing our country.
The Smith recommendations do not do enough to give us policy coherence in employment, the minimum wage and welfare so that we can tackle the long-term issues facing our country, and they deny us control over damaging policies such as sanctions. However, as the First Minister has made clear, we welcome all additional powers, and Parliament should be assured that we will do all that we can with those new powers to ensure that they benefit the people of Scotland.
Following the debate on the impact of the UK Government’s welfare reforms on disabled people, I wrote to the Minister of State for Disabled People asking for the roll-out of the personal independence payment—PIP—to be halted in Scotland. Now that the Smith commission has proposed that powers on disability come to the Scottish Parliament, it is all the more pressing that roll-out be stopped.
The Scottish Government is also clear that nobody should be adversely affected by the changes that the Smith commission proposes. Disability benefits should be devolved to the Parliament before the proposed £310 million budget cut comes into operation from the transfer of the disability living allowance to PIP. That should be a matter of good faith for the UK Government. Equally, those who receive benefits should not be penalised as a result of any changes that are introduced by the Scottish Government; rather, the financial rewards of any such measures should go to the individuals or families concerned.
Paragraph 55 of the Smith commission report is critical in that regard. It outlines that any new benefits or discretionary payments that are introduced by the Scottish Parliament must provide additional income for a person or family and must not result in an automatic offsetting reduction in their entitlement to other benefits. As members are aware, responsibility for universal credit has not been devolved, and we want to make it clear that any benefits that are created by this Parliament should not be deducted from anyone’s means-tested universal credit. All of us should unite behind that objective. The Scottish Government expects that recommendation of the Smith commission to be honoured in full.
I welcome the Welfare Reform Committee’s report, which has helped to inform the direction that we will take and to highlight the issues. Michael McMahon mentioned Denis Curran’s appearance at the committee and the number of hits the footage on YouTube of that has had. There is a real concern in Scotland about food banks, the people who use them and the benefit sanctions regime, and I think that the committee has done a lot to bring that into the public eye. I welcome that, so I am pleased to support the motion and the work of the committee in taking action on these issues.
15:06
I offer my thanks to the Welfare Reform Committee, to members past and present and, in particular, to the committee clerks, who have been very helpful and supportive.
I am not entirely sure what will happen in the new year, but this may prove to be my last speech as a member of the committee, and I just want to say how grateful I am to all my colleagues and how much I have appreciated working with them on such an important subject. I had been going to give special thanks to the convener, but our partnership on the issue will continue on Labour’s front bench.
To continue the theme of collaborative working, it is fair to say that Labour and SNP members are united and frustrated in equal measure. I recognise that SNP members want to prevent the damage that the Tory reforms are wreaking on some of our most vulnerable citizens and that they believe that it is only by removing the relevant powers from Westminster that we can protect Scottish communities. Labour members are equally frustrated in that we, too, want to get rid of the Tories, but we believe that the election is the best place to do that and that in the meantime we should focus on using the powers that we have rather than excusing ourselves by pointing at those that we do not.
I recognise that those arguments will persist and that those frustrations will continue, but my hope is that we can now put the emphasis on what we have in common rather than on where we differ. The Welfare Reform Committee exists because a range of powers over welfare have already been devolved, and more are to follow—now that the vow has been delivered through the Smith agreement, we will potentially have the power to create new benefits. I believe that we can work together and that the people of Scotland expect us to do so.
There is no doubting the urgent need that exists. None of us can have been left unmoved by the witnesses who came before the committee or by the evidence that we heard from them. Just this morning, my colleague Jackie Baillie and I met the homeless charity the Pavement to discuss its word on the street project. One member of the group, Caroline, told us how illness had led to her being sanctioned and having her benefits stopped for 15 months, which left her on the brink of homelessness.
The British Medical Association and the Scottish Association for Mental Health have both reported that living in fear and stress is having a devastating effect on the mental health of those who rely on benefits, and the UK Government’s own review noted that people with mental health conditions or learning difficulties make up 40 per cent of the individuals who go through a work capability assessment.
On a different note, I still recall the young single mother whom Jamie Hepburn and I met at the citizens advice bureau in Parkhead, who had to explain why going into labour was probably a justifiable reason for missing an appointment without being sanctioned. The range of experiences varies from the deadly serious to the almost laughable, but what emerges from nearly all the witnesses who have testified is a sense of having to justify themselves and a double feeling of victimisation.
For those people, there is anxiety about their very real needs and how they will feed and look after themselves; in most cases, there is also anxiety about how they will feed and look after those who depend on them, such as their children. Alongside that, there is a different anxiety—a feeling of being judged, threatened or even punished because of the unfortunate circumstances in which some welfare recipients find themselves. There is a feeling of being punished twice over, not through exercising any choice of their own but for finding themselves in difficulty and then being blamed for it.
Our committee reports have pointed the finger directly at the Tory Government and concluded that benefit sanctions were one of the key factors that led to the huge increase in the need for food banks. They have demanded a sea change in sanctions policy. However, alongside that, we need to ask what more we can do here. What can the Scottish Parliament do?
I was very encouraged by some of the work of the Scottish Government’s expert working group on welfare in the run-up to the referendum. I recognise that ministers and all of us across the Parliament want a system that is based on the dignity and respect of individuals. However, earlier this week, Willie Rennie, among others, reminded us of the inherent complexity of the welfare system and of how difficult it can be to translate good intentions into actions.
Our welfare system is bitty, piecemeal and messy, just as our lives are. We go in and out of work at different stages in our lives and have times of dependency and self-sufficiency.
I will give one example of how difficult it is to practise what we preach. The debate on Tuesday on the Scottish Government’s Welfare Funds (Scotland) Bill, which is a very straightforward bill to replace the social fund, revealed that 80 per cent of crisis grants that have been given out under the interim scheme have been awarded in kind rather than in cash. In other words, we are making judgments almost immediately. We are no longer leaving decisions to the choice of the individual; we are denuding people of individual choice rather than building people’s resilience.
None of us in the chamber gets paid in furniture. Most Scots do not expect to pay their bills with vouchers or get told which shops to go to and which choices they have to make. We do not need to justify or explain our everyday actions, so why should we expect that of those on welfare?
On a broader point, our debate should be not just about benefits. We need to change the way in which we approach the growing numbers of those who are in work but are still in poverty—those who are simply not paid enough. One reason why costs are rising is that housing benefit is being paid to those in employment. Many new challenges face us, but many families are working harder than ever and finding themselves deeper in debt.
It is not just a matter of poverty; it is about rising inequality. The answer does not necessarily or solely lie in welfare reform; it lies in how we tackle wages and wealth at the top alongside how we reward those at the bottom. It is about what we are doing about the living wage, about wage differentials and about tax.
So far, the Scottish Government’s response to the welfare reforms and its exercise of the powers at its disposal have been quite conservative. It has replaced the social fund and council tax benefit, and it has effectively overruled the bedroom tax. I am not criticising the Government for any of those measures, as Labour has supported them—in fact, it called for them—but there has been no attempt so far to reform welfare or to take a different approach in Scotland.
I believe that there is agreement in Parliament that we do not want to keep people on benefits. We are not trying to create a welfare society; we are trying to create a system that supports each of us in our time of need in a non-judgmental way.
With more powers coming that will allow us to create entirely new benefits, we need to work together to use those powers to build a fairer society. I hope that we can do so.
15:13
I am pleased to take part in this debate.
As I am a very recent arrival in the Welfare Reform Committee, my colleague Mr Johnstone will cover the reports to which he contributed as a committee member. I look forward to being on the committee and working with Mr McMahon. He may not know what to expect from me, but he might find himself pleasantly surprised. I hope that I can make a positive contribution to the committee’s work.
The committee has done and is doing very important work and is identifying important issues. One of the great roles of the committees of the Parliament is to consider, when work has been done and evidence has been produced, what can be done to use that leverage or discoveries to influence change. That is where the committee may have a very important role to play.
I want to focus on the Smith commission report, which I am a little more familiar with than I am with the work of the Welfare Reform Committee. As Mr McMahon said, that report implies substantial changes. It is three weeks to the day since it was published. In tune with the new theme of consensus in the Parliament, I have enjoyed the positive response to it, which has been obvious from all the five political parties that are represented in the chamber. I accept that the minister’s party considers that it does not go far enough, although at the same time her colleague Nicola Sturgeon has gone out of her way to say that she thinks that what has been delivered by Smith is positive.
I remember that, when I first came to the Parliament, there was a huge sense of excitement and optimism about how the Parliament would operate and would use its new powers. I detect in the Holyrood air that those same feelings are brewing now—there is a mixture of excitement, anticipation and ambition. The question that we are all asking ourselves and one another is: what can we do with the new powers to improve life in Scotland?
As we talk about the Welfare Reform Committee’s latest reports, it is timely to look at the Smith proposals and ask what the committee and the Parliament can look forward to achieving with the new powers. As we know, an element of devolution on welfare has already occurred, arising out of the Welfare Reform Act 2012. On Tuesday, the Parliament debated stage 1 of the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Bill, a debate to which my colleague Mr Johnstone contributed. It is good that the Parliament is taking the opportunity to put an interim arrangement on to a statutory footing.
I know that not everyone will agree with me—that is pretty clear from the speeches that we have heard already—but the aim of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 was to reform the benefits system and introduce a new system that is fairer, simpler and more affordable. Although I accept that not every aspect of the reforms has been well received—that is pretty clear—I have to make the important point that it would be hard to find opposition anywhere to the principle that the system needed reform. Most acknowledge that reform was necessary and overdue.
I fully acknowledge that the issues then become ones of the implementation and management of change. That is where the committee is doing important work. The whole point of the reform is to help people to get back into work, to reduce dependency on the state and, in tandem with increased personal allowances and changes to the tax system, to enable people to make individual choices about what they do with their money, rather than simply having to hand it to the taxman to be given it back in the form of prescribed benefits.
I know that the Scottish Parliament does not always see eye to eye with Westminster but, beyond the rhetoric, there is an important point. The political landscape is different here and, more importantly, our electors in Scotland have a different set of needs. I recognise that they have different preferences from those of other members of the family of nations that is the United Kingdom. Therefore, the time between now and the delivery of the Parliament’s new powers is when the hard work should start. We should debate how we can design a welfare system for Scotland within the United Kingdom, bearing in mind that, back in September, we voted to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom.
My party will contribute to that debate. I want a system that is compassionate and flexible and one that is effective in helping people into work. I want a system that measures itself not by the size of the welfare bill but by how many people are helped back to work and can then support themselves and contribute to the broader economy.
I am excited about how the Parliament will manage its new competencies. There are proposals in the Smith agreement on disability living allowance, the personal independence payment and the regulated social fund as well as on the ability to top up existing benefits and create new ones. Those are real, exciting and important choices.
Am I correct in my reading of paragraphs 55 and 56 of the Smith commission report that any top-up benefits that the Scottish Parliament decides to implement will not be offset and that we will not have a repetition of the issues with attendance allowance and free personal care?
My understanding is that the spirit behind the Smith commission, with which the five parties were in agreement, is that “top-up” means what it says. We cannot top up something that is not there already. The understanding is that top-up will be an additional and supplementary support.
In addition, when the current work programme and work choice contracts expire, we will have a significant capacity to help the most vulnerable not only to find work and share in the wealth of a growing economy but to contribute to that economy.
I think that the Smith commission has done a good job in trying to balance responsibility and obligation. It means that we are protected against economic shocks, which are one of the difficulties of being overly responsible for expenditure in one part of the UK. The recent fall in oil prices has shown that an economic shock in one corner of the UK will not imperil a large proportion of a nation’s tax base or welfare spending.
For a long time, many members of this Parliament have been calling for more devolution of welfare to Holyrood. Now that the Smith agreement is out, it is clear that it reflects those calls. I want to move this debate on. Let us now talk about what we are going to achieve with the new powers rather than lament the ones that we do not have. We can innovate, we can create effective new policies, we can get away from stale, left-wing dogma and we can improve the welfare system in Scotland instead of blaming the existing one. I want to think that, in this respect, the blame game is in the past.
We now come to the open debate. Speeches should be a maximum of six minutes, please.
15:20
I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about welfare for the second time this week. I might repeat some of the things that the committee’s convener has just said and some of the things that I said on Tuesday, but I think that that repetition will be worth while.
On sanctions, the committee noted a few major problems, such as: a consistent failure to notify people that they are being sanctioned; a lack of flexibility; a prevalence of the misapplication of sanctions, which reduce the likelihood of people finding work; and a failure to appreciate that many people on benefits do not have the necessary information technology skills on day 1 to use the DWP’s universal jobmatch facility or other IT systems.
According to Inclusion Scotland, 132,074 sanctions were applied in Scotland, with more than 33,463 of them being applied between January and March this year. Inclusion Scotland suggests that nearly 30,000 JSA sanctions will have been applied against disabled people in Scotland. That is a huge amount of people who will have been affected by the sanctions regime.
On 9 December, during one of its your say sessions, the committee heard from two witnesses about their experiences of the welfare system. One of the gentlemen who was there, John Lindsay, has never actually been sanctioned but has a great fear of being sanctioned. At one point, he moved to Aberdeen to seek work because he was so scared of being sanctioned. He said:
“It kind of finished me off. After that, I was really down, depressed and anxious. It was the final straw. Within a week or two, I got a sick note from the doctor and went on to employment and support allowance. What happened really pushed me over the edge. I had to go up to Aberdeen, away from my family. When I was told at the interview that I had the job, I was told also what it would be like and that the accommodation would be great and so on, but it was an absolute disgrace. When I went there and saw that, and when I heard the stories from other people, I could not have stayed in the house any longer. I had to get away the next day and go home—it really pushed me over the edge. After that, I was just so anxious all the time about getting sanctioned.”
Mr Lindsay has suffered from mental health problems from a young age. During the course of his evidence, he went on to say:
“It builds up. If a person has depression, anxiety or whatever, and somebody talks to them as if they are a piece of dirt, they will take it personally, think about it and obsess about it, and before they know it, within a day or two they are a complete nutjob. They just do not function right. They end up obsessing about the matter and then get really ill. That is what I am like, anyway.”
He has a real fear of sanctions, even though he has never been sanctioned.
The other witness that day was Mr James Nisbet. He said:
“When I first came off ESA and was having a problem getting back on JSA, I went in on the first day with my wife, because I did not feel comfortable going back in to sign on, and the assessor saw the two of us together. I had not been sat down for 10 minutes when she was setting me sanctions. I said, ‘What are you going to sanction me for?’ She said, ‘You’re not doing enough job searches.’ I said, ‘I’ve only just started. I cannae work a computer,’ and that is why I ended up having to go on a computer course for nine months. I do not know what has happened now—perhaps Westminster has taken the pressure off—but Atos were like the Gestapo. I do not know whether I should say that.”—[Official Report, Welfare Reform Committee, 9 December 2014; c 12, 22, 19.]
These are real people and that is how they have been affected by the current regime. That is why it is so upsetting that real people are not being listened to by the DWP ministers and that DWP ministers will not appear in front of our committee to hear about real people.
We have already heard from the convener about the attitude of Neil Couling of the DWP. After he said that the increase in the number of food banks is down to the increase in supply rather than an increase in demand due to the increase in sanctions, I said that he was talking claptrap and living in cloud cuckoo land. Many of my constituents have said much worse.
I wish that Neil Couling and others would go and talk to Barry at the Trussell Trust in Aberdeen, or Christine at Community Food Initiatives North East, or Sophie, an instant neighbour who, along with volunteers, is running these food banks. Then they would get a true idea of what is actually going on out there.
The Scottish Government’s expert group on welfare produced the report “Rethinking Welfare: Fair, Personal & Simple”, which is a very good document. What we have from the Westminster Government is unfair, impersonal and simplistic, and I hope that we can change that.
15:27
I welcome the Welfare Reform Committee’s “Interim Report on the New Benefit Sanctions Regime: Tough Love or Tough Luck?” and I agree with its findings that the sanctions regime, pioneered by the Government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, is unfair, unjust and unacceptable.
The regime is one that penalises the poorest and is having a devastating effect on many people in communities across Scotland. I apologise in advance to Alex Johnstone for my left-wing dogma, but I believe that the regime is part of an austerity agenda that has seen benefits and tax credits changed and cut, hitting the sick, the vulnerable and the poorest families hard while at the same time cutting taxes for the richest millionaires. We have seen a blind eye being turned to the tax evasion of individuals and multinational companies and to bankers’ bonuses.
We have already seen £18 billion being cut from out-of-work benefits and tax credits, driving people into debt, poverty and destitution and forcing thousands to resort to food banks to feed their families, to payday lenders and loan sharks to make their money last out the month, and to other desperate measures just to get by. People have put at risk their tenancies, homes and debt repayments, which has impacted on the health and wellbeing of individuals and their families for now and for the future.
The reforms have hit the youngest hardest, with 39 per cent of sanctions being applied to young people aged 18 to 24. The Citizens Advice Scotland briefing for today’s debate highlights the harsh impact of the sanctions regime and the direct link between sanctions and the use of food banks. Across Scotland, at least 71,000 people relied on a Trussell Trust food bank to eat last year and in my constituency of Dunfermline, 1,300 food bank vouchers have been issued since April. That is a staggering 400 per cent increase—five times as many as last year—and the figure is growing day by day and week by week.
Home-Start estimates that around 30,000 children in Scotland live in families who cannot afford to eat properly and that one in four adults has skimped on food in the past year so that others in their household can eat.
The committee’s report highlights cases of people living in Scotland who have had to walk many miles to get to the nearest food bank. Until recently, in west Fife, many clients of Dunfermline Foodbank were walking not just 2 or 3 miles but more than 12 miles to get their food parcel. To solve that problem, satellite centres have now opened in Rosyth, Inverkeithing and Bennarty.
The food bank certainly has not been short of volunteers or donations, but that is just as well because client numbers are predicted to double over the next year. Dunfermline Foodbank now has more than 180 volunteers across its four centres and warehouse and the commitment of those volunteers is outstanding. Their hard work and dedication is to be commended by us all. I understand that, over the past week, donations from the public have gone through the roof, showing the strength of community spirit but also the genuine anger that people in 21st century Scotland are going hungry.
John Drylie, who runs Dunfermline Foodbank, is doing an absolutely brilliant job. When I told him that I would be speaking in this debate, he told me that, as well as his usual Christmas wish that no one should go hungry in west Fife, or in Scotland, he would like everyone who uses food banks to be given free transport to get there and back. I hope that the Scottish Government will look into that.
The reason that a staggering 53 per cent of people at Dunfermline Foodbank have claimed food parcels in the past nine months is benefit delays or sanctions. Those people have nowhere else to turn, but the food bank can help for only a few days and on a few occasions. What happens when someone has been sanctioned for months or even, as Michael McMahon said, for three years? How are they supposed to put food on the table, never mind get money to pay for their bus fare to seek work, heat their home, keep a roof over their head, put shoes and a warm jacket on their children or put presents under the Christmas tree?
Although to most of us the link between sanctions, welfare reform and food bank use is glaringly obvious, it sums up how out of touch the coalition Government is that Tory ministers continue to believe that there is no link between welfare reform, sanctions and the use of food banks. They clearly live on a different planet from the rest of us.
It is simply unacceptable that in a country as wealthy as Scotland any individual or family has to turn to a food bank. Although we all applaud the dedication of the volunteers who run the food banks and provide that emergency lifeline, our goal must be the elimination of food banks, as the committee concluded. Our goal must be a Scotland where no family is forced to turn to a food bank to put tea on the table, where no one is forced to go hungry and where welfare is distributed fairly; we must have a welfare system that ensures that every Scot has a decent standard of living and supports people to escape from the poverty and destitution in which the current welfare agenda is placing them.
Labour created the welfare state, which is one of the real benefits of the union and which pools and shares resources and risks across the UK. The majority of Scots voted to stay part of the UK, but on the doorsteps there was certainly an appetite for change. Voters told us that they wanted more control up here in Scotland.
I am confident that the Smith commission report, which all the Scottish political parties signed up to, will deliver that change. Although it clearly does not go as far as some of us would like—Scottish Labour had hoped that it would go further, too, in respect of housing benefit—it offers many opportunities. It allows Scotland the possibility of shaping much of our own welfare system while recognising that some things are best delivered at UK level, giving Scotland the power to create new benefits, top up existing benefits and mitigate the unfair effects of welfare reforms.
The Smith commission report offers real powers that will make a real difference to individuals and families across Scotland: the power to top up child benefit; the power to reform and improve carers allowance; the power to redesign totally the work programme; and the power to create a new Scottish welfare system suited to our needs here in Scotland, which treats every Scot with respect and dignity.
Will the member take an intervention?
I do not have time.
Ultimately this debate is not and should not be about powers. This is about political will. It is our actions, not our constitution, that can and should protect our citizens from poverty. It is our actions that can and will end child poverty; ensure that our pensioners can stay warm this winter; and make work fairer and extend the living wage to make work pay for more workers.
I look forward to the Scottish Government using the powers that it has and the powers that are on the way to transform people’s lives, tackle inequality and make Scotland fairer and more inclusive. Let us all work together to end the scandal of food banks and ensure that Scotland is genuinely the best place to grow up in for every single child and that no family in Scotland goes hungry.
15:33
The people of Scotland, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, are being battered and assaulted by benefit cuts and confronted by the bedroom tax and they are trying to battle the frequently bizarre decisions made at Atos assessments. In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, 22,000 children used food banks last year.
That is what Iain Duncan Smith refers to as welfare reform. His concept has more in common with the old reform schools than it has with welfare. In fact, the entire coalition view of welfare and benefits bears a terrifyingly close resemblance to the Victorian approach to welfare as punishment, in effect—if people are so careless and so self-indulgent that they become a charge on the state, they ought to expect to live in misery as a result.
So far, Iain Duncan Smith has managed to create a complete fiasco of the universal credit and PIP programmes. Even the Public Accounts Committee has recognised that.
Although we of course welcome any extension of devolved powers to Scotland, the Smith package—which has definitely not been delivered yet—falls very far short of this Government’s ambition for all the people of Scotland. I will not itemise the carefully wrapped package contents. I want only to remind everyone of the fundamental principle behind the Smith report: the rules ensure that neither the Scottish Government nor the UK Government will lose or gain financially from the act of transfer of power, so 85 per cent of powers over welfare remain reserved to Westminster. In other words, in real terms—no change. It is Westminster rule, not home rule. Without meaningful control over our national budget—by that, I mean that the elected Government enjoys the genuine freedom to raise and spend its own money for the betterment of all—we continue to be constrained by the choices of Westminster, however inappropriate those choices are for Scotland.
On welfare, we could get control of over £2.5 billion out of a total of £17.5 billion of spending. For me, that is just tinkering at the edges. It is not enough to allow us to change a broken system and turn it into an effective one that meets the needs of the Scottish people, rewarding those who achieve but never punishing those whose circumstances limit their options.
Why has “welfare” turned into a bad word—a criticism, an accusation? Welfare is wellbeing. Welfare is someone living their life in as full a way as is possible for them. If they are severely autistic, if they suffer from bipolar disorder, if they are wheelchair bound and/or suffering from a long-term, perhaps life-limiting or even terminal condition, they have the absolute right to enjoy life to the full
I thought that the notion of the deserving poor had died with Dickens, but obviously not. As a result of reforms announced during 2010 to 2015—let us not forget where the Welfare Reform Act 2012 came from—households with both disabled children and adults are facing the highest total reduction in income. In terms of the percentage of annual income, their loss is around three times the average reduction in income that is faced by non-disabled households.
As a new member of the Welfare Reform Committee, I have been both moved and shocked by the evidence that we have received. We have listened to the accounts of people who have been subjected to sometimes brutal and even offensive questioning, without any supportive expert available—my colleague Kevin Stewart gave the perfect example of that with the testimonies of the people we heard from last week. Such questioning has left people confused and unclear about how to go forward. That is not just a daily but an hourly issue in my constituency.
Engender has explained in a briefing that
“since 2010, 85 per cent of cuts to benefits, tax credits, pay and pensions have been taken from women’s incomes. Together with recent announcements in the Autumn Statement, this amounts to £22 billion from a total of £26 billion.”
That means that £22 billion of those cuts have been shouldered by women. Existing inequalities mean that women have fewer financial assets and less access to occupational pensions. They are still paid less than men—13 per cent less in Scotland for full-time workers and 34 per cent less for part-timers, who are largely women.
Then there is all the unpaid caring work of bringing up children and looking after other relatives, and what we can call the motherhood penalty. As Engender has pointed out, these reforms are a move backwards towards greater misogyny and apparently the desire to remove benefits from disabled people and their families. By now, no one should be surprised to learn that the greatest losers are women with a disability.
Citizens Advice Scotland is all too aware of the problems that the current system continues to spawn. People are literally starving as a result of sanctions and the sudden withdrawal of benefits. As they face Christmas, it is likely to be with the help of a food bank and the notion of armfuls of presents will not figure. Locally, from some of the monitoring that I have done, it seems to be young men who present themselves more often—young men with few family ties; young men with additional problems; the same young men who, percentage-wise, are the ones who commit suicide.
On “Sunday Politics”, Iain Duncan Smith told us that food banks were just fine—Germany has lots of them. He said that it was nonsense that the current welfare system was pushing people towards food banks. Well, I have some news for Mr Duncan Smith—the people in my constituency are going to food banks because they have no alternative. They need to feed themselves and their children and, without welfare support, they cannot do it. I hope that he is proud of that achievement.
So, where to from here? We need to ensure that Scotland has a real—and a loud—voice in Westminster in next year’s elections. We need the voices of those who are genuinely committed to a fairer society to overwhelm those who are committed only to their own self-interest.
We will fight ridiculous measures such as the bedroom tax so that Scotland can move forward and make its own decisions. Our control now is limited. In an independent Scotland, we will have the freedom to make the choices that we cannot make now.
If there were but one refrain that united the Scottish Parliament, I would hope that it would be this: let us do our absolute best for all of the sovereign people of this land and let us deliver to them a fair and equitable society that does not identify people as rejects or the undeserving poor.
15:40
I am pleased to take part in the debate. I, too, thank the Welfare Reform Committee, not only for publishing the reports and securing a debate on the matter but for its commitment to welfare as an issue for the past two years. The work that the committee has done and the dedication that its members, and its convener, Michael McMahon, have shown to their subject matter is a fantastic example to other committees in the Parliament of what can be achieved.
The report talks about the marked increase in the use of food banks in our country. In order to get a true sense of what we are discussing, I thought it important to look at the history of the establishment of food banks across the world. It was in America in 1967 that John van Hengel, a volunteer with the St Vincent de Paul Society, first established the concept. Mr van Hengel saw a widow and her 10 children looking through rubbish behind grocery stores for food. He helped her to find edible food and asked the store owners to give him the products that they would have thrown out so that he could distribute them to the needy.
In 1984, the first food bank was established in Europe. That was followed by the establishment of the European Federation of Food Banks in 1986. The UK and other wealthy nations did not set up food banks until later. Since 2004, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, Lithuania and Serbia have joined the network, followed in 2010 and 2011 by the Netherlands, Switzerland, Estonia and Denmark, and in 2013 by Bulgaria and Ukraine.
The issue is not that food banks exist—as I have demonstrated, they have existed throughout the world for some time—but that there is a growing reliance on them in society. In 2004, the Trussell Trust, a Christian-based charity, had just two food banks; now, it has 423. That shows just how reliant many in society have become on that type of provision. In a few short years, people of my age and younger have not only become aware of food banks but come to see them as an integral part of their communities. That is the most disappointing thing for me.
Pupils from St Andrew’s high school in Coatbridge—in your constituency, Presiding Officer—visited the Parliament today and told me that, only last week, they raised around £1,000 for their local food bank. The young people should be congratulated on raising such a fantastic amount of money. However, the fact that they had to do that so that someone—maybe a classmate—would get a meal this Christmas should not only embarrass those of us in the chamber today but embarrass and shame the coalition Government even more.
The findings of the Welfare Reform Committee make for uncomfortable reading and could not be clearer: the measures that the UK Government introduced are creating reliance on food banks—it is as simple as that. With £14.9 billion-worth of cuts having been made to benefits, tax credits, pay and pensions since 2010, what other outcome could there be? Not only have people had a cut to their benefit or had their benefit stopped altogether but, on top of that, many have faced intolerable sanctions.
The UK Government may say that sanctions have been designed to promote the correct and proper use of the welfare system and enable effective and efficient use of resources that support people on the path back to work and, ultimately, out of poverty. However, we have found, and the report demonstrates, that sanctions are being used to punish people. Sanctions have left some of those most in need without money for up to three years. That point was made repeatedly in several briefings—in particular, Inclusion Scotland’s briefing—that we received for today’s debate.
From those briefings, we learn that, since October 2013, claimants wishing to challenge a decision by the DWP to refuse an award of benefit or impose a sanction must request a “mandatory reconsideration” before they can appeal to the tribunal. Nearly 25 per cent of JSA sanctions have been subject to mandatory reconsideration, and in more than half those cases, the sanction has been overturned. For ESA claimants, nearly half the decisions to impose a sanction have gone to mandatory reconsideration, with nearly half being successfully overturned.
Although the DWP has still not published any statistics on mandatory reconsideration, which was introduced in October 2013, the measure appears to have caused an almost total collapse in appeals to tribunals. Only 23 JSA or ESA sanctions went to tribunals for an appeal decision between April and June 2014, compared with the usual figure of at least 1,000 per month. Although the UK Government claims that sanctions are a last resort, it is evident that they are being imposed almost as a matter of course, with no opportunity for the claimant to give reasonable cause for the failure that leads to the sanction. That is the impact that the so-called welfare reforms have brought to many people’s doors across Scotland and the UK. It is no wonder that more and more people are finding it harder to feed themselves or their families.
People must be supported by the state in their hour of need. I therefore welcome the Smith commission’s agreement on welfare powers and on giving this Parliament the ability to create new and additional benefits as well as top up existing benefits. I believe that that will give us an opportunity to address some of the many issues that affect our constituents, particularly women. As Engender points out in its briefing for today’s debate:
“The UK’s social security system is a facet of gender inequality as demonstrated by the highly gendered impact of ‘welfare reform’, which is seeing women and their children at increased risk of poverty, abuse, violence and physical and mental health issues.”
The briefing goes on to say:
“The Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament must therefore use the opportunity of new powers over social security to ensure that these patterns are redressed where possible.”
I could not agree more, and I hope that the Government will use every power coming its way to help rebuild the people’s trust in the welfare system, because that trust has been lost.
15:46
I speak today as a former member of the Welfare Reform Committee. I welcome Michael McMahon’s opening speech. Its content was certainly in the spirit of what I felt was the opinion generally of the Welfare Reform Committee when I was a member.
I am pleased to speak in the debate because I was involved in work that was done for the two committee reports—on food banks and on the sanctions regime—that the motion refers to. I will say a few words about both.
I think that the committee felt that the sanctions regime, as it is operated, is overly punitive and has many errors. It is interesting to note that, in its briefing for the debate, Citizens Advice Scotland says that, in the year to June 2014, there were more than 200 JSA sanctions per day, which is a lot. However, what really got to me was the point that
“Since the start of the ... sanctions regime in October 2012, over 3,800 sanctions were ‘high level’ sanctions meaning a sanction of at least 13 weeks.”
Thirteen weeks is a heck of a lot of time for somebody to have their money stopped, especially if it is stopped in error, if they have not received notice of the sanction, if the sanction is imposed when they have good reason for not meeting the requirements or if they are unaware of their right to challenge decisions, which Citizens Advice Scotland has found to be fairly common.
With such a punitive welfare regime, it is no wonder that there has been such growth in food banks. I saw all the arguments that came from David Mundell, Iain Duncan Smith and all the rest about people taking advantage of food banks—basically, if something is provided, people will turn up for it. I am sorry, but I would rather listen to Denis Curran, who Michael McMahon talked about.
Denis has been operating food bank food distribution and has worked with the homeless for 20-plus years in East Kilbride. He knows a lot more about the issues than Iain Duncan Smith does. Denis will tell us that charitable organisations that help people out now and then or in the longer term will always be needed, but that what he has seen over the past few years is unprecedented—and, in my opinion, immoral and non-ethical.
I feel bad about the fact that Denis Curran keeps saying to me—he will probably say it again tomorrow—“There you all were talking again. What you gonna do about it?” The feeling of helplessness is ridiculous—there are people who have been working on the issues for so long and just want to do something.
Siobhan McMahon is quite right to say that we are starting to mainstream food distribution as part of our welfare system. That is absolutely appalling, but we see all sorts of examples of it. I was horrified to see that the Co-op, of all places, is marketing its own-brand products as “ideal for food banks”. What on earth are we doing when such things are happening in our society?
It is easy to talk about the figures, but I believe that every member of this Parliament must have examples of constituents who have been hit. I am certainly not going to name anyone, but one chap who had been sanctioned and had not had any money for weeks phoned our office, crying. He had worked for most of his life but had lost his job and ended up being sanctioned—by mistake, I may add; we won that case—and he was crying because he was hungry and because he could not bring himself to turn up at the food bank. It was only because we organised something with Denis Curran that that chap ended up getting something to eat over the weekend. I am just disgusted that I am living in a society where that kind of thing becomes the norm.
I guess I could say that I was privileged to be part of the Smith commission’s work, which we went into wanting a cohesive set of powers that would allow us to stop these things happening. I am not convinced that we have got that, and neither is much of civic Scotland.
Will the member take an intervention?
No, thank you.
I suspect that members of the Welfare Reform Committee are a bit sceptical about that, too. That is not to do down what we hope will come out of the Smith commission, but I do not think that we should get too carried away, thinking that it is a big answer to the big problems that we have while Governments at Westminster apply welfare reforms that are alien to what many of us believe in.
The Smith commission’s recommendations have still to go to the Westminster Parliament. There are those who believe that they will be enacted regardless of the result of the next UK election, but some issues are yet to be ironed out. There are technical ones such as the formula for block grant adjustments, but there are also issues to do with effects and overall income adjustment where top-ups or new benefits apply. I was delighted when Richard Simpson intervened on Annabel Goldie to put across our understanding of the issues, but some people are already saying that that is not their understanding. I am worried that, in their passage through Westminster, things will change because we do not have the earnings taper control.
There is so much more that I could say, but I will end by saying to everyone in the chamber what Denis Curran says: “When are you going to do something about it?” If we can do nothing else, we can shout about it to our respective people at Westminster. Across the Parliament, we can jointly call for the early transfer of things such as DLA so that we can stop the PIP roll-out. If we really want Scotland to be a fairer society, that is what we have to do. Let us start here.
I do not believe that, as the new leader of Labour says, we can be the fairest country on earth if we do not have control over the things that would allow us to become that, but surely we can make small differences as a way of moving forward.
15:53
I am pleased to have another opportunity this week to contribute to the debate on welfare reform and the Smith commission. I welcome the findings in the Welfare Reform Committee’s interim report and thank it for all the hard work that it has done to date.
As I am sure members throughout the chamber will agree, welfare and its challenges are among the most common subjects of the conversations that we have with our constituents. The welfare state was founded as a safety net for the most vulnerable in our society, and it is a great shame that in 2014—it is nearly 2015—we are still having discussions about hungry children and their families having to turn to food banks to survive. Sadly, it seems that the problem is not going to disappear soon.
I welcome the welfare proposals that have been put forward by the Smith commission, which will allow the Scottish Parliament to provide greater support to our nation’s most vulnerable people.
I welcome in principle the efforts that the Scottish Government’s Welfare Funds (Scotland) Bill seeks to make to alleviate these problems, although in my speech to Parliament earlier this week I raised concerns about certain aspects of it. I also welcome my party’s commitment to ensuring that welfare and work programmes are devolved not just to Holyrood but to the towns and cities of Scotland. It is apparent to me that local authorities, charities and third sector groups, which are embedded in their communities, can make better decisions about getting people back into work and breaking the dependency cycle than someone sitting either here in Edinburgh or in Westminster.
One of the most common issues raised by my constituents is benefit sanctions. Indeed, just this week, a constituent told me that she had had no idea that her benefits had been sanctioned until she discovered that her payment had not been made to her bank account, and she expressed frustration that no one seemed to speak her language and that she had been left with no alternative but to turn to a food bank. Although I welcome the proposals in the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Bill, it is clear that without the appropriate awareness raising, training, advertising and provision of materials to Jobcentre Plus and third sector agencies, many initiatives such as the Scottish welfare fund and the community care grant will not be widely known to our most vulnerable, and the money will remain shockingly underspent.
It also strikes me that, when new proposals are drafted, one group that is not consulted enough on them is the most vulnerable. Given that they unfortunately have to rely on the system, surely they have a role in ensuring that it is as stress free and as simple as possible. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises access to food as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, but the committee’s report found that, since 2012, the use of food banks has increased by 400 per cent. In many cases, people who are sanctioned wrongly have their housing benefit stopped, but relatively few who are sanctioned receive hardship payments, and the committee’s report highlights cases in which people living in Scotland had to walk up to 12 miles to get to a food bank and notes that some users had to refuse the food provided because they could not afford to turn their oven on to cook it. With its welfare reforms, the coalition Government has denied the right that is set out in article 25 to the 71,000 people in Scotland who are dependent on food banks.
Finally, as I suggested in my speech about the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Bill, anonymous case studies could be used to ensure that organisations that get people back into work and help them live a full and independent life have a better grasp of the needs of our most vulnerable and are able to explain things to them as clearly as possible.
It is not the job of the Scottish Parliament simply to acknowledge welfare challenges; it would be incredibly easy just to note such concerns and say that we have done our duty. However, I am sure that all members across the chamber will agree that that is simply not enough. If we are not here to challenge, we are wasting our time; if we are not here to listen, we are not doing our job; and if we are not here to change, we have lost all hope.
15:58
Although I am now a member of the Welfare Reform Committee, I was not at the time that these reports were produced and I pay tribute to the MSPs who were involved, the committee clerks and all the organisations and individuals who gave evidence. These two comprehensive reports have raised awareness and understanding of extreme poverty and its causes.
I agree whole-heartedly with the food bank report’s conclusion that UK ministers are quite wrong to deny any link between welfare reform and the rising use of food banks. In fact, the distressing evidence that was taken by the committee demonstrates a strong link between the two. In their written and oral evidence, witnesses repeatedly referenced benefit sanctions and benefit delays as reasons for the increase in the use of food banks. As others have mentioned—this bears repeating—the Trussell Trust said in evidence that the three main problems that led people to Scottish food banks in 2013 and 2014 were benefit delays, benefit changes, including sanctions, and low incomes.
The rise in the use of sanctions by the Department for Work and Pensions is a moral outrage, as it leaves people completely destitute. Other members have talked about the figures that show how sanctions have risen, so I will not repeat those. However, I will repeat a piece of evidence that was taken by the committee that shows the absurdity and the cruelty of the sanctions regime:
“Annemarie was sanctioned in December 2012 for four weeks for failing to do the requisite number of job searches. She applied for 27 jobs instead of 28 within a two week period. This left Annemarie without the money she needed to heat her home or to be able to buy food. Annemarie could not access the hardship fund until the 15th day of her sanction, leaving her with no money for over 2 weeks. Annemarie felt her only option was to borrow money through a payday loan, enabling her to buy food as well as small Christmas gifts for her family. Fortunately, Annemarie was able to access seasonal part time work to assist her throughout this time. Annemarie is still paying back the loan ... 12 months after the initial sanction.”
It was perhaps not surprising that the Trussell Trust found that 19 per cent of its food bank users did so because of changes to their benefits. However, the same proportion of food bank users did so because of low income. That was confirmed by Mark Ballard of Barnardo’s, who told the committee that the driver of food poverty was not just the low and delayed benefits but the decline in the value of wages.
Carol-Anne Alcorn of FareShare and Edinburgh Cyrenians said that working people on low incomes cannot meet the rising cost of rent, food and fuel. That has been my experience when I have helped volunteers at the First Base Agency, a charity in Dumfries that distributes food parcels in Dumfries and Galloway. What shocked me—other members have mentioned this—was the large number of people who asked us to make up parcels that did not require cooking because they could not find the cash to pay for gas and electricity. I note that my first-hand observation was repeated in evidence to the committee.
Other members have talked about their local food banks and I want to pay tribute to the First Base Agency, whose work is remarkable. Its director, Mark Frankland, writes a blog, to which I direct anyone who wants to know more about the hard work and the effort that it takes to keep such lifeline services going. Mark’s current posting, “A December day in the life of a Scottish food bank”, makes for a very poignant read. Every Monday morning, he has to be at the back door of Greggs for 8 am to take delivery of 50 loaves. Last week, he ended one of his days at Kirkcudbright harbour, where a trawler that had taken a particularly good catch donated a large part of it to him. The haul of scallops was not for the food bank but for him to sell in order to use the money to buy other food for distribution.
I pay tribute to the generosity of those who contribute to food banks, in particular local businesses. In our area, church congregations are particularly generous and Mondays at the food bank are very busy as volunteers drop off collections taken during Sunday services.
In Mark Frankland’s blog, he talks of opening a Christmas card last week with a £200 cheque inside. It was from two pensioners who had decided to donate their winter fuel allowances as they felt that others were more in need of it than they were. He mentions that those pensioners were his
“fellow travellers from the ‘Yes’ campaign”.
Although people from all political backgrounds donate to and run food banks, I want to mention the yes movement’s action in that regard, particularly since the referendum. All over Scotland, local yes groups, deeply disappointed with the referendum result, wanted to channel their energy into making a positive difference to their communities and found that addressing food poverty is a very tangible way to do that.
Last weekend, my SNP branch in Dumfries east set up a food collection stall in the centre of town at the suggestion of two of our younger new members. By the end of the day, we had collected £600-worth of food and £200-worth of cash donations for the First Base Agency.
I think that there is a good reason why people who were part of the independence campaign want to throw their energy into that type of activity. As has been discussed, welfare is a reserved matter, and the two specific aspects of welfare that will stay reserved are sanctions, which cause many people to go hungry, and low wages. The Smith commission’s proposals will specifically keep the sanction regime in London and prevent our setting a minimum wage here in Scotland. Although I welcome the reforms that the Smith commission proposes, those key aspects of food poverty will remain reserved to Westminster, which is deeply disappointing.
We move to the closing speeches. I call Alex Johnstone, who has six minutes.
16:05
In Scotland, we are extremely lucky to be part of the United Kingdom—an economy that is now growing faster than any other economy in the developed world. Contrary to the policies that were adopted by many of our European colleagues, particularly those in the eurozone, the policy that we have decided to follow is, throughout the United Kingdom and in Scotland, creating jobs and economic growth at a time when many of our European neighbours would kill for such an opportunity. Yet, we have a persistent problem.
Here in Scotland, in many areas—perhaps all areas—there is a desperate labour shortage, yet when jobs are created they are filled largely by immigrants. I am one of those Conservatives who does not oppose immigration, particularly immigration within the European Union, but it still concerns me that we do so badly when it comes to getting our unemployed into the jobs that we are now creating. The consequences of that failure are obvious and are clearly stated in the two reports that we have in front of us today.
I will address the issues specifically. When it comes to sanctions, there is obviously a problem. The sanctions regime seems to attack the same people time and again. However, I want to take a step back and take a broader view of sanctions. First, I refute the suggestion that sanctions are somehow the invention of the current coalition Government. Sanctions were introduced some time ago, under the previous Labour Government. In fact, only in the past 12 months has the level of sanctions gone past the peak that was achieved in 2007, when Frank Field was the minister responsible. Let us therefore take no lessons from the previous Government on the implementation of sanctions.
Nevertheless, there are problems with sanctions as they are applied today. There is a broad understanding that, if we are to have a welfare regime and a benefits system, some kind of enforcement and disciplinary measures will be necessary. The report “Re-thinking Welfare: Fair, Personal & Simple” does not go so far as to suggest that we do not need a disciplinary and enforcement mechanism. Yet, for many of the individuals who have experienced sanctions, it is a very difficult circumstance to find themselves in. Many of them do not understand why sanctions have been applied, and a great many more have gone through the process of having their mandatory reconsideration and the sanction threat being withdrawn. There is an appeals procedure and, as with many appeals procedures in the welfare system, there is a surprisingly high success rate of appeals. However, in my view, that is symptomatic of a system that is not being appropriately administered rather than a system that is itself inappropriate.
Let me move on to the other reports. Several times today, we have heard members say that the demand for food banks is caused entirely by the implementation of sanctions. We have heard others suggest that low wages are a large cause. A moment or two ago, however, we heard a brief mention of the evidence that was provided by Mark Ballard on behalf of his employers, who went to some length to explain the causes of the demand for food banks. He understood that the drivers include high food prices.
We have been through a five-year period in which food prices peaked at a very high level. High fuel prices have also been a driver. No one is giving away free electricity, so free food from a food bank will be the option that people choose. Sadly, extremely high transport costs have contributed to family difficulty and, as we have heard on more than one occasion during this debate, some people have been unable to travel to food banks or have had to walk many miles to take advantage of their service.
Food banks as a whole balance people’s opinions, and we must be careful what we say about them. I agree with everybody here that it is unfortunate that food banks are currently necessary. However, they are a wonderful example of how, when a need is identified, human beings can pull together and work together for the benefit of all. I pay tribute to everyone who works in a food bank, large or small, or who makes a contribution to food bank, to keep that essential service in place while it is necessary.
Our challenge is to work to ensure that it is not necessary for ever. The opportunity presented to us by the Smith commission agreement is one that the Scottish Government is underestimating. The opportunities that universal credit presents are extremely positive and the universal credit system, administered by the Westminster Government, will contribute enormously to the simplification and efficient provision of support in the main benefit areas.
The Smith commission agreement gives us huge new opportunities to top up benefits or create new benefits and support systems that we can deliver here in Scotland. The challenge, however, is to achieve the political consensus necessary to do that. In effect, we can pay any benefit we like, as long as we raise the money through taxation here in Scotland. We must all pull together and work together to argue a case that is acceptable to not only those who will take advantage of the systems that are provided—
Draw to a close, please.
Will the member take an intervention?
The member is closing.
—but those who will pay for them, too. That is a challenge that will keep us thinking for many years to come.
16:12
I welcome the opportunity to make some concluding remarks on behalf of the Labour Party on this committee-initiated debate. The committee’s report is excellent.
There is much common ground. Most of us would agree that, whatever the original good intentions, the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition policies on welfare have become uncaring and unjust, as Cara Hilton said.
Will Mr Simpson give way?
No, I have not even got started.
Whoever had been in power would have had to make difficult and often unpopular choices at UK, Scottish and local authority levels, but there should be no doubt that the coalition has, perhaps inadvertently, punished the most vulnerable while it has rewarded, certainly deliberately, the most affluent with tax cuts.
One phrase that will remain laughable in the living memory of most people of this generation is:
“We are all in this together.”
The rich are getting richer. Last year the chief executive officers of FTSE 100 companies awarded themselves a 14 per cent increase in wages. Bankers’ bonuses continue—they just do not get it. At the same time, we have low pay—which, as Alex Johnstone said, is contributing to the use of food banks—part-time working, poorly rewarded self-employment and zero-hours contracts.
As Ken Mackintosh said, we need to address the rich and address poverty wages. A Labour Government will take some tough decisions, including restoring the 50p tax rate and introducing a bankers bonus tax, a mansion tax and a tobacco producers tax. Of course, that can happen only if Labour is the largest party. We shall see what happens in May.
If anyone is in any doubt about the consequences of five more years of Tory rule, the recent vote on the bedroom tax, which was supported by 35 Liberal Democrats, and the statements that some Tories made in the food bank debate make it clear where we will head if there is a Tory Government after May: a state whose size will be reduced, as the Office for Budget Responsibility said, to the same proportions as in the 1930s—not the same size but the same proportions. That is still highly relevant.
Alex Johnstone is right that sanctions have always been part of our benefits system. As a general practitioner in the 1970s, I dealt with the problems associated with the measure that was called stop down. However, as Michael McMahon made clear on behalf of the committee, the new sanctions regime is excessive and counterproductive.
It has become apparent that no one is off limits for the coalition’s implementation of the welfare system. The Inclusion Scotland briefing highlighted how hard the most vulnerable have been hit. In Scotland, 132,000 sanctions have been applied, as Linda Fabiani said, and 3,000 at a high level—for more than 13 weeks. Can anyone imagine doing without benefits for 13 weeks? Members should just think of it. How would they cope? Without food banks, we would be nowhere.
As Anne McTaggart and others said and even Alex Johnstone admitted, many people do not know that they are being sanctioned and, on appeal, find that they have been the victims of maladministration. The so-called hardship funds are normally payable only after 15 days. Joan McAlpine’s good illustration demonstrated what that meant to people.
SAMH has usefully provided us with a lot of information. I do not have time to go through the statistics but, as a shadow health minister and a former doctor, I am particularly concerned about the effects of welfare reform on those with mental ill health.
The implementation of the rather crude system of welfare that we have introduced is particularly damaging to those with mental ill health. Mental ill health can be continuous but it is often highly variable, and the implementation of the system has often killed the aspirations of many people with mental ill health to get back into work. My experience was that people in that situation wanted to work, but I often had to counsel them and tell them to go cannie. They had just been through a hard time—they had been through a depressive illness, they had bipolar disorder or their schizophrenia was just under control—and I told them to go into voluntary work first, find out how they coped and move forward gradually. However, 98 per cent of respondents to the SAMH survey said that their mental health had suffered as a result of the system that was being employed, with increases in stress and anxiety.
There are many other statistics that I do not have time to give, but Kevin Stewart graphically illustrated the effect that even the fear of sanctions has on individuals.
The bedroom tax is an illustration of what is wrong with our system. I remember having good ideas as a minister and, when I was out of power and working as a consultant psychiatrist, watching them being implemented on the job that I was trying to do in a way that added hugely to the bureaucracy and administration of my work. I was appalled that, as a minister, I could have envisaged that but I had not; it was not my intention. That is often what happens with measures such as the bedroom tax.
An underoccupancy charge might be valid where there are people who want homes, but not in the way that the measure has been applied, with people who have disabilities not having room to store their equipment or, for example, someone not being able to sleep separately from their disabled wife who has disturbed nights. Those are cruel things to happen.
Food banks are perhaps the epitome of the system, as many speakers said. Their usage is massive. The history, which Siobhan McMahon gave us, shows that we have always had food banks, but only 40,000 people in the UK used them in 2010 and the figure is nearly 1 million today. That must irrefutably be a consequence of the welfare reforms because, as Alex Johnstone said, employment has increased.
I am running out of time and I do not have time to deal with the Smith commission. Regardless of the fact that they will never satisfy our colleagues in the SNP, the additional powers that are coming to us give us an opportunity and the Scottish people will not forgive us if we do not use them effectively. As many members said, the work must start now to create the additional model of Scottish welfare that achieves the fairer society that we all want. Griping about what we do not have will not be sufficient. It might have certain political advantage, but the Scottish people will not forgive it. The work starts now.
16:19
During the debate, it has been clear that members have a real understanding of how the welfare reforms are affecting people in all our communities. The message that we should be sending out to people is that we know what impact the process is having on them.
There has been a lot of talk about the sanctions regime, which is punitive. Regardless of what has been said, it is not helping people back into work; the evidence does not show that it is. The illustration that Kevin Stewart gave highlighted the fact that the fear of sanctions is making it more difficult for people to get into work, because it is affecting their mental health, as Richard Simpson mentioned. People are not deliberately not complying with what the jobcentre is asking them to do. Many people do not understand what they are being asked to do and are not being supported in doing it. We must say so.
For me, the biggest regret as far as sanctions are concerned is that the Parliament still has no powers over them. We will not get any powers that will allow us to take action on sanctions and make things easier for our people. I would have liked full welfare powers to have been devolved to Scotland. That would have enabled us to adopt a much more proportionate approach to any so-called offence that a benefit claimant was alleged to have committed.
Food banks have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. It is clear that there is a link between the use of food banks and benefit reforms, benefit delays and low income. We will not be able to have any control over that, because we will not get the power to control the minimum wage or powers to grow our own economy. It is sad that that is not to happen. There was an opportunity for us to get such powers.
It is not just the Scottish Government that says that. Unison says it, too. Unison is extremely disappointed that, although the proposals include some positive elements, which I accept,
“the package as a whole falls short of our aspirations ... with particular regard to job creation, employment regulation, equalities and minimum wage.”
Those are all areas in which having the power to act would help to make the fairer society that we want. There is nothing in the new powers that will allow Scotland to create a new welfare state. There are certainly powers that we will use to benefit the people of Scotland, but they will not allow us to create a new welfare state, which is what most—75 per cent—of civic Scotland wanted.
A number of areas were mentioned in which it was claimed that the Scottish Government is not taking action. We are taking action. With the powers that we have, we are taking direct action to do what we can to support people and organisations throughout Scotland in what are very difficult times.
The Scottish welfare fund shows what we can achieve when we deliver welfare here in Scotland, and the most recent official statistics show that, between April 2013 and June 2014, more than 100,000 households in Scotland received at least one award. Those awards come to a total of around £38 million. By working alongside local authorities, we have been responsive to the needs of vulnerable people.
I want to pick up on a couple of points that Ken Macintosh made. He talked about people being paid in goods as opposed to cash. I repeat what I said during Tuesday’s debate: the bulk of the crisis grants that are paid out—which are paid out when people have no money for food, fuel or whatever—are paid out in cash. It is community care grants, when bigger items of expenditure are involved, that in many cases are paid in goods and, in some cases, vouchers. It was clear from the evidence that was given to the Welfare Reform Committee that many people and organisations appreciate receiving goods, and that they have a say in what goods are provided. Like other members, I agree that it would not be appropriate just to provide any goods, but when the goods are what people require and are chosen in discussion with the individual, in many cases people appreciate receiving goods.
We will also listen to what stakeholders say about the impact of the DWP sanctions.
I recognise that this is not an easy point. I think that I made the point on Tuesday as well as today that there can be an argument, but does the minister recognise that none of us gets paid in goods or in furniture and that, by paying people in that way, we are definitely making a choice on behalf of welfare recipients? I made the point that if people are denuded of choice, their resilience is not being built. Does she accept that argument?
No, I do not accept that we are not building resilience in many of the people who get goods. They get an opportunity. They are very vulnerable people. There have been stories of people going with a support worker or an organisation to choose their own goods and pick a colour scheme. Goods are delivered to their home and they have windows measured for curtains. A full service is provided. For very vulnerable people, just taking part in that exercise, which they might never have done before, helps.
The goods allow many local authorities to stretch the fund further. That must be looked at, as well.
The Scottish welfare fund has flexibility in local authority areas. I am not saying that it is perfect yet. We can work on that, but that flexibility should remain.
We listened to the concerns about sanctions and changed the guidance on the Scottish welfare fund to make it clear that an application by someone who has been sanctioned by the DWP should be considered the same as any other application.
We are doing what we can to ensure that a vital safety net remains in place, but we recognise that no single organisation or area of Government can own Scotland’s overall response to the UK Government’s welfare reform programme. That is why we are working closely with all our partners to ensure that we do the best with our existing resources to help those who are affected. We also know that the programme puts significant pressure on local government.
Finally, I want to say a bit about the Smith commission. I make it absolutely clear in response to what Richard Simpson said that the Scottish Government will work with our stakeholders and the people of Scotland to make the very best use of any powers that come to the Parliament. I accept that they are not the powers that we wanted but, whatever powers come to the Parliament, the Government will work closely with civic Scotland and our stakeholders and across the chamber to ensure that the people of Scotland get the best benefit from them.
I call Clare Adamson to wind up the debate on behalf of the committee.
16:27
I welcome the opportunity to contribute to my first committee debate in my role as deputy convener of the Welfare Reform Committee. I thank the previous members of the committee for their hard work in producing both of the reports that we are discussing.
I may be new to the post, but I am certainly not new to the concerns and issues around welfare reform. We all hear similar stories in our constituencies about the hardships that people face. There cannot be an MSP or councillor in Scotland who does not understand the level of the problems, because our surgeries are full of people who are seeking help and our mailboxes are full of letters from them.
In the debate earlier this week, I referenced the Citizens Advice Scotland briefing for this week’s debates on welfare. It talked about the need for food banks and the level of poverty being destitution that goes beyond poverty.
While I have been getting up to speed with the committee’s work, some things have really struck me in the evidence. In his opening speech, our convener Michael McMahon mentioned the severity of the new sanctions regime. I want to raise a point about proportionality. As the committee heard in oral evidence from Dr David Webster of the University of Glasgow, the loss of income that sanctions can lead to is now twice the maximum that can be imposed by the fines in our courts. He said:
“the JSA scale of fines runs higher than that which is available to the mainstream courts, yet claimants have none of the protections that an accused in the mainstream courts would have. I am referring to the presumption of innocence, the entitlement to legal representation and the fact that—as I mentioned in my submission—in a mainstream court, before someone is sentenced, the sheriff will call for reports so that the sentence is appropriate.”—[Official Report, Welfare Reform Committee, 1 April 2014; c 1404.]
We have also heard about the DWP shifting the social responsibility and the costs of dealing with the effects of welfare reform, particularly the costs of dealing with sanctioned claimants.
One area where the cost has clearly been put on to the third sector is food banks. The DWP argues that there is no causal link between the increase in food bank use and welfare reforms, but the committee heard different in oral evidence. Dr Filip Sosenko of Heriot-Watt University told the committee that the “strongest evidence” for a link between welfare reform and the demand for food aid was the growth of food aid at a faster rate post April 2013. As we know, April 2013 was when significant changes were made to the welfare system, including the introduction of the so-called bedroom tax, the uprating of benefits by 1 per cent rather than in line with inflation, the assessment of people on disability living allowance and the benefit cap. Those were four significant changes to the welfare system.
To bring the issue down to local level, Community Food Moray said in its written submission that
“The impact of the welfare reform was evident almost overnight.”
It pointed to an increase in referrals post April 2013 from 10 per month to an average of 15 per week.
I will address some of the issues that my colleagues have raised during the debate. In the minister’s opening speech, she framed the Government’s approach to welfare reform within three main priorities: making a prosperous Scotland, tackling inequality and protecting and reforming our public services. The minister ably brought to light some of the work that the Scottish Government is already doing with the powers that we have. She had hoped that the Smith commission would give a significant opportunity to move away from mitigation of the welfare reforms to a system that suits Scotland’s needs. However, in the minister’s assessment, the commission is a missed opportunity.
Ken Macintosh almost broke into consensus. He ably highlighted the work of the charity the Pavement and its word on the streets project. He told us about the plight of Caroline, who had 15 months under sanctions—an apt example of some of the problems that people are experiencing. Mr Macintosh also referenced the committee’s visit to the Parkhead citizens advice bureau, which I am sure was extremely informative and helped the committee in its work.
We heard from two esteemed members of the Smith commission: Annabel Goldie and Linda Fabiani. Ms Goldie looked to future actions and how to influence change and provide mitigation. I share Dr Simpson’s concern about paragraphs 55 and 56 of the Smith commission report, which are on top-up benefits. The concern is whether such benefits may be offset in the future. Ms Fabiani also mentioned that as a concern.
Kevin Stewart highlighted the number of disabled people who have been affected by the reform. He referred to the moving evidence to the committee from John Lindsay and James Nisbet, who ably told us of their experience as people suffering from mental ill health going through the system and having to deal with what they said were punitive measures and often insulting questions.
Cara Hilton thanked the volunteers who work in the food bank sector. She mentioned that we should all regret the need for food banks, and spoke of the great work of volunteers across Scotland. There is a food bank drive in my Central Scotland region on Saturday morning, which I hope to take part in and which I hope is a success. The issue was also highlighted by Joan McAlpine in relation to South Scotland.
Christina McKelvie reminded us of the disproportionate effect that welfare reform has had on women’s incomes, with an estimated £22 billion of the £26 billion of cuts so far being shouldered by women, many of whom are also disabled. Ms McKelvie pointed to the inequality of that and said that it leads to further discrimination against women in our society.
Siobhan McMahon gave us an informed history of the establishment and the growth of food banks in the world and, as Michael McMahon did in his opening speech, Siobhan McMahon said that the three-year period up to which people can be sanctioned is a completely disproportionate and punitive length of time. She also reminded Parliament that use of food banks and third sector organisations to address issues of need that should lie within the responsibilities of the DWP should not be normalised or accepted as the way forward for our society, because those societal burdens should lie with the DWP.
Ms Fabiani talked about the growth in the number of food banks and highlighted the work of a constituent of hers in East Kilbride, Denis Curran, who has worked in food banks for many years. She said that his experience made it impossible to understand how anyone could deny that the austerity policies of Westminster and welfare reforms are linked to the current rise in the number of food banks and their use.
Anne McTaggart spoke passionately about the wider aspects of fuel poverty and the complications of poverty, and Joan McAlpine highlighted the case of Annemarie, who was left in debt for years because of problems arising from the large number of sanctions that had been applied to her.
I come to Alex Johnstone’s summing-up speech. I was interested in the use of language throughout the debate. When we hear members using words such as “punitive” and “inhumane”, it is difficult not to share some of their concerns about how inhumane the sanctions reform is. However, I hope that the consensus and willingness to move forward that Mr Johnstone talked about will work across the chamber. I hope that, in my time on the committee, I will be able to work with all its members to try to solve some of these very difficult problems.
You can wind up, Ms Adamson.
Thank you, Presiding Officer. As I said, this has been my first opportunity to speak on behalf of the committee, and I hope that I have reflected the debate this afternoon. I look forward to continuing that work with the committee.
That concludes the Welfare Reform Committee debate on welfare reform and the Smith commission.
I invite the Minister for Parliamentary Business to move a motion without notice to bring forward decision time to now.
Motion moved,
That, under Rule 11.2.4 of Standing Orders, Decision Time on Thursday 18 December 2014 shall begin at 16.37 pm.—[Joe FitzPatrick.]
Motion agreed to.
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