Chamber and committees

The Government has six priority groups for the action that it is taking to reduce poverty. Are you concerned that, among all those groups bar one, child poverty is going up? In particular, it has gone up by 4 percentage points among ethnic minority households in the past decade, it has gone up by 5 percentage points among lone parent households and it has gone up by 8 percentage points among households with a baby under one. The Scottish Government has extensive powers to support lone parents and women into work, so do you recognise that there has been a failure in that regard?

With respect, the cabinet secretary would acknowledge that the Scottish Government has not produced a medium-term financial strategy for quite some time.

Growth is increasing.

Good morning. Cabinet secretary, when your party came to power, relative child poverty was at 23 per cent after housing costs were taken into account. Last year, as we have heard, the figure was 22 per cent, so there has been a 1 percentage point fall in 18 years. The Government’s child poverty summary says:

“in recent years, both relative and absolute child poverty have shown little consistent change”.

Do you accept that that is perhaps just a polite way of saying that you have not moved the dial in 18 years?

If you could cover the point about lone parents, that would be really helpful.

It is encouraging that the cabinet secretary continues to seek engagement on the UK child poverty strategy, which is important. I note her comments about the delay to the strategy’s publication, but she will recognise that Governments often have to take more time in order to understand the work that they are doing. For example, publication of the Scottish Government’s medium-term financial strategy has been delayed again. The Finance and Public Administration Committee has had a number of things to say about that, and its delay has an impact on what we are discussing this morning.

The scope of the UK task force is very important. The cabinet secretary knows my view on the two-child limit: the UK Government should act on that. However, as with any task force, any proposed measures have to be paid for, and I think that that is part of the reason why more time is needed. The Scottish Government, which includes the cabinet secretary, has opposed all the UK Government’s budgetary and taxation decisions—all the revenue-raising measures in the budget have been opposed. I am keen to understand her view on how we should pay for some of the interventions if she is not in favour of the tax-raising measures in the UK budget.

I add my thanks to Michelle Thomson for lodging the motion and opening the debate; I recognise the way that we have engaged across parties in the chamber to ensure that the debate could take place today. I also pay tribute to the excellent work of Beyond Srebrenica Scotland and to its chair, Sabina Kadic-Mackenzie, for all her efforts in ensuring that we protect the memory of Srebrenica and educate people about what happened there 30 years ago.

To that end, I urge colleagues to join the events in Parliament today. There will be a drop-in in the Fleming room, where some of the young people whom Karen Adam referenced will talk to members, and a photograph will be taken outside at quarter past 2. I hope that colleagues will be able to join us in those endeavours.

Like Michelle Thomson, I was honoured to take part in the delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina in March, along with minister Siobhian Brown and many others from across public life in Scotland. It was one of the most profound things that I have done as an MSP and, as Michelle Thomson referenced, a great opportunity to understand and encounter people who lived through those horrendous experiences 30 years ago.

When I was in that delegation, each evening I tried to write something to capture my thoughts and experiences. In the speaking time that I have, I will read to colleagues one of the reflections that I wrote on the day that we came back from Srebrenica:

The sun is slowly dipping below the hill. There has been some warmth today and all around are hints of spring, but as evening falls there is a chill that seems to reach down to us from the mountains. Nzad has just finished speaking to us. He is framed by row upon row of white gravestones. He survived a mass execution as a child and walked with bullet wounds to his head and stomach for days to reach safety. He is a softly spoken man. He speaks calmly and generously answers our questions. He speaks about his daughters, who just yesterday played with Bosnian Serb girls in the local volleyball team.

Despite the horrors done to him and to those he loved, he wants a better future for his children. A silent reverence lingers before we rise to walk one last time in the fading light around the thousands of graves, touching the names etched into the grey stone on the Srebrenica genocide memorial—each a son, a father, a brother, a husband.

There is something incomprehensible here—something that makes me want to stay longer, to try to understand, to cry out, to do something, although nothing seems to meet the enormity. The journey here reminded us of the fragility of the peace agreement and the prevalence of denial of the genocide in the Republika Srpska. In each service station and each town, there would be people who had turned on their neighbours, people who had stayed silent in the face of what was happening, and people who even carried out those unspeakable acts. They are walking these roads, sipping coffee, watching our bus pass.

We visited the memorial centre at the battery factory, which was the Dutch UN base at Potocari, and we retraced the footsteps of those days in July 1995. We were all rendered speechless by video footage of what happened after the UN allowed the Bosnian Serb forces to separate boys and men from women and girls. Promises of safe passage to free Bosnian territory were a lie.

In the video, filmed by their executioners, we watched six men shot dead. The two youngest were spared until they had dragged the four bodies of their comrades into a shallow grave. There are no words. We all reach out to each other without speaking as we climb the stairs to meet the directors of the centre.

Before we left, we met Mother Fadala. She speaks to us at her shop, selling flowers, books and memorial items. Like all the mothers, she lost everything. The shop is her defiance, her reason to go on. The authorities of the Republika Srpska do not want her here, but this unassuming, smiling small lady in her 80s is a rock, unmovable, strong. She tells us that soon she will travel to the United Nations in New York to call for the international community not to forget and to do more. This is what the mothers do. They stand because others cannot.

In the darkness of our journey back to Sarajevo, there is much to process. I think of the sun setting on those rows and rows of white stones and the words that are written in the books held in common by the Abrahamic faith. What have you done? Listen—your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.

Clearly, what happens at the moment is that people often fall through the gaps. You are describing what is perhaps a more comprehensive approach to make sure that that does not happen. When considering any disadvantages of a mixed model, are there still risks of gaps in provision and the most vulnerable not being able to readily access a service?

Throughout our inquiry, we have been looking at the mixed model as proposed in the Government’s discussion paper. We had a bit of a discussion with the previous panel on the finance and the money that is put into legal aid by the Government. Is it your view that a mixed model would save money?

The Law Society gave evidence on its frustrations, but it also spoke about the opportunity that it sees because of where we are now and because things are beginning to move. It was hopeful that certain proposals, which I think it described as tweaks to the system, might be implemented in the summer, before the end of the parliamentary session. Are you working towards that?