Chamber and committees

Good morning. I am interested to hear your views on what it would have taken to reach the 2030 target. You are saying that things needed to be wrapped up and the pedal needed to be put to the floor, but what does that mean in real terms?

You spoke about cars being taken off the road. Did you mean fossil-fuel cars or electric ones?

What can the Scottish Government do to enable that switch to electric vehicles to happen that bit quicker?

Dr Hilary Cass highlighted that the

“increasingly toxic, ideological and polarised public debate”

does nothing to serve the young folk accessing this care, their families nor the NHS staff who care for them. Does the minister agree that it is vital that we all do everything that we can to take the heat out of the issue and to redouble our efforts to deliver the best outcomes for young folk accessing this care?

I congratulate my friend and colleague Clare Haughey on securing this important debate.

As the motion regretfully notes, this month marks the seventh anniversary of the introduction of the two-child cap. That cruel policy means that families miss out on around £3,200 a year due to the loss of universal credit or child tax credit. That is £3,200 for every child that they have after their first two.

That policy could not be further from my values or from those of many folk across Scotland. I believe that children should be given the best possible start in life. In Scotland, and with an SNP Scottish Government, we are investing in that best possible start, in our future and in our young people through a wide range of measures. We are doing that with the baby box, by delivering 1,140 hours a year of free childcare and through the game-changing Scottish child payment.

We can compare and contrast that with the UK Government’s two-child cap, a policy that directly targets children, based simply on how many siblings they have. That policy includes the rape clause, which forces women to prove that they were raped and is one of the cruellest policies to have been introduced by the Tories during their time in Government. An email that I received this morning from the Scottish Association of Social Work said that its members

“witness day-in and day-out the hardship and poverty caused by this inhumane piece of legislation. It hits the most vulnerable children and families the hardest and fails to recognise the fact that all children, whatever their placement is in their sibling group, are citizens with human rights to the basics of decent living. It impacts most on women (still usually the primary or only carer) both financially but also because the impossible and pernicious decision to label a child the result of rape falls to them.”

As far as I am concerned, the child cap should have no place in a modern democracy and I look forward to its being scrapped at the earliest possible opportunity.

Just last June, the then shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, described the two-child cap as “heinous” as he unveiled Labour’s plans to scrap it. A little over a month later, UK Labour decided that it would keep the cap after all and, two months after that, scrapped Jonathan Ashworth instead, in a reshuffle.

This is not about a lack of money, but a lack of principles. Just a couple of weeks ago, in an exclusive piece for the Daily Mail, Sir Keir Starmer pledged to increase the defence budget by billions of pounds. There always seems to be money for bombs—whatever shade of UK Government we have, they will always prioritise bombs over bairns. That is the answer to Jeremy Balfour’s question about where we could get the money from.

That money could still be spent on ensuring that our children are fed every single night.

It is a tragedy that the two-child cap has remained in place for seven years. There are about 24,000 such tragedies across Scotland, because that is the number of households—including 730 across Aberdeen—that are currently affected by the policy. According to an End Child Poverty report last year, 2,600 children in the Aberdeen City Council area live in households that are affected by the two-child cap, while, across Scotland, the policy affects more than 87,000 children. The UK Government is failing more than 87,000 children in every corner of Scotland and it will continue to fail them for as long as this barbaric policy remains in place.

Good morning, panel, and thank you for coming. I will begin by asking for your views on the proposed disqualification orders. I am interested in hearing any thoughts or insights that you have about the level of intimidation, harassment or abuse that folk have to endure during elections. I do not mean just candidates; I mean campaigners and the hard-working electoral staff, too.

I will start with Kay Sillars, who has probably had to deal with the staff side of that.

Thank you. You explained it so much better than I did.

I ask Hannah Stevens to respond next.

Are there any other provisions that the rest of the witnesses think could be considered for inclusion in the bill? Does anybody have anything to add?

The bill makes provisions for disqualification in certain circumstances. Is there a significant issue with the harassment and intimidation of those involved in elections, including candidates, staff and campaigners, in Scotland? Are the provisions on disqualification orders suitable? Do they go far enough?

As you are looking at me, Professor Clark, I will pick on you.