Chamber and committees

I thank my fellow committee members and the clerks for their work in producing the report. We can all be proud of the report, even if the situation that it describes falls far short of ideal. As a member of the committee, I also thank the many organisations that gave evidence to us for their invaluable contributions. I agree with my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy that it was an eye-opening experience.

The committee convener highlighted the section of the report relating to school meals debt. My colleague Martin Whitfield noted how little the threshold for free schools meals has changed in the past 20 years. I hope that the Scottish Government will look at the aspect of that that is under its control and make it part of any efforts to combat child poverty.

I agree with Paul McLennan that it is incredibly important, in relation to the issues discussed in the report, that the UK Government ensures that benefits are uprated with inflation. Maggie Chapman rightly noted the fundamental problems of low pay and in-work poverty and the need to address those.

I am grateful to Gillian Martin for highlighting the lack of data regarding people from ethnic minorities. That is a problem that we face all too often in the Scottish Parliament. My colleague Michael Marra noted the value of Scottish Labour’s cost of living plan and how a Scottish Labour-run council has been doing great work to take action on the cost of living.

A common theme that came up again and again in the committee and is represented in the report is that of false economy. We have systems in place to try to mitigate the effects of poverty and to try to ease people out of debt but, as Douglas Lumsden noted, the failure to provide and promote early intervention can lead to later, more costly interventions.

Evictions are an example of that. The committee heard that there is no moral or business case for threatening a tenant who is in arrears with eviction. The committee was told that the cost of evicting a single male with low support needs is in the region of £24,000. We begin to see a picture whereby every eviction is a failure. It is a failure of the system that should have been there to help and yet did not—it is a failure of the social safety net. That failure costs us even more in the long run.

Miles Briggs expressed his hope that UK Government policy on welfare could be looked at, given that the committee has heard that it perpetrates poverty in relation to young parents. I welcome that.

We see similar problems in the approach to debt—missed opportunities that cost more later. We cannot afford—monetarily or morally—to apply such false economies across our society. It is clear that we need interventions where they are most effective in people’s lives. Such interventions often end up being more cost effective for the state, too.

I urge the Scottish Government to think very carefully about its policy response to the committee’s report. We must be vigilant against a penny-pinching approach to early interventions.

Pam Duncan-Glancy highlighted the impact of funding cuts on the third sector organisations that are operating on the front lines of the crisis. The nature of that false economy—of trying to save money on early intervention services—can lead to catastrophic costs further down the line. Those costs can be greater both for the Government and for the real lives of the people behind the figures and case studies that we have heard about today.

I hope that the Scottish Government takes note not only of the scale of the challenges ahead, which the committee has highlighted, but of the strategic thinking that will be required to deal with them.

Good morning. Most of my questions have been answered, but I have one small question for the minister. Has the Scottish Government considered the impact of the cliff edge on social mobility?

In cases where home education is a matter of necessity, what support can the Scottish Government provide to ensure that children have the connectivity and the equipment that are needed for a modern education?

In its justification for the cuts to concessionary travel, the Scottish Government cited

“Forecast reduction in patronage numbers and fare levels.”

Given Scotland’s commitments to net zero, would it not make more sense to address the reduction in numbers instead of using that to justify cuts? Is that not another false economy from the Scottish Government?

To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the impact of its announced £37.6 million reduction in the budget for concessionary travel. (S6O-01397)

I will start by offering my congratulations to the young people who passed their exams this summer. Their years in education have been more disrupted than any in living memory, and they can be proud—rightly—of their achievements. The legacy of Covid will take many years to filter through our education system. Unfortunately, Covid has intensified problems that have existed for years.

I am, therefore, dismayed by the motion, which is the sort of motion that we have come to expect from the Scottish Government. It is mostly self-congratulatory, with only occasional reference to the idea that not everything is rosy.

However, we are only 18 months down the line since the joint report from the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission, which found inconsistent progress in the national improvements. Although the Scottish Government is content to pretend that all the problems started with Covid-19, the report also said that the poverty-related attainment gap remains wide and that inequalities have been exacerbated by Covid-19. Those problems were not created by the pandemic; we know that those inequalities have been there for many years and we know that they have repercussions right through our society.

The Scottish Labour amendment highlights the scale of the poverty-related attainment gap this year, but we should not be tempted to believe that it ends with this school year. We know that those inequalities filter through society and that they entrench themselves geographically and generationally. The more those inequalities persist, the more Scotland will literally and figuratively be poorer. It will be poorer in the lost human potential of people who could have gone on to greater things but who were held back by the circumstances of their birth. It will be poorer as the effects accumulate and blight particular areas and communities across Scotland.

We know that poverty and race are closely correlated in Scotland. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that poverty levels among people in minority ethnic communities in Scotland are double the national average, and rising. The Scottish Government always has warm words on matters of equality, but when we see educational inequality being repeated year after year, even in the years before Covid, we should be aware of exactly what that means for marginalised people across Scotland. By allowing the poverty-related attainment gap in education to become entrenched, we are limiting the life chances of people in ethnic minority communities. Therefore, we are also continuing the cycle that leads to poverty becoming entrenched in those communities.

Surely we can hope for better than that. In so many ways, Scotland has come so far. Here, in Edinburgh, we have recently had the slavery and colonialism legacy review group, chaired by my friend Sir Geoff Palmer, which has done much to help our city to come to terms with its past.

I am sorry—I have a lot to get through.

What good is coming to terms with the past, however, if we are entrenching inequalities in future generations? That is partly why I strongly believe in anti-racist reform in our education system. As I have said in the chamber before, I praise the Scottish Government for setting up its race equality and anti-racism in education programme, but, the last time I raised the issue, I was promised that we would hear more about it over the summer. What happened?

I firmly believe that we need an education system that addresses both the inequalities that ethnic minorities in it face and the injustices of Scotland’s past. It must address the inequalities that I have mentioned, it must contain curriculum reform to address the legacy of colonialism and wider racism, and it must work to create an actively anti-racist Scotland. Only then will we start to make social progress that is worthy of the warm words of the Scottish Government.

The Government’s motion does not express the reality of the inequality that Scottish education faces. I will support the Scottish Labour amendment.

Good morning, panel. I will put Dr Hosie in the spotlight again. The committee has heard again and again, particularly when discussing equalities matters, that there is not enough data or that data is not collected. How much progress has been made in improving data sources on equalities?

The committee has been made aware of the impact of the cost of living crisis on single-parent families. Is there enough concern about the vulnerability of that group to poverty, including child poverty?

How effective are impact assessments as an exercise? How can we better ensure that they are taken seriously and not seen as just another hoop to jump through?