Fife Gingerbread (Support for Lone Parents)
The final item of business today is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-04590, in the name of David Torrance, on congratulating Fife Gingerbread on its 25th anniversary. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament congratulates Fife Gingerbread on its 25th anniversary; understands that the group supports lone parents in Fife and acknowledges what it sees as the invaluable work that it carries out in the community by offering advice, representation and emotional and practical support; understands that Fife Gingerbread has developed many successful partnerships with other community organisations; considers that the charity does valuable work and that this could not be carried out without the help of the wonderful volunteers and buddies who give up their time to make a contribution to people who are in need; commends what it believes is the high-quality service provided by the organisation over the past 25 years, and wishes it all the best for the future.
17:32
I welcome to Parliament staff and volunteer members of Fife Gingerbread. It was a pleasure to attend Fife Gingerbread’s 25th anniversary celebrations, and a privilege to be a guest speaker at the launch of the think big, dream big project that was recently held in Glenrothes. One of the highlights of the day was the presentations, which were delivered with enthusiasm and skill by lone parents, many of whom are in Parliament today.
Fife Gingerbread is a voluntary sector organisation for lone parents from all over Fife. Its remit, which has remained constant over the years, is to provide accessible, approachable and non-judgmental support, as well as advice and information, to all lone parents. It provides services to people from varying backgrounds and walks of life, with children of all ages.
Fife Gingerbread offers a variety of services, including advice and information; one-to-one support; support through local groups; advocacy and representation; family activities and events; volunteering opportunities; and teen parent support. The services that are offered are invaluable, as lone parents, who constitute some of most vulnerable members of society, find themselves facing new challenges and increasing stress and worry because of the potential loss of income following the recent welfare reform changes.
Figures show that, in Fife, there are 10,500 lone parents, with a median age of 36, 66 per cent of whom live on an income of less £15,000 a year. A report by One Parent Families Scotland indicates that many lone parents lack confidence, have low self-esteem and lack social, educational and vocational skills. They are often left trapped in social isolation, stuck on benefits and struggling with debt and poverty. That is why the work that Fife Gingerbread is engaged in across local communities is both invaluable and important.
Fife Gingerbread, with its 10 staff and 22 volunteers, is the only organisation of its kind in Fife and rightly prides itself on being open, inclusive, approachable and friendly. It maintains excellent links through its work with a wide range of local, voluntary and statutory services to identify and engage with lone parents in order to make accessible and provide the best services available.
Many of the projects that Fife Gingerbread offers, such as aspire—a nine-week course that the organisation designed to increase the knowledge, skills and confidence of lone parents—are backed up by other agencies, which provides lone parents with access to a broad spectrum of help in many fields, catering for such aspects as budgeting, relationships and learning how to stay healthy and safe in a fun and supportive way.
Fife Gingerbread also offers other services in the form of advice, information, support and advocacy. Its buddy project, which aims to match hand-picked lone-parent volunteers with parents who need practical and emotional support, is a huge success. What struck me most, having spoken with many of the volunteers from the buddy project, was the passion and pride that they exhibited when discussing the work that they were doing with lone parents—that is a great credit to them. Some 82 buddies have now been involved in the project, with around 23 now in employment and 27 at college or university. A further 14 are volunteering in the community, and 19 continue to volunteer with Fife Gingerbread.
I have had a particular interest in the teen parent project since its inception, due to the fact that my constituency has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. The pilot of the project took place in Leven and proved very successful, which led to the project being launched in Kirkcaldy in 2011. The project’s main aim is to identify specific issues affecting young parents that impact on them and their parenting skills. It provides one-to-one support to teenage parents in conjunction with group work and peer support. The project addresses many of the issues that are faced by teenage parents, such as isolation, post-natal depression, and mental health and relationship problems, thus enabling them to try to overcome the difficulties and challenges that they face in order to do the best that they can for their children.
The ability to identify and understand the support needs of teen parents has ensured the success of the project from the time of its first referral in January 2012. It now works with more than 50 families in the Kirkcaldy area, with the main emphasis being on working in partnership with such groups as the YWCA, Barnardo’s, Mellow Parenting and the Cottage Family Centre in Kirkcaldy. That partnership working has helped to contribute to the project’s success. I will quote a teen parent who is involved in the project to highlight how important the work is:
“I was terrified when I found out I was having a baby and I felt quite alone. I am so glad I now have someone to talk to who can help me and who knows how I am feeling.”
Since it began, the teen parent project has supported 341 parents and 316 children in the Levenmouth, Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes areas. Project outcomes include mothers showing increased confidence and self-esteem, better health and wellbeing and increased parenting and self-advocacy skills. Children show improved levels of physical, intellectual, emotional and social development and are engaged with more and wider-ranging services to help facilitate their health and wellbeing.
The gateway project, which is specifically aimed at vulnerable families, is currently running a pilot in a local primary school that focuses on early intervention and support for local families, the benefits and impact of which should become apparent in future years.
Recently, I was privileged to spend a Sunday morning in Kirkland high school, interacting with parents and children in a series of tasks and games, including around healthy eating. It was a delight to see families participating and bonding with one another while having a good time. I have no doubt that when that project is rolled out, it will prove a success. I found the whole experience most enjoyable, despite getting soundly beaten at football by a six-year-old boy.
I attended the recent launch in Glenrothes of the Poverty Alliance report “Surviving Poverty: The Impact of Lone Parenthood”, and I congratulate Fife Gingerbread on working in partnership with the Poverty Alliance on that report. I bring the report to the attention of all MSPs in the chamber and I urge them to read its findings. I also thank the Fife Gingerbread community researchers for all the work that they put into the report and to Claire, Debbie, Lana, Kelly, Nicola, Lisa, Kerrie and Hazel for such an excellent presentation. Key issues for lone parents that are highlighted in the report include food costs, debt, employment opportunities, stress and isolation—issues that clearly reflect the challenges of balancing and managing life as a lone parent.
Fife Gingerbread offers many other services that I have not had time to mention but which are, nonetheless, as important in helping lone parents across Fife. I have no doubt that, through the dedication of the staff and volunteers, Fife Gingerbread will continue to highlight the issues facing lone parents throughout Fife and maintain the provision of an excellent and valuable service to lone parents and some of the most vulnerable families in society.
Having such a fantastic, flexible team with a proven model of success driving it forward, Fife Gingerbread will undoubtedly continue to adapt to ever-changing circumstances and deliver the best possible services to lone parents in Fife.
17:40
I should begin by declaring an interest, because I am a councillor on Fife Council, which provides funding to Fife Gingerbread.
I congratulate David Torrance on securing the debate. Fife Gingerbread is an organisation that is rooted in Fife communities, providing vital peer support for lone parents. I am pleased to have the chance today to speak about that work.
Anyone who has raised children, let alone raised them single-handedly, will know that it is hard work. Apart from the day-to-day joy of scraping food off the walls and kissing goodbye to one’s bed, the relentless responsibility, worry and sheer exhaustion one experiences can take their toll. Not only do lone parents have to deal with all the challenges and worry by themselves, but they face additional multiple barriers around income, security and stigma.
Lone parents do tough and important work, and Fife Gingerbread does tough and important work to support them. Led by a hard-working and dedicated team, Gingerbread provides non-judgmental advice, information, encouragement and understanding to lone parents across Fife. Gingerbread also engages with all levels of Government on behalf of lone parents to make sure that their voices are heard.
Gingerbread does not tell lone parents what to do or what is wrong with them; it provides the support that lots of lone parents need to be able to meet the challenges that they face, to know that they are not alone and to recognise their own strengths.
Just over a week ago, I spoke at the Fife launch of research undertaken by Fife Gingerbread in partnership with the Poverty Alliance. Together, they have produced a report called “Surviving Poverty: The Impact of Lone Parenthood”. The research is focused on the experiences of lone parents living in rural Fife and was carried out by a team of community researchers who were themselves lone parents. The report tells us that although lone parents need our understanding, without the right actions, they and their children will continue to struggle.
We have to take action to mitigate the impacts of welfare reform. As I have said before in the chamber, the Scottish Government must use its powers in health, housing, childcare and education. To tackle child poverty, we need sustained investment in the early years, education services, extracurricular activities and informal educational experiences. We must also recognise that by helping parents, we help children.
Debt is an enormous worry for lone parents. Colleagues will be aware of the excellent work by Kezia Dugdale, through the debtbusters campaign, to raise awareness of the dangers of payday loans and strengthen the role of credit unions. I will be taking that work forward in Fife.
Making available affordable, flexible and good-quality childcare has to be at the top of the to-do list of any Government that is serious about tackling child poverty and removing barriers to work for lone parents.
The report also highlighted the importance of public transport. It is clear that the current system of bus services is failing these families badly. That is why we should support attempts to look at re-regulation of buses in Scotland.
We must also ensure that it pays to be in work, which is why I am a firm supporter of the roll-out of a Scottish living wage.
Fife Gingerbread is also at the heart of early years work in Fife.
I just could not miss this opportunity to make those voices heard here in the chamber. In such frightening and uncertain times for lone-parent families, it is critical that we continue to celebrate, support and, as policy makers, take forward the work of Fife Gingerbread.
17:43
As the SNP member for the Mid Scotland and Fife region and a member of the Welfare Reform Bill Committee, I am very pleased indeed to have been called to speak in the debate. I congratulate my fellow Fife MSP David Torrance on securing this timely debate.
I extend my warmest congratulations to Fife Gingerbread on its 25th anniversary. What a credit to all those involved in setting up Fife Gingerbread 25 years ago and to all those who have, over the years, worked tirelessly to support its excellent work. I commend the hard-working staff members and, importantly, all the volunteers who have given of their time and enthusiasm to make a real difference to the lives of lone-parent families.
As we have heard, Fife Gingerbread is a voluntary organisation that works with lone-parent families throughout Fife to provide practical help, support and information. It does that through traditional project models and through very innovative project models. I will return to that briefly in a moment, but it is important to highlight one of Fife Gingerbread’s landmark achievements, which is the breaking down of the completely erroneous and misleading stereotype that lone parents are primarily teenagers and—if the more lurid tabloids are to be believed—that they are teenagers who became pregnant deliberately to get a council house and benefits. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In relation to the stereotyping that goes on when some people talk about lone-parent families, notwithstanding what my colleague David Torrance said about the incidence of teen pregnancy, we need simply to look at the study by One Parent Families Scotland, entitled “One Parent Families—A Profile”, which was published in August 2009, to see that only 2 per cent of lone-parent mothers are teenagers.
The stereotype is not only entirely manufactured and insulting; it also fails to take account of the fact that many lone parents find themselves in that position as a result of relationship breakdown, bereavement or fleeing from the home because of domestic abuse. Understanding the nature of the issues that face lone parents is key. If we do not understand those issues, we cannot do our best to help them properly.
Fife Gingerbread is exemplary in that respect. Through its pioneering buddy project, to which David Torrance referred, it has shown what can be done to bring about step changes in lone-parent families’ lives. The project’s success is in its focus on the parent of the child or children, providing them with practical help and aiming to inspire individuals to have confidence to grow and develop.
Another excellent initiative is the provision of a dedicated student support worker, who helps people to address barriers to pursuing further education or training. I do not have time to describe all the many other excellent initiatives. What has struck me about Fife Gingerbread’s success is the number of self-initiated referrals—the rate is 25 per cent—which testifies to the high regard in which Fife Gingerbread is rightly held.
A major cloud on the horizon is the looming United Kingdom Government welfare cuts, which are expected to have a significant negative impact on lone-parent families, as on other vulnerable individuals across Scotland. I know that Fife Gingerbread will do what it can to provide support and clear information. However, the only way to secure the welfare system that we in Scotland want is to ensure that it is our Parliament here in Edinburgh, and not a Tory Government in London that the people of Scotland did not vote for, that controls welfare.
17:48
I add my congratulations to David Torrance on securing this worthwhile members’ business debate. Fife clearly owes the Gingerbread movement a huge amount for all that it does, so it is fitting to have this occasion in the Scottish Parliament to recognise the work, support and commitment of Gingerbread. It was good to see members of the Gingerbread movement attending committee meetings this morning.
David Torrance highlighted many examples of the support that Fife Gingerbread provides to many lone-parent families. Some of that happens in challenging situations, which are part of the backdrop to the support. However, Annabelle Ewing made a sensible point about the difficulties that relate to stereotyping.
We must bear it in mind that there is a wide variety of reasons why parents end up as lone parents, including divorce, separation, bereavement and a spouse being away in the armed forces. My mother was very grateful for the support that she had in our local community when my father died very early from an unexpected heart attack. We must be careful about the circumstances by which we judge anything.
Fife Gingerbread is a genuine example of how charities throughout the United Kingdom and Scotland can work as a network. From the establishment of the Fife Federation of Gingerbread in 1987 to the Fife Gingerbread organisation today, the guiding purpose has been not just to provide information to lone parents, but to ensure that they have someone to turn to—as David Torrance described movingly in his speech when quoting a young person who had found someone to speak to who turned their life around. That is very much needed and valued.
Notwithstanding what I have just said about categories of lone parents, the circumstances can be highly challenging, reflecting many of the difficulties of modern life, which has changed so much in the past 20 years. We must accept that many people who seek the support of Gingerbread’s services are in difficult circumstances, whether through poverty or a very low income base, or because of substance abuse. We must accept that that is a very real situation, which needs to be addressed. I note from the website that there are about 10,500 lone parents in Fife alone, so there is a clear need for Gingerbread’s support.
When thinking about the debate, I was struck by a story that I was recently told in a constituency surgery about a couple who, sadly, had separated, and about the difficulties that the lone parent was having in paying the household bills, not because she was unable to do that, but because it was something that she had never had to do before. She very much appreciated the advice—albeit that it was basic advice—from somebody who had been through the same thing. The Gingerbread group has been highly successful in providing such support in Fife.
As a regional MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and a member of the Education and Culture Committee, I have been very aware of much of the other support that has been given in linking up with other groups—including the student support worker that Fife Gingerbread can offer—that offer childcare and assisted benefits.
Fife Gingerbread is to be congratulated all round on the terrific effort that it has put in—not only in doing its own work, but in yielding that experience elsewhere.
17:52
With others, I congratulate David Torrance on bringing the debate to Parliament and commend him for highlighting the work of Fife Gingerbread. I add my congratulations to Fife Gingerbread on its quarter-century celebrations last year. It has given 25 years of invaluable service in supporting lone parents across Fife, and can be justly proud.
Fife Gingerbread’s remit has remained the same throughout its history. It is there to provide accessible, approachable and non-judgmental support, advice and information to all lone parents with children of any age from all backgrounds and walks of life. Although there are times when individuals feel that they are alone, Fife Gingerbread is there to support them. No one can understand their situation better than the volunteers at Fife Gingerbread. It is a vital organisation for lone parents in Fife, and the level of support that it offers could not be achieved without the hard work of its staff and volunteers.
As Jayne Baxter and other members have mentioned, both the staff and the volunteers at the organisation have been working on “Surviving Poverty: The Impact of Lone Parenthood”. That was a study of lone parents in rural communities in Fife in particular, including people in the Howe of Fife and around Cupar in my constituency. That research forms part of the Poverty Alliance’s evidence, participation and change project. The EPIC project aims to enable people with direct experience of poverty and social exclusion to have their voices heard in the policy-making process.
The research sought to explore and understand the quality of life in rural communities, and it included a project that involved 10 women as peer researchers, who conducted the fieldwork in September and October last year. Lone parents were contacted through a postal survey of 200 one-parent households, and eight in-depth one-to-one interviews were conducted to explore the issues that were raised in the survey. Both those approaches were carried out in conjunction with the peer researchers. The peer researchers were, largely, lone parents who are involved with Fife Gingerbread. They went through comprehensive research training, which not only improved their research skills but increased their confidence and ability to speak out on matters that are important to them.
A fundamental fact that comes across clearly in the report is that a lack of adequate income, whether through low pay or benefits, is the underlying cause of many problems that are faced by lone parents, who have the responsibility of being both breadwinner and carer. As Jayne Baxter and other members said, the report noted that rising costs of food and fuel, in particular, have had a significant impact on lone-parent families. The report also mentioned difficulties to do with debt and accessing mainstream credit, and noted that employment opportunities are difficult to find. An overwhelming feeling of social isolation is all too common a problem among lone parents.
It is likely that welfare reform will make the situation more acute. We need to ensure that we are doing all that we can at the Scottish level to help to alleviate the hardship that lone-parent families all too often face. We need a Government that is committed to mitigating the impact of unfair welfare reform. It is important that policy at local and national levels ensures that approaches that are taken to support lone parents take account of individual and family needs.
We need to ensure that policy makers are doing all that they can to engage effectively with service users. I encourage all members to read the report and to help to ensure that its recommendations are heard by all.
I wish Fife Gingerbread all the best for the future and I thank David Torrance for bringing this worthwhile debate to Parliament.
17:56
I congratulate David Torrance on securing this important debate and I welcome to the gallery the representatives of Fife Gingerbread. I am not a member of the Scottish Parliament for Fife, but I have been aware of Gingerbread as a national organisation for a long time and I have a long-standing interest in support for lone-parent families. Because of that, I was interested to read about the activities of Fife Gingerbread, and like other members I am extremely impressed by the range of its activities.
I was pleased to hear Annabelle Ewing and Elizabeth Smith criticising the stereotyping of lone parents. I was particularly pleased to hear that from Elizabeth Smith, because I think that the first speech that I gave on lone parents was 20 years ago when, I am afraid to say, stereotyping of lone parents was raging in the party that she represents. I do not think that that is the case today, but we must recognise that the UK Government’s welfare reforms will have an adverse effect on lone-parent families in particular. Children in lone-parent families are already twice as likely as children in two-parent families to be poor, and that is set to get worse.
An important part of the support for lone parents is the responsibility of Government. Jayne Baxter talked about the importance of affordable childcare; in general, financial support for lone parents should be top of the agenda. However, help for families with one parent goes beyond financial assistance. Emotional and practical support from groups that have an appropriate level of understanding and experience of the unique issues that lone parents and their children face is invaluable. Fife Gingerbread has provided such support for a quarter of a century and we cannot overstate the value of the service that it provides to hundreds of families, which highlights the importance of continued investment in a sustainable framework of support for all single-parent families.
I was particularly impressed by the buddy project, which has been mentioned. The scheme enables parents who have experience of being the sole provider to feed back into the Gingerbread project and to support others who are going through similar experiences. The buddies who take part gain satisfaction from knowing that they can impart knowledge in an empathic way, and the system provides the opportunity for training and gaining new skills in a community-oriented setting. I am not sure whether buddies were involved in the surviving poverty project, but I know that peer researchers were used and that the importance of the research comes from the fact that people listened to the experiences of lone parents.
I have also been impressed by the different ways in which Fife Gingerbread conveys information. There is the traditional newsletter, and the organisation also has a presence on social media; I was pleased to start following it on Twitter today. Of course, that approach enables it to reach a large number of interested people in a new way.
However, all the online information in the world is no substitute for the emotional and physical benefits that are provided in establishing a regular system of face-to-face support, and Gingerbread excels in assuring families and provides free home visits and group events.
My time is running out, but I am sure that Aileen Campbell will want to mention—I may be stealing her thunder—something that I saw on Twitter today. An advert has been placed for a new position with Fife Gingerbread that will link up with Edinburgh so, at last, there will be a connection with my constituency. It is looking to appoint a project worker to work with dads rock, which is an Edinburgh organisation. Unsurprisingly, that organisation will be called Fife rocks and will be based on the other side of the Firth of Forth. I know from my constituency experience of the great work by dads rock to provide one-to-one support to fathers and their children. I will stop on that convenient link to tomorrow’s debate, which will provide another interesting angle on a similar subject.
18:01
I thank David Torrance for securing the debate. I, too, welcome our friends from Gingerbread, some of whom I think I had the pleasure of meeting at a Save the Children event in the Parliament before Christmas. If those folk are not in the chamber, I certainly want to welcome those whom I have not met, and perhaps we will get a chance to meet sometime soon.
Like others, I pay tribute to Gingerbread for supporting families in Scotland and congratulate the Fife branch on its wonderful work over the past 25 years. It has been great to hear David Torrance’s fantastic description of what Fife Gingerbread does in its local communities.
Despite Malcolm Chisholm stealing my thunder, I am delighted that Fife Gingerbread has been awarded £10,000 from the Scottish Government’s community and families fund to run a pilot playgroup in Dunfermline for dads with children under five and an interest in music, which will build on the success of—as Malcolm Chisholm rightly noted—the two dads rock playgroups in Edinburgh. Dads rock is another wonderful organisation; it recently celebrated its first birthday, so it is a wee bit younger than the Fife Gingerbread group.
The Scottish Government's aspiration for children and young people is a simple but ambitious one: we want Scotland to be the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up. We want Scotland to be a more child-friendly country, and to have a culture that supports all parents and carers—including those raising children on their own—and values their role.
We believe strongly that families need to feel supported not only by our public services but by their own families and communities. Gingerbread, One Parent Families Scotland and many other organisations play a crucial role in supporting lone-parent families.
Jayne Baxter asked that we do more to support parents. I am pleased that the Government has shown its commitment to Scotland’s parents by ensuring that they are supported when they need it in order to do what can be—I am speaking as a mother of a two-year-old—a difficult job and to do it well.
In the national parenting strategy that we published last year, we have recognised the particular pressures that lone parents face. We consulted 1,500 parents from all backgrounds in that consultation. It was a pleasure to meet so many wonderful people whose contribution culminated in the publication of our strategy.
The main aim of the strategy is to strengthen the help and support on offer to parents. We want parents, carers and families to know that, whatever their needs and wherever they live, practical support is available. As David Torrance said, that could be to overcome self-esteem and confidence issues.
As the First Minister announced in September last year, the early years task force is committing £18 million over three years to improve the provision of family support across Scotland. Malcolm Chisholm is a member of that task force; I thank him for his work on that and his deep interest in the area. In addition, we will continue to provide specialist information, advice and support services tailored to meet the needs of lone-parent families and the practitioners who work with them. That includes telephone support, telephone mentoring, benefits and money advice, online information for lone parents, and training and material for practitioners.
I am particularly proud of the tradition of community-based projects in Scotland, including those, such as Fife Gingerbread, that rely on volunteers to deliver sustainable support for local communities, drawn from the communities themselves—a truly asset-based approach. They provide a wide variety of services to lone parents in local communities, including early intervention and support for families who have a range of multiple and complex needs. It is right that we celebrate their work, the holistic approach that they take, and the volunteers who make all that happen.
I would like to touch on the support that lone parents in Fife get from Fife Gingerbread and, much more generally, on the challenges that lone parents face. The issue is an extremely important one, because almost one in four children live in one-parent households and the figure is projected to rise significantly.
Nine out of 10 lone parents are women, but I have met a number of lone fathers who face a number of different challenges. That shows us that, as Annabelle Ewing and Liz Smith said, we should scratch beneath the stereotypes; we should certainly not stigmatise lone parents. Liz Smith gave us personal testimony of why we should be careful of stereotyping.
We know from the latest growing up in Scotland findings—David Torrance and Jayne Baxter mentioned this, too—that lone parents are less comfortable engaging with formal services and less likely to attend baby and toddler groups, so the support that they get from services such as Gingerbread and One Parent Families Scotland can make all the difference.
Whether children have always had only one parent, or whether their parents have divorced, they were never married or one of their parents has died, there is no evidence to suggest that being brought up by one parent rather than two automatically leads to worse outcomes. It is important to avoid discriminating attributions and assumptions that relate to perceived links between lone parenthood and social problems. Loudly and clearly, I pay tribute to the many lone parents in Scotland who do an amazing job in raising children without the support of a partner, which they often do while living in particularly difficult circumstances.
However, it is also important to recognise, as many members have, that just under half of the children who live with one parent are poor, compared with 24 per cent of children who live in couple families. As Roderick Campbell pointed out, Fife Gingerbread’s recent report, “Surviving Poverty—The Impact of Lone Parenthood”, powerfully highlights the many challenges that lone parents face. As organisations such as One Parent Families Scotland, the Poverty Alliance and the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland tell us, our best efforts to support Scotland’s parents are undermined by poverty.
This Government firmly believes that children in Scotland deserve the best possible start in life. We do not want any child to be born into, or condemned to, a life of poverty. It is simply morally unacceptable that 17 per cent of our children still live in relative poverty. We are doing all that we can to tackle poverty and inequality in Scotland within the limited powers and resources that we have, for example through our commitment to increase the offer of early learning and childcare for three and four-year-olds to 600 hours and through the work of the early years task force and the early years change fund.
Although I know that there is constitutional disagreement, this Government’s point of view is that we need the powers over personal taxation and welfare benefits that are currently reserved to the UK Government. We all want a welfare system that is simpler, that makes work pay and that lifts people out of poverty, but I believe that the solution is for this Parliament to have control over such matters, so that we can devise policies for the benefit of the Scottish people.
I end by thanking Fife Gingerbread and its team of volunteers and other projects in Scotland that provide crucial support to lone-parent families and help parents to do the best job that they can. I wish Fife Gingerbread and the families that it works with every success for the future.
Meeting closed at 18:08.