Social Justice and Social Security Committee [Draft]

Meeting date: Thursday, March 21, 2024

Official Report 732KB pdf

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Extra Costs of Disability

Welcome back. Our next agenda item is a presentation on the additional costs of disability in Scotland. The committee commissioned a piece of research on the topic in March last year to inform its scrutiny work, and, following a call for bids, the research was awarded to a joint bid from the University of Strathclyde and the Poverty Alliance.

I welcome to the meeting two of the authors, Christy McFadyen, knowledge exchange associate, economics, Fraser of Allander Institute, University of Strathclyde; and Dr Laura Robertson, senior research officer, the Poverty Alliance. Thank you both for joining us today.

I believe that, first of all, you are going to take us through a presentation of your work and findings.

Thank you very much for having us. I will start and then pass over to Laura Robertson to talk about some of our work.

For context, I should say that I have been working more on the quantitative side of the research and Laura Robertson has been working more on the qualitative side. If you could direct your questions accordingly, it will probably make more sense for us. However, we will try to answer as well as we can on both sides of the work.

The additional costs faced by disabled people are recognised as being detrimental to quality of life. For any given income, a disabled person is not able to realise the same standard of living as a non-disabled person. Additional costs are many and varied, and they depend on individual circumstances, including type of disability, household composition and rurality. Those additional costs are concerning not only from the point of view of fairness, but because the impact of poorer living standards is also potentially significant and can lead to poorer wellbeing and health outcomes over the short and long term.

In recognition of those higher additional costs for disabled people, a system of disability benefits has long been established as part of the UK social security system, and it is now part of the devolved benefits system in Scotland. The Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 states that Scotland’s social security system will be designed

“on the basis of evidence”.

However, to our knowledge, there is no Scotland-specific baseline for the scale of additional costs that are faced by disabled people.

This report takes a step towards a better understanding of the additional costs of disability in Scotland. We have looked at the limited data that is available to analyse the scale of additional spending that disabled people in Scotland face. To contextualise and supplement our findings from the national survey data, we have also worked with six disabled Scottish residents, who, through weekly diaries and interviews over a five-week period, have provided us with information about their extra costs and their experiences of accessing support.

On definitions, we refer in the research to the core definition of disability in the Equality Act 2010, which states that a person is disabled if they have a “physical or mental impairment” that has a “substantial and long-term” negative impact on their ability to do normal activities. In that context, “long-term” refers to a condition that lasts or is expected to last 12 months or more, and “substantial” refers to the condition having a non-trivial impact on daily activities. A bit later, we will talk about severity of disability. Normally, in national surveys, people, in referring to their disability, can say that they are limited in their daily activities either a little or a lot. Therefore, when we talk about severity and a more severe disability, we are referring to the category of “a lot”.

I will give you a preview of our findings before we take you through them properly. They show that the best available data is far from perfect and cannot tell us enough at this stage. We found some evidence of additional spending on food, energy and health, and less spending by disabled households on transport. We cannot say whether the additional costs in the spending data that we used are statistically significant, because of the small sample sizes, but they are persistent over time, which gives us some trust that they are true effects. Importantly, data on spending also does not capture what needs are not being met due to a lack of income or what support is being received that might already compensate for additional costs.

We will start by going through what the data can tell us, starting with findings across all disabled households versus non-disabled households in Scotland, and Laura Robertson will take us through some of the qualitative findings. We will then go into some of the breakdowns that we have done, including for urban versus rural households, and more statistics on severe disabilities and extra spending in that respect.

I will just provide a bit of an introduction to the data that we use in the report. It comes from the living costs and food survey, which contains expenditure data for individuals and households across the whole of the UK. It is the best expenditure data that we have available for our purposes, as it is designed to be representative of the UK population, and it indicates whether each household member has a disability and allows us to look specifically at Scotland. We have supplemented that with findings from the weekly diaries that I mentioned—that is, from six disabled people in Scotland over a five-week period between January and February 2024.

To provide some context, I would point out that the diaries are not designed to represent all disabled individuals—we would never claim that with only six diaries. Instead, they provide some context for the lived experience of additional costs related to disability, including the potential drivers of those costs and other available support and how they interact with people’s lives. We also wanted to look at the impact of the continued higher costs of living in 2024, which the data that we have cannot provide, given that the latest data that we have available is from 2021-22.

If you have copies of our report available, you will see that table 1 and figure 1 show the additional spending by disabled households in Scotland compared with spending by non-disabled households across four essential categories: food, energy, transport and health. I will provide a bit of a primer in how to read those figures, because it might not be intuitive.

A positive number in a box means that disabled households are spending more on that category. For example, a non-disabled household might have spent £20 per week on health. If a disabled household had spent £21 per week—that is, £1 more—the box would show a positive number 1 to represent the difference in spending.

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We then looked at mean total spending across those categories and subtracted the numbers for non-disabled households from those for disabled households to find the difference. If the result was a positive number, that meant that disabled households were spending more; if negative, it meant that non-disabled households were spending more. Our main finding was that there was slightly extra spending by disabled households on food, energy and health, and less spending on the transport category.

Actual spending is a lot more variable than the means show, due to different household incomes, which is why we split the sample into income groups. Instead of comparing, say, a disabled household on a really low income with a non-disabled one on a really high income—which we would not want to do, because their spending is probably wildly different anyway—we made our goal to compare like with like. We therefore split our sample of households into five equally sized categories, with income group 1 the 20 per cent lowest incomes and income group 5 the 20 per cent highest incomes. We always compare disabled and non-disabled households that have similar levels of income, to understand where the differences are.

The chart in figure 1 shows the difference in mean expenditure across all the income groups, and you will see the variety across them. Table 1 shows the mean difference in expenditure. For example, the figure for food is 0; for energy, 1; for transport, -17; and for health, 2. We have therefore seen slight additional spending across food, energy and health and less spending on transport.

One point to note is that the mean of the food expenditure is 0, which means that we are not seeing additional spending once we average everything out across the five income groups. However, when we looked at previous years, we saw additional spending on food, so inflation has potentially had an effect there. All low-income households will have spent more of their income on food in 2021-22. If they have a limited amount of money to spend on food each week, the limit could be reached faster in disabled households than in non-disabled ones, due to the additional costs associated with disability. Laura Henderson will touch on this much more, but, when we looked at the data, one of our first realisations was that we were not seeing any unmet need in it. We were seeing only what people were able to spend money on, not what they were unable to.

Our data shows that disabled households spend less than non-disabled households on transport, and we believe that that effect is down to a combination of factors. First, disabled people take fewer trips on average than non-disabled people. We have evidence of that from a Department for Transport study carried out across the UK in 2017. Secondly, disabled people are more likely to have access to free transport via a free bus pass or similar. I reiterate that we have covered only spending data; we are not seeing use of services in our figures, but we will touch on that a bit later. Social support might cover expenditure that we would otherwise see in our figures if such support were not available.

Laura Robertson will now talk about one of the case studies from our diaries.

I will give the committee a bit of context about the diaries. As Chirsty McFadyen mentioned, the diaries looked specifically at needs that were not being met for a group of six disabled people who took part in that section of our research. Of the six participants, one was in employment, one was a student, four were receiving universal credit or employment support allowance alongside personal independence payment, and one was receiving adult disability payment.

I will start with a summary of the diary participants’ experiences. Four of the six participants said that they were going without basic essentials every week of the five-week diary exercise, and five of the six participants said that they were finding it quite challenging or very difficult to manage on their incomes every week.

I will touch on a case study involving a man with a physical disability who uses a wheelchair and is in receipt of personal independence payment with high mobility and middle care. He also receives employment and support allowance. In his diaries, he mainly reported finding it very difficult to manage on his income. He had a range of additional costs for his disability such as taxis and energy, and some of the others are outlined in the briefing; I should say that the cost of energy was cited by all six participants as one of the highest costs. He also had to pay for specific treatments and hire people to help with household cleaning and other household tasks.

I will give an example of what he was sharing in his diary every week. He experienced a very cold time in January and February, and, because of the bad weather, he had to use his storage heaters frequently. He recorded in his diary that, in one week, the cost of using his storage heaters came to £100. He shared that, because of the high cost of food and heating that particular week, he had to borrow money from his family, as his income through employment and support allowance, alongside what he got through PIP, was not sufficient.

In most of his diary entries, the man reported not being able to cover the costs of basic essentials such as food and energy every week; indeed, one quote from his diary was that he often had to make difficult choices between heating and eating. Another effect of such high costs was the need to cut back on social activities outside his home, so there were obviously effects in terms of isolation and loneliness.

I will talk a bit more about how we have broken down the data. First, on additional spending for those with more severe disabilities, we see similar results in the living costs and food survey data when we compare people with a severe disability to all other households, including people with less severe disabilities. The only obvious difference in the data for people with more severe disabilities is that they have less additional health spending. We think that that could be due to people with more severe disabilities being more likely to draw on national health service care for their condition instead of relying on over-the-counter options, but we cannot state the exact reason from the data alone.

We had to omit income group 5 from table 2 and figure 2, because that high-income group had a sample size of less than 10 observations for severely disabled people—highlighting, I would suggest, the limitations of the data. When we survey around 5,000 households across the UK, around 20 per cent of them are Scottish. We then cut the data by disability and severity, which gets us down to really low numbers of households. Again, it shows the limitations of the current data: it is harder to collect evidence when we want to do so, and it is harder for the data to be reliable when we have smaller sample sizes.

We also looked at differences between urban and rural areas. Figure 3 shows that urban households seem to be spending more than rural households on food, energy and transport. That might seem surprising at first glance, as we know that people living in rural areas often face additional costs compared with those living in urban areas. As I have said, sample sizes become even smaller when we split disabled households into urban and rural areas, which means that we are even less sure that we can trust those figures in comparison with the already volatile Scottish averages. It is possible that what we are seeing are the extra costs of living in a rural area overshadowing the additional costs related to having a disability. That is similar to what I said before: it might just be that, if people have a limit on the amount that they can spend on essential categories, disabled households are hitting that limit faster and are simply not able to spend more than that amount, so we are not seeing that evidence in the spending data.

However, we see evidence in figure 3 that disabled households in rural areas are spending more on the health category. We are not sure why that would be or why that is different from the food, energy and transport results. A further interesting difference is the large difference in spending on transport between urban and rural areas for disabled households in comparison with non-disabled households. We are not sure whether that is a true effect or a result of poor data, as I have mentioned previously. If it is a true effect, one factor that could contribute to that is the existence of relatively fewer public transport options in rural areas, which could act as a barrier if private transport is not an option for households.

We have gone over what the survey data can tell us. As I have said, the findings from the LCFS are variable, and small sample sizes become an issue when we analyse urban and rural areas and those with more severe disabilities. There are not extra costs in every disabled household in Scotland; that creates overlap, which means that we cannot say whether these results are statistically significant. However, they are, as I have said, persistent over time, which makes us more confident in that regard. I have also included UK-wide results for comparison in the appendices, if the committee is interested in looking at them. They show similar trends.

It is important to point out that we have included the diaries in our research partly because data on spending cannot quantify financial difficulty. Laura Robertson will talk a bit more about the findings from them.

I will talk the committee through two of the case studies from participants. I will touch on some of the consequences for their day-to-day lives while they struggle on their incomes with the particular costs that they identified they were struggling to meet.

Across the sample, there were examples of participants who had to get financial support from family or friends or who were considering getting a loan because they were struggling. Energy-related debt was also mentioned by two of the participants.

We included a prompt for any additional forms of support that the participants might have accessed. We wanted to find out about things aside from benefits, such as social care support. One of the participants was receiving self-directed support for 10 hours a week, but the rest of the participants were not, although two of them were using their disability benefits to pay for social care.

One participant had accessed the Scottish welfare fund crisis grant one week, and another who was struggling with her energy costs had received the warm homes discount. Apart from that, no other forms of additional financial support were mentioned by any of the participants over the five weeks.

The diaries reveal, on a weekly basis, how much the participants are having to plan and make adjustments to lower their spending. High costs of living in respect of energy and food were mentioned frequently. One participant said:

“I combined all my journeys outside of the home into one combined journey, to save petrol costs, then did all my errands ... in one day, which resulted in experiencing fatigue and a day mostly in bed.”

Several of the diary participants reflected that they were so used to having extra costs of living relating to their disability or their health conditions that, over time, they had succumbed to almost normalising those costs, which would become part of their routine and part of their weekly budget. When we did the interviews at the start of the project, quite a few of the participants said that it had become just normal to them that they had those costs that they had to manage every week.

I will read out a bit from Jenny’s case study, which illustrates the financial difficulty that she was experiencing and how that was impacting on her mental and physical health. Jenny has several health conditions and is in receipt of a personal independence payment. Her health conditions mean that she needs to buy more expensive food and that she is restricted and must stay inside more. In the five weeks of taking part in the diary, she frequently had to buy shopping on her credit card because she did not have enough money left after putting aside money for energy bills.

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In her week 3 diary, she gave the specific example that she and her partner had had to cut showers to every few days to preserve electricity and to have enough money to put the heating on. She said:

“This will obviously cost me more in the long run, but I live from week to week hoping the next one will be better.”

She noted the weekly effects on her mental health, as well as the negative effects on her relationship with her partner and her family. She said that the stress exacerbated her symptoms, writing:

“It is stressful and wearing and I often find myself on the edge of depression struggling to stay out of it.”

The next case study from another participant illustrates the experience of accessing social care support. The participant had a physical disability at the highest rate for care and mobility and was using a big proportion of his income for social care assistance. He specifically said that he uses his PIP to hire personal assistants and that he also regularly has to use it for travel to and from work, as it can take months for him to receive his transport expenses from his employer.

He recorded in all his diary entries that he had gone without basic essentials. He wrote in one diary:

“It isn’t unusual to use this benefit (PIP) in half the time it should cover.”

He also shared that distinguishing his additional costs was difficult, as he feels that he has normalised those costs over time. Therefore, he has adapted and has to find his own solutions due to a lack of available social care support in his local area and the lack of wider recognition of the social model of disability.

Another issue that he raised when we did the interviews at the start of the project was about housing not being accessible for his needs, which means that he cannot access and manage the energy in his house by himself. He shared that, as a consequence, he often has to sit in his flat wearing a hat, thermals and layers of clothes with an electric fire in winter.

A big issue for him was the lack of personal assistants available in his local authority, which means that he often feels that he has to call on friends and family for support, which he said that he does not want to do. He is therefore often not able to access the support that he needs.

He shared the following impacts in his diary entry. One week, his shopping and house cleaning were shelved—he was not able to get support that week—so that he could have support to go to a social event instead. In week 5, he said:

“I’d love to have greater personal assistant support and use it when I needed it rather than generally trying to fit in with the paid worker”

and their availability. He went on:

“I’d love to have access to a resource that is user led such as the service run by Glasgow Centre for Independent Living.”

I will pass back to Chirsty McFadyen for some conclusions.

I will conclude by saying that data on spending from the living costs and food survey shows that disabled households in Scotland spend slightly more in essential categories such as health and energy but less on transport. However, we have seen from the diaries that disabled households could be rationing essential spending due to financial difficulty.

The LCFS data is far from perfect. Small sample sizes are a problem at the Scotland level, particularly when we start to look at severe disability in urban versus rural households. We have put some more information on sample sizes in the appendices.

Importantly, the spending data does not capture what households need but cannot afford. The diary entries show that the six participants’ incomes are not providing consistent adequate levels of income for additional costs associated with having a disability or health condition.

Although the diaries do not represent all disabled households in Scotland, other studies have shown similar findings on a wider scale. For example, in 2023, Scope looked at the difference in material deprivation levels between disabled and non-disabled households and found that disabled people’s incomes, including disability benefits, provided a lower standard of living when compared to those of non-disabled households on the same income across the UK.

The impacts of the cost of living crisis and deepening levels of poverty among disabled people have been evidenced in various pieces of qualitative and quantitative research. In particular, people with disabilities in the UK have been affected by rising energy and food prices and are more vulnerable to increases in those essential costs, as they make up a higher proportion of their budgets than they do for non-disabled people. Recent qualitative research commissioned by the Trussell Trust found near consensus that disability payment levels were too low to cover the extra costs associated with physical and mental health conditions.

For some of the participants in the diary exercise, the lack of support from the social care system, including personal assistance, was a recurring challenge. Therefore, there are wider implications for social care support that meets the needs of people with a disability or health condition in Scotland. Getting the right social care support in place could reduce the additional costs that disabled people face. Some of the interviews also highlight the importance of having the right housing that better meets people’s needs, which is also a crucial issue.

Going forward, policy makers will need to think carefully about how to measure the additional costs of disability and the adequacy of benefits and other public services, to ensure an evidence-driven approach. We do not believe that there is an existing source of quantitative data that can provide robust enough evidence on the additional costs of disability in Scotland. Even if that was the case, the personal nature of disabilities means that costs are likely to differ markedly between different people. An effective, evidence-based policy to meet additional costs of disability will need to recognise that point rather than assume a one-size-fits-all approach.

We are happy to take questions.

I apologise, because I introduced you as Christy when your name is actually Chirsty. My humble apologies to you, Chirsty.

The research that you have given us is really useful for providing insights into the hidden and extra costs of disabilities. Do you, as researchers, have any suggestions on the best way to approach further research on that?

One of the main things that I spoke about is the point that, if we want an evidence-driven policy approach, we need more evidence. Some surveys in Scotland, such as the labour force survey and the annual population survey, have a Scottish boost that is paid for by the Scottish Government, which means that we have better sample sizes and can have better data. That is one option for improving sample sizes if we want to have more robust evidence on the matter.

However, as we said, the issue also has much to do with whether the appropriate social support is in place. In the diaries, we saw many times that a lack of social support was causing extra costs for people with disabilities. Looking more into whether social support and social care are adequate and where barriers are to accessing that support could be useful in thinking about what additional costs of disability we can get rid of through better policies in other areas.

Dr Robertson, would you like to comment on that?

We already referenced other qualitative research from the Glasgow Disability Alliance. Inclusion Scotland also published research last year on the impacts of increased costs of living and deepening poverty for disabled people.

I would always recommend more research on lived experiences. Ours is a short-term, small-scale project. We were not looking to have a very diverse sample, so we have not spoken to families who have a disabled child or adult, for example. Therefore, research could be done on those different experiences and how households are managing.

Also, given the on-going impacts of the cost of living crisis, more longitudinal research that followed people with a disability or a condition over time would show how people are managing at different points in the year. We were limited because we looked at a five-week period and this research was done in January, when energy costs are higher. That longitudinal research would also be a really important evidence base.

That is helpful. I will open questions up to committee members.

Thanks for your time this morning. In your conclusion, you have recommended that careful consideration be given to

“how to measure additional costs of disability and the adequacy of benefits”.

Are you aware of countries across the globe that are doing it right and that we could learn from? If you do not have notes on that today, perhaps you could come back to the committee. It would be interesting to see how other countries are doing.

Yes, definitely. We have done some work on learning disabilities at the Fraser of Allander Institute, and some of the work that we have done on data has been quite useful learning from other countries. For example, New Zealand carries out its census over similar periods to us but, when it finds that people have a type of disability that it is interested in learning more about, it will do a booster survey to bring more information in on that. We can probably learn from that more generally. However, I do not know of any other countries that are doing it right. It is one of those complicated issues that everyone is trying to get better at. We are definitely keen to look at that more and maybe feed back to you later.

That would be great. Thank you.

It is helpful to read this report in the light of the other report that the Fraser of Allander Institute did recently on disability and employment. The reports go quite well together, and I will raise questions about that. I would like to ask a number of questions, but, given the time, I will ask one long question.

The deputy convener will always tell me that we have political choices to make about how we spend our money, and he is absolutely right. However, may I put that to you and ask whether, if you had another £20 million to spend, you would create a universal benefit for disabled people? Would you increase the disability payment, or would you target that money in some way?

I think that Dr Robertson said that there is not one need—disabled people have different needs—so, if we had that money, how would we target it? Would you create a universal benefit or is there a more nuanced way to do that?

That comes back to the commitment to evidence-based policy making. We have done a short-term study, but more work could be done to understand the issue better. The first thing that I would do with the money would be to gather the evidence so that we had a good understanding of exactly what the additional costs are and whether needs are not being met and then base policy and benefits on that. On the evidence that we have gathered, I could not tell you how to spend the money. I know that that makes it even harder for you guys to decide where to put things.

Therefore, for me, it is definitely about gathering more evidence first and trying to understand the issues so that we are not spending money in a way that is not evidence led and ending up having to go back and do things again.

From the Poverty Alliance’s perspective, outside this research that we have been doing, we would call for an increase in incomes for people with a disability who are living in poverty in Scotland.

In the evidence session before ours, one of the witnesses said that just over half of the people who live in relative poverty live in a household with somebody with a disability, so there is clear evidence that people with disabilities are more likely to be living in poverty. Therefore, there are decisions that could and should be made to increase incomes for people who have a disability. By what means that would be done, I am not sure, but it is clear that their income is not adequate at the moment.

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I suppose that that is the issue that I am trying to work out, Dr Robertson. Personally, I probably fall into income group 5, but if you increase adult disability payment, I will benefit as much as somebody in income group 1. I do not have the answer, but I am trying to work out how we increase the income of groups 1, 2 and 3, maybe, but not necessarily of groups 4 and 5, because those people, although they will have extra costs, can probably meet those costs. I am looking for a way to identify those individuals. Maybe the data is not yet available, and we need to get that, but I am concerned that, if we universally increase incomes, although everyone benefits, it will not benefit enough those who need it more—if that makes sense.

Yes. The example that was discussed in the previous evidence session was the Scottish child payment and the learning from that. That is a passported benefit for families who receive universal credit and other eligible benefits. That has been successful in pulling a lot of families out of poverty, so that has been a very successful policy in Scotland and there is useful learning in that about identifying families who are already struggling.

I would caution that there are a lot of people in Scotland who are in in-work poverty and low-paid work who might not be in receipt of one of those eligible benefits, and they will have those support needs as well. Therefore, we need to think about that and ensure that certain households—particularly those in low-paid work—are not missing out.

I was struck by figure 1 on page 4 of our briefing, which showed that transport costs, in particular, were quite starkly different, which follows on from Jeremy Balfour’s point. It was very interesting that spending on transport costs in the highest income group—if I am reading it correctly; I am looking at the blue line—has fallen the most dramatically. One of your themes seems to be that disability affects a lot of different people in a lot of different ways. For example, some disabled people can still drive and some disabled people cannot. Presumably, that is a major factor because, if you have to give up your car, your costs are going to drop dramatically.

However, you also make the point that spending does not equal need. I am guessing that some disabled people who would be able to drive just cannot possibly afford a car. What is the data on transport telling me? Is it telling me that there is a great need that is not being met, or is it telling me that the concession card system is so good that people do not have a need that results in a cost?

I think that it is a combination of things. The first thing that stands out to me is that we have UK-level evidence that disabled people travel less than non-disabled people. The reasons for that are potentially something to look at. Why are disabled people travelling less? Is it because they do not have access? Is it a lack of affordability? We do not know, but that could definitely be looked into more.

Then, yes, as I said before with regard to concessionary bus passes, in this data we do not know who has one of those passes. Therefore, we cannot tell whether people are travelling but are just not spending money on that. However, from the larger numbers in this research, it seems that the prevailing thing that is happening is that people are just travelling less when they are disabled. Therefore, that is something to look at with regard to disabled people having access to society and being able to travel where and when they want to. We also see that with regard to the extra costs for energy. We know that disabled people are spending more time at home and having to heat their home, which means that their energy costs can be higher. It is all tied in, but it is definitely something that could be looked at more.

So, the message is that we need a much more in-depth and bigger survey. I think that we are all agreed on that. Who should do that? Is it best for the Government to do that, or should it be a third sector organisation?

The Fraser of Allander Institute. [Laughter.]

It is difficult to say. What I always come back to is that, as long as something is well resourced, that is what is important. If a survey is well designed and well resourced, we will get the evidence that we need. If the Government wanted to do it by working in partnership with organisations that have specific in-depth knowledge about disability, poverty and incomes and so on, that could be really useful, but I guess it would be up to you.

You said that there is a split between whether people’s activities are affected a lot or a little. Is that too basic? Do we need to go into a lot more detail on that?

Based on the data that we have, we should not be splitting things any further, because it is already very difficult to understand. Jeremy Balfour mentioned some of the other work that we have been doing on the disability employment gap, for example. We have seen that employment gaps among people with different types of disability are closing faster or slower. In the long term, and in an ideal world, we need more evidence on specific types of disability and who has additional costs based on their needs. However, cutting the current data into smaller chunks would mean looking at one or two people in a sample, which is obviously not useful for us.

It goes back to the point that, if we had more resource to collect more information, we would definitely want to split it by something more. We use that definition because it is the national definition that is used for disability, but it would definitely be good to look at types of disability.

Did you want to come in, Dr Robertson? Most of my questions were aimed at Ms McFadyen.

No. Chirsty is the expert on the questions that you asked.

Chirsty, I believe that Jeremy Balfour was offering up your services again for further research. I now invite Bob Doris to come in.

Thank you, convener, and thank you, Mr Balfour, for the namecheck. In the earlier session, I suggested an imaginary extra £10 million. It has doubled in the space of half an hour, and Mr Balfour is playing with an extra £20 million that does not exist.

I want to ask a wee bit about what is not in the survey. I get that there are data issues and massive restrictions on what you were able to collect and analyse. The Scottish child payment has been mentioned, and I had a wee look at it. The interim review of the Scottish child payment from July 2022 indicates that 16 per cent of people in receipt of or applying for—I am not sure which—the Scottish child payment at that point had a disabled person in the household. It might therefore be that we already have a benefit that supports those who live with disabilities, when there is a child in the household and the household is on benefits. In fact, that report suggested that, because 8 per cent did not want to say whether there was a physical or mental issue in the household, there could be underreporting and it could be that up to 24 per cent of Scottish child payments go to households with a disabled person.

Ms McFadyen suggested that the Scottish child payment has had an impact, but it might also have an impact on disabled families. I know that I am asking you a question about something that is not in the report, but was that on your radar at any point? It is quite a significant positive impact, but it also begs the question of what we are doing for households that are in poverty and where there is a disabled person but there are no children. I get that; it is about consistency of approach. Do you have any comments on that, Ms McFadyen?

We did not look at any benefits in relation to our data. We looked at disability benefits briefly, but we did not include that information in the final report, because we found very similar results whether or not people with disabilities were claiming benefits. We found similar extra costs. It would be interesting to look at that in relation to the Scottish child payment.

We decided to use the household unit in the research, because we recognised that the household is generally what receives the benefits, so you could have a point there, but we did not look at that specifically.

I do not know whether Dr Robertson has any thoughts on that in relation to qualitative research.

We were obviously very limited with the research. I mentioned that it did not include families, so there was nothing around the Scottish child payment. I am not sure without checking, but I think that Inclusion Scotland and the Glasgow Disability Alliance have published research in the past year—qualitative research and quantitative survey data—about the impacts on different types of households. There might be evidence there that is relevant to your question.

That is helpful. My understanding is that Social Security Scotland does not routinely collect data on households with disabilities claiming the Scottish child payment. Perhaps it has to improve its data collection on that. Do we know the split between disabled households that live in poverty and have children and those that do not have children?

I could not tell you the numbers off the top of my head, but they should be available in national surveys. I do not know whether that would be in the Social Security Scotland survey or in the UK Government’s family resources survey. I personally do not know that figure.

I could not tell you that either. The other big source of data is the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s annual report. I am not sure whether it broke down the data in that way, but that would be the first place that I would look.

I ask because of the political choices that Mr Balfour referenced. The Scottish child payment will have an impact on some households that are in poverty and have a disability, but not on others, so we would be able to see the ones that we need to focus on. I think that Mr Balfour was floating the idea of targeting an additional resource.

Ultimately, we get money to people of working age who need it, in Scotland and across the UK, through the benefits system, predominantly through universal credit. Has either of our witnesses looked at the sufficiency or otherwise of how universal credit recognises disability in households in relation to addressing poverty?

We have not looked at that. As we said, this was a very limited study. We have looked only at the living costs and food survey and the six diarists, so there is definitely an opportunity for further research into that.

That is very helpful. I have a final brief comment. I must reflect on the comments that both witnesses have made on pressures on social services provision and meeting the care needs of families or individuals who live with a disability. We will perhaps draw that to the attention of the lead committee, which looks at that kind of thing as a matter of course. I just wanted to reflect that I have listened to what has been said on that issue.

Dr Robertson, did you want to come in there?

I have nothing to add, but it was very clear that, for four of the six participants, there was a lack of accessible local support, and they had to make decisions about what they used their benefits for. They also had to use their PIP for a large proportion of their additional costs, which was quite an interesting finding.

As members have no other questions, I thank you very much for undertaking that research and presenting your findings to us. It will be very useful for the committee’s on-going scrutiny of benefits in Scotland and for future inquiry work.

That concludes our public business for today. We will move into private to consider the remaining agenda items.

10:59 Meeting continued in private until 11:28.