Chamber and committees

No, convener. In the interests of time, I am happy to hand back to you.

If I may, convener, I will ask another question. David, you mentioned that you expect to see call waiting times coming down. Do you have a timescale to work to for bringing them down? Do you have targets for that so that we will be able to analyse what improvement looks like?

How are processing times impacting on clients? What is the view of the impact that they are having, and how does Social Security Scotland keep people informed and updated throughout the process, while they are waiting? Is there regular communication? Are there set points in the process at which communication is proactive?

I am grateful to rise on behalf of Scottish Labour to wind up on the bill.

There is a huge degree of consensus on the bill. As I said in my opening speech, the bill can go forward. However, it is vitally important to say that we could go further.

I will not rehash those points, because the cabinet secretary heard them quite clearly.

I do not know whether there is some slight heckling from members at the back, telling me to get on with it. No, there is not.

I want to add to what we have heard already. It really is a privilege, for me as a parliamentarian, and for us all, to interact with charities in our work. We all get to experience, in our constituencies and our regions, the huge breadth and depth of wonderful charities that are doing amazing work.

In this place, we host charities probably more often than many places in Scotland do—on a daily basis. Every lunch time or evening in the Parliament, the place is brimming with different organisations coming to talk to their parliamentarians. Those are very often charitable organisations, which do a range of important work. There are charities that provide food parcels for older people; health charities that raise money for our children’s hospices and hospitals; and charities that support our armed forces and veterans community. As I said, it is a great honour to be able to engage with as many of them as we can.

Indeed, this evening, I will host a number of HIV charities from across Scotland to talk about how we progress the route towards the elimination of HIV in Scotland. Yes, Presiding Officer—that was a plug for my event this evening, so I hope that colleagues in the chamber will join me.

I am very happy, on behalf of Scottish Labour, to reiterate our support for the bill, and to reiterate the points that I have made previously about ensuring that we go further in the future. I also reiterate the point about how we deal with religious charities more broadly. I am keen to have further dialogue and discussion on that with the cabinet secretary—I know that she has made that offer previously, and I am sure that she will do so again in summing up.

I do not intend to detain the chamber for much longer than I need to, other than to say that I think that the bill commands support from members on all sides of the chamber, and it certainly commands the support of the regulator. The crucial test, however, will be whether it commands support for its provisions among charities across Scotland—those charities that we all know from our communities. That will be the next test, which is why it is vitally important that we get the monitoring and the post-legislative scrutiny right before we move on to the next phase of the review.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate, and Scottish Labour will support the bill.

Forgive me, Deputy Presiding Officer—in my previous contribution, I should have declared an interest as the chair of trustees of the Neilston War Memorial Association.

I rise to speak briefly in support of the amendment. As Jeremy Balfour has outlined, communication and understanding the obligations that are placed on charities were a key part of the evidence that was heard in committee. It is often the case that charity trustees feel anxiety, as they do not know whether they are being fully compliant with what is expected of them.

It is important that OSCR outlines clearly how it intends to do that and to review its communication strategies to ensure that no charity is left in the dark when we reflect on the changes that will come about thanks to the bill. Labour members will certainly support the amendment, and we encourage colleagues to do likewise.

I am grateful to Pauline McNeill for giving way. She knows of my deep personal interest in the issue—indeed, she will note that I had the great honour of hosting in this Parliament three people who were deeply involved with the architecture of the Good Friday agreement, as we marked 25 years of the agreement. As we have heard, they were clear that the bill will not work in achieving the consensus on reconciliation that is required, and that it does not have the support of the people of Northern Ireland. Crucially, it is relevant to people in Scotland because of the strong diaspora links between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Would the member agree that we have to respect the people of Northern Ireland on this matter?

I wish to make a brief contribution on amendment 3. I am sure that that will not come as a surprise to the Government, given my interest in the bill at stages 1 and 2.

Indeed, my colleague Rhoda Grant raised issues around controlled interests in land in relation to religious organisations and churches during scrutiny of amending regulations earlier this year. I will refer to some of the points that she raised then, which the Government has not fully addressed.

Transparency, proportionality and accuracy are fundamental. We all want a register of charity trustees, which the bill is seeking to put in place, and a register of persons holding a controlled interest in land, both being transparent and accurate. As I have said, the bill firms up the register of trustees with OSCR, thereby making clear who is in control of the charity and who is responsible for it, which is, of course, very welcome. However, there is an opportunity to deal with the concerns that many churches and religious bodies have raised in relation to the register of persons holding a controlled interest in land.

I do not view amendment 3 as one that would make organisations exempt from the register of persons holding that controlled interest; instead, it seeks to record their interest more accurately, reducing the burden to individual office bearers. The Government has, of course, exempted Scottish charitable incorporated organisations, charitable incorporated organisations that are based in England, and charitable companies limited by guarantee, arguing that they are covered by alternative transparency regimes within OSCR. Why, then, would religious charities not be covered by the new transparency regime that will list the trustees of individual charities, which we are considering in the bill? Those are the trustees whom we know will collectively make decisions on the assets of the charities, in line with the democratic structures of their organisations.

At a cursory glance, prior to coming to the chamber, I was able to access the financial income and expenditure of the churches in the community where I live and some 37 pages of entries from across the whole country just from the Church of Scotland. To further that example, the Church of Scotland contends that the regulations as they currently stand do not achieve the aim of transparency around who has a controlled interest in respect of the land that it owns. Indeed, it argues that the opposite is the case.

As members will know, the Church of Scotland will have to record individuals who hold congregational offices—the minister, the session clerk and the treasurer—who are deemed by the regulations to be the people who exercise control or have significant influence over the land although, actually, the governance of the Church of Scotland is designed to preclude individual control. I am sure that we remember from our history lessons that that was the whole point of the reformation. No single individual, including those named office bearers, has control over decision making in relation to land. The register would therefore be inaccurate and, we could argue, would not be wholly transparent or create the level of transparency that we all intended when the 2005 legislation was passed—although I was not a member of Parliament at the time.

Would it not make far more sense for the organisation to be registered as holding the controlled interest, in order to better reflect the accuracy of decision-making processes and the decisions that will be taken on the land in the organisation, given that the details of those organisations are publicly available and that trustees will, by virtue of the bill, be on the charity register?

I will finish where I started, with my colleague Rhoda Grant, who said during the scrutiny of an SSI that the

“legislation ... was designed to close tax loopholes and to create transparency about who the beneficial owners of land are—especially when that land is held in companies that are registered in tax havens”.

It should not, however,

“put an unacceptable burden on Scottish churches.”—[Official Report, 16 March 2023; c 114.]

We must be able to find a solution that has balance, transparency, proportionality and accuracy.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in this stage 3 debate. I have previously referred members to my entry in the register of interests as a charity trustee. It is a great joy and honour to be a charity trustee. I am sure that many other members of the Parliament and many people across Scotland feel a sense of pride in the charities that they work for. It is important that we bear that in mind today as we discuss issues that will directly impact them and the charities for which they do so much good work.

I also put on record my thanks to everyone who has been involved in bringing the bill to its conclusion. In the classic style of the Parliament, I came to it late in the day. I joined the committee just in time to approve the stage 1 report and then to take part in the stage 2 proceedings, so all the hard work was done by my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy, who worked with her committee colleagues to take the bill through its various evidence-taking sessions and challenged the Government robustly at various points to ensure that we have the best bill possible today. I thank her for that. I also thank everyone involved from the clerking team, the bill team and everyone who has worked to improve the bill.

As I said at the outset of my speech, we should take the opportunity to thank all those who are involved in charities across Scotland. We heard from the cabinet secretary some of the impressive statistics about the work that charities in Scotland do and the money that they raise for a range of charitable causes. It is important that we put on record our thanks to them.

Scottish Labour will support the passage of the bill at decision time. We believe the bill to be a welcome and overdue step to reform charity legislation. It will increase the transparency and accountability of charities, which is important in progressing charity law and bringing its key aspects into line with other regulatory frameworks in the United Kingdom—those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I will take some time to focus on where we can go further. I am heartened again to hear the cabinet secretary’s commitment to the wider review of charity regulation and law and to engagement with the SCVO. However, the review cannot just be about the structures; we have to take a fundamental look at how we can better support charities and the work that they do.

I highlighted in my speech in the stage 1 debate the importance of ensuring that we consider issues such as the funding cycle for charities. Many charities live year to year in terms of the funding that they receive from the Government or local authorities. That can prove challenging when trying to plan for the future or to make projects go beyond just the one-year phase.

Approaches such as three-year funding cycles have been talked about for a long time in the Parliament, but we never seem to have got to a place where we are offering charities a three-year deal. It is important that, in the conversations that the cabinet secretary has with the SCVO, she listens to its asks on behalf of the wider sector and tries to bring them into the scope of the broader work that she is keen to do on charity regulation and the advancement of charities in Scotland.

I want to briefly say something about Jeremy Balfour’s amendment 3, which was not agreed to. I outlined my concerns about the burdens that the register of controlled interests in land has placed on churches. I think that we need to look at that issue again. I will not rehearse the arguments that I made during our consideration of amendment 3, but I ask the cabinet secretary to reflect on what she has heard today, as well as on what she has heard from churches and other religious organisations over the course of the bill’s passage through Parliament, and to tell Parliament what more she thinks can be done to engage properly with the churches to give them the comfort and support that they need in order to be compliant with the law. The last thing that we want to see is anyone who is involved in those organisations in good faith facing any kind of challenges because they have not complied.

I reiterate our support for the bill, which we will support at decision time. However, we feel that we can go further to support our charities in Scotland, and we are open and willing to work with anyone—especially the cabinet secretary—in that vein to ensure that the review covers all the issues that I have mentioned and supports a good, thriving third and voluntary sector here in Scotland.

Things are getting worse, not better. In Scotland, the average wait for processing adult disability payment applications more than doubled between September 2022 and April 2023. People have been waiting for an average of 19 weeks for a decision, which is more than double the average waiting time for people in England and Wales who are applying for personal independence payments through the Department for Work and Pensions.

That is an unacceptable position. We do not even have a full picture of the longest waits, and many members around the chamber will have mailbags full of stories of the inordinate waits that people are experiencing. We need granular data to be able to show the full picture of the situation in Scotland. Will the cabinet secretary agree to publish full data, so that we understand the scale of the problem and can measure her responses against it?

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the reported delays in processing times for adult disability payments. (S6T-01488)