Chamber and committees

My next question arises from an ask from Shelter and other organisations and relates to provisions in the bill to allow for the sale of a property when landlords are in specific financial difficulties. How can the Scottish Government support landlords and, indeed, registered social landlords to buy back homes, so that we can protect tenants in situ? That would give everyone involved a level of comfort.

I will just follow up on that, then I will ask another question.

We have a task and finish working group, but sometimes there is the task of the policy intention and then there is how something is finished and what impact it has. I am keen to look at the impact assessment that has been published, but I am concerned about the other end of the process and about double-checking in, say, six months’ time that we have understood the consequences as they apply to those groups who often experience the sharpest impact of poverty and inequality. I would like to get an assurance that the Scottish Government will seek to report back on that.

Good morning. We have discussed already the fact that we have a lot of data gaps. I hope that a housing bill will help us to sort that out.

With regard to social justice in particular, we know that the individuals who are bearing the worst of the cost crisis tend to be women, people with disabilities and people from black and minority ethnic communities. How do we ensure that we collect the data that we need in order to understand the impact of the intervention? I hear people calling it a sticking plaster, but in emergency situations a sticking plaster is often all that we can apply. How do we ensure that those who need it most will benefit from the policy, given that we do not generally collect disaggregated gender data and that we do not always understand intersectionality with regard to how policies are applied?

The tenant grant fund and discretionary housing payments have been mentioned. How do we ensure that the Scottish welfare fund is applied effectively? Who collects data, and how do we ensure that we get the intended outcome? That question is for Rhiannon Sims, Emma Saunders and Caroline Crawley. I am interested in the perspective of tenants in your organisations.

With regard to best practice, many local authorities and RSLs across the country engage actively in buy-back, specifically of properties that were formerly social lets, to bolster the number of affordable homes. An agreement that that already happens and that such an approach should be supported over this six-month period would be helpful.

Today, we see clear evidence that our Parliament can act quickly during a time when the cost of living is spiralling to bring about protections for those who rent their homes. Inaction in another place should not be replicated here, and good ideas across political lines can and should be embraced where possible, as we should collectively aim to make the lives of those who live in Scotland better.

I spent years working in and around the housing and homelessness sectors. Among the jargon, the spreadsheets, the housing revenue accounts and the bureaucracy, the people—the tenants—can often be forgotten. The pandemic and now the cost crisis have brought people back into sharp focus.

During the height of the pandemic, I was still a councillor and COSLA’s housing spokesperson. We saw a surge in action to get people into accommodation, to prevent evictions and to mobilise the entire sector to work collectively to ensure that people and communities were safe from the clear and present danger. We need to see the cost of living crisis in the same light as the pandemic: it is a clear and present danger to wellbeing.

Yes, I will. I am having a menopausal moment, but I will try to deal with that as best I can.

I thank Jeremy Balfour for that intervention, as it allows me to turn the focus back on to why we have spiralling inflation, with mortgage costs hitting a point at which it might not be sustainable for some landlords to continue. There is provision in the bill for landlords who face being unable to afford such increases. We can see from those protections that the Government has listened to the private landlord sector.

People are experiencing a contraction in their income the likes of which most have never experienced before. Many of us came through the financial crash of 2008, but at that point our food and energy bills did not skyrocket to the alarming extent that we see now, and our incomes had yet to suffer a decade of austerity at that point.

We know that those who rent their property spend a disproportionately large part of their income on rent and have lower incomes overall. Those who are in the private rented sector spend a significantly higher percentage of their income on rent. The cost can be much higher if the local housing allowance does not cover all their housing costs due to local pressures, meaning that they will be required to use some of their universal credit towards rent. If we add that to the disproportionately large increase to the living costs of those with limited incomes, we can see an impending crisis over the winter months.

I will take one more intervention.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. Thank you, too, for pronouncing my name correctly—every time that is done in the chamber, I get very excited.

I thank all the members, across most parties, who signed my motion, to allow us to debate the important yearly event that is challenge poverty week. I express my sincere thanks to the Poverty Alliance—a couple of its staff members are in the gallery—and all organisations, across all sectors, that work so hard to challenge the insidious, pernicious, anxiety provoking and hugely damaging social and economic construct that is poverty.

Since 2013, #ChallengePovertyWeek has acted as a platform for sharing ideas about how we as a country—across all spheres of government, all sectors and civic society—can turn our shared values of justice and compassion into concrete action to release people from the grip of poverty.

Since its inception, challenge poverty week has grown year on year. In 2021, more than 350 organisations took part and there were more than 900 separate activities. This year, there is a clear focus on the current cost of living crisis and the threat that it poses to people who live on low incomes. It is hoped that this week will bring attention to the support that exists for solving poverty, including support for policies that aim to ensure that no one in Scotland has to live in the grip of poverty.

I have worked in the third sector directly with people who were experiencing the worst of multiple disadvantage and I have seen the most extreme poverty up close, in all its horrific technicolour. I helped women and children who fled domestic abuse taking only what they stood up in. I supported people who were in the grip of trauma-induced addiction as they tried to navigate a hostile benefits system that was all too often ready to fling a punitive sanction at their feet, and a criminal justice system that all too often neglected to look at the underlying trauma that precipitated offending behaviour or at how incarceration causes and exacerbates homelessness and family breakdown, further entrenching poverty in communities. The situation was always made worse by systems that do not speak to each other and leave folk trying to join up the pieces themselves at a time when their resilience is at its lowest.

When I was a child in Canada, my family relied on food banks and voluntary agencies for a time, after my dad was paid off and we had no support network around us to help to pick up the pieces that sudden poverty brings. My relationship with food is, to this day, coloured by that experience. What a difference something like the Scottish child payment would have made to little eight-year-old me and my wee brother. Perhaps my mum would not have had to forgo food herself to eke out the sustenance that was available for her kids.

As an adult here, in Scotland, I have been in receipt of social security at several points and have found myself—to quote part of the title of our Social Justice and Social Security Committee’s recent inquiry report—

“Robbing Peter to pay Paul”.

I have even hidden behind the sofa lest the door-to-door loan operative from Provident see that I was at home with nowt but coppers in my purse and no way to cover the week’s instalment. When my son was small, I used charity shops and clothing banks to ensure that he was kitted out and that my money stretched.

I know from my lived and work experience that the people who are in entrenched poverty at this time—and the people who have just been tipped into poverty—will be facing sleepless nights and suffering an exponential decline in their mental and physical wellbeing.

Challenge poverty week’s theme this year is #TurnTheTide, and it involves a range of asks. The first is that we

“Redesign our economy to make jobs work for people through being flexible, secure, environmentally minded and paying at least the real Living Wage; affording everyone enough to live a dignified life.”

The second ask is that we

“Ensure our social security system provides a strong and adequate lifeline for all of us, when we need it.”

We need to uprate benefits in line with inflation. We need to scrap the cap, including the hated rape clause. We need to scrap the five-week wait and the dreaded sanctions regime.

The third ask is that we

“Accelerate actions to tackle both the climate crisis and poverty.”

The recent cap on energy prices will not be felt equally by all. I watched a wee video today about Carolyn Hunter, a carer who provides unpaid intensive care to her daughter Freya. The family has lived with fuel poverty for years, because Freya’s needs are such that the family has to use a lot of energy. Despite the additional measures from Social Security Scotland, the family is experiencing unrelenting and crushing fuel poverty. More must be done to protect people who are in such a situation.

The fourth ask is for

“Communities most affected by poverty in Scotland to have more power and resources to bring about change.”

Real and lasting change is needed. It is vital that we mainstream participatory budgeting, provide communities with the support that they need to realise their goals and roll out the principles of community wealth building.

The links between poverty and poor health are profound and significant. The fifth ask is that we

“Ensure all of us have access to good quality, timely health and care services that meet our physical and mental needs.”

We should strive to embed community link workers and mental health workers in health centres across the whole of Scotland.

The sixth ask is that we

“Redesign our public services so that they are affordable, accessible and work for everyone.”

Services such as transport, childcare and digital inclusion are vital to successful participation in society and crucial in supporting us all to live decent lives. The ask extends to ensuring that our housing system is such that homes are affordable and warm for all, that homelessness is eradicated and that rents are at a level that does not entrench poverty.

We must also recognise and act purposefully to address the gendered nature of poverty and structural inequality.

Free school meal provision should be increased and rolled out at pace. School meal debt should be written off, as is happening in more and more council areas across the country. Weans need to eat.

Last week’s announcements rocked the very foundations of our economy. We must work together to ensure that the people who have the least do not bear the brunt of decisions that are made by those with the most. Let us all challenge poverty and work to turn the tide.

Thank you very much, Presiding Officer.

We can always cherry pick the evidence. We must look more widely than at our immediate neighbours. A lot of places on the continent of Europe have quite stringent rent controls and a really buoyant private rented sector. We cannot just choose the evidence that suits our narrative. I urge the member to look into that in his own time.

Social justice and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, the bootstrap cook, drew attention to author Terry Pratchett’s concept of the boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness according to Discworld character Sam Vimes. Pratchett wrote:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money ... Take boots, for example ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.”

Someone

“who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping”

their

“feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor”

person

“who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time?and would still have wet feet.”

With rent increases in the private rented sector of up to 40 per cent in the recent past, the feet of Scottish tenants are wringing. That evaluation of socioeconomic unfairness is hugely pertinent today as we see our most vulnerable bear the brunt of austerity and, frankly, economically illiterate fiscal events in another place. That is why it is right that we have a bill before us today that seeks to place a cap on rent increases at zero per cent and that re-introduces a moratorium on evictions until the end of March 2023.

Folk with the least are paying the most, as a percentage of their income, for essentials. Women, people with disabilities and people from black and minority ethnic communities are facing the starkest of choices, and it is incumbent on us in this place to ensure that they do not face rent increases that could lead to homelessness during a cost of living crisis—that would be a humanitarian crisis in every community.

Although the Scottish Government does not have control over energy policy or inflation, it has, with a largely limited budget, sought to mitigate the worst effects of the situation to the tune of £3 billion every year.