Chamber and committees

Thank you very much for that. Perhaps the committee could have a dialogue with you about that.

It looks like Simon Coote left, came back in and would like to try again. I will bring him in.

Simon, we still do not have any volume for you, unfortunately. Perhaps you will have to come back to us with your point in writing.

We will move on to a question from Marie McNair, who joins us remotely.

Thank you very much, minister.

I remind the committee that only members and the minister may take part in the formal debate. I invite the minister to move motion S6M-03002.

Motion moved,

That the Social Justice and Social Security Committee recommends that the Social Security Up-rating (Scotland) Order 2022 [draft] be approved.—[Ben Macpherson]

Motion agreed to.

Thank you very much. That concludes the public part of the committee’s meeting. I thank the minister and his officials—even if we had some gremlins and we could not actually hear from the officials—for their evidence this morning.

Pam Duncan-Glancy has a final question.

Thank you very much for that, David. It was helpful for you to set that out in the way you did.

Jeremy Balfour’s question on the theme has been answered, so we will move on to questions from Foysol Choudhury.

We now move to questions from Emma Roddick, who is with us in the room, and then Marie McNair, who is joining us remotely.

We will now consider one affirmative instrument. We were also due to consider the Social Security (Up-rating) (Miscellaneous Amendment) (Scotland) Regulations 2022, but the committee received a letter from the Minister for Social Security and Local Government yesterday that explained that those regulations were due to be withdrawn and relaid. I hope that the minister can provide some information about that this morning.

I welcome to the meeting Ben Macpherson, the Minister for Social Security and Local Government. The minister is joined online by Scottish Government officials Simon Coote, the head of the cross-cutting policy unit; Camilo Arredondo, a solicitor; and Dominic Mellan, an economic adviser in social security analysis.

I invite the minister to make an opening statement.

As we are over time, I ask those members who still have questions to ask to put them on the record, and I will ask our witnesses to submit their answers in writing. I invite Foysol Choudhury, Pam Duncan-Glancy and Emma Roddick to ask their questions.

In the interests of time, I ask members to group together their remaining questions. We have not rigidly stuck to the themes after having set them out.

I live beside a church that has a very old cemetery, which contains several covenanter graves. Despite the sterling efforts of the church and local authority, there are times when the cemetery needs extra attention to ensure its upkeep and preservation.

Last year, as I walked past on the way to the shops, I could hear chattering voices, accompanied by the sound of power tools and lots of activity. I keeked in the side gate and saw a group of folk hard at work tending the cemetery and engaging in jovial conversation. “Great to see”, I thought.

On my way back from the shops a wee while later, I found myself on the lane behind a woman who was carrying a shovel over her shoulder and singing to herself as she made her way to the workers’ vehicle. She blushed when she saw me and said, “I was having such a good day that I just had to sing.” She went on to say that she was doing community service. She was almost apologetic about it. The stigma that she felt was writ large across her face. She had gone from being so happy that she was singing to being embarrassed about why she was there that day.

I responded positively. I said thank you to the entire crew for making such a wonderful job of the cemetery. I said that she should be proud of what she had achieved that day and that she should never let anybody stop her singing.

I walked home thinking about how it is the small things that make all the difference to an individual’s feeling of self-worth and about just how much stigma impacts on a person’s ability to enter and sustain recovery and avoid repeated interactions with criminal justice services.

Later that evening, I posted photos and a thank you on social media. The posts were positively received by the wider community and I hope went a wee way towards breaking down the layers of stigma.

I worked for many years supporting people who face addiction, homelessness, grinding poverty, mental health issues and multiple and complex trauma, so I fully understand that someone’s self-worth all but disappears when they face a world full of chaos and repeated periods of incarceration that make any chance of entering and maintaining recovery seem almost impossible. I saw that time and time again.

There is no doubt that trauma and poverty, exacerbated by stigma, can lead someone to self-medicate as they seek to blot out things that they are unable to work through. Those can be the people who enter the revolving door of incarceration, liberation, problem drug use and homelessness.

Although not everyone who experiences trauma ends up in that situation, just about everyone in that situation has experienced trauma. That is why the issue must be seen as a public health emergency and a national mission.

We must move away from a justice system that retraumatises people, which is why I fully support the Scottish Government’s new vision for justice, which has at its heart a trauma framework, in which staff are given the knowledge and skills that they need if they are to embed trauma-informed practices.

Recognition of the prevalence of the trauma and adversity that people who interact with the criminal justice system have experienced will help us, as a nation, to tackle repeat offending and—importantly—our drug deaths. Those deaths are a national loss. The enormity of that loss is felt keenly by the families who are affected, but we need to recognise that, as a country, we have lost far too many people and, with them, all their hopes, dreams and talents.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this, but a combination of access to same-day treatment by embedding the MAT standards, widening access to rehab, diversion from prosecution, the navigator programme, a nationwide naloxone roll-out, meaningful and funded community justice options and funding facilities such as the River Garden centre in my constituency, which Sue Webber mentioned, gives us the best chance of preventing the worst outcomes. Members should make no mistake: community justice and diversion from prosecution are not soft justice; they are smart justice.