Chamber and committees

I alluded to some of that work in my earlier response to Craig Hoy. I went through, in some detail, the areas that are being dealt with. The part that we did not get on to is the work that is already going on within the agency to examine the quality of decision making. Rather than repeat what I have already said, can we perhaps talk about the next aspect to that?

The target is to ensure that the policy is working effectively. Rather than that work having an arbitrary target, where we say that it will bring down social security or that we expect it to deliver a particular level of saving, it aims to ensure that the policies are fit for purpose and are working in line with the policy intent that Parliament agreed to.

The importance of such work is that we can use it to go back to first principles. What is a review supposed to do? Is it fulfilling the purpose of a review, which is to ensure that if someone is eligible for the benefit they keep that benefit, and if they are not eligible for the benefit they do not get it?

What could be inferred from the material in the press is that the Government expected to get £36 million that it is no longer getting. To me, the black hole reference implied that, somehow, because the Scottish Government was not taking part in one part of the UK Government bill—although we are taking part in other parts of it—we were setting aside £36 million. I hope that we have demonstrated to the committee that that is far from the case.

What we have disagreed with the UK Government about is the approach to recovering such money. We will recover it through the types of work that David Wallace’s agency already undertakes. That can be extrapolated to the work that will go on with the additional historical debt, which will now be transferred.

I disagree with the suggestion that our benefits are unsustainable. It goes back to the point that eligibility for our benefits has been proposed by the Government and supported by the Parliament. There have been very few exceptions whereby there have been votes against or even abstentions in votes on the current eligibility.

We then get into an important discussion. The headline, which I often hear in the chamber, is that we need to decrease the amount that is spent on social security. The Government’s position is that we do not intend to take benefits away from people and reduce eligibility, so those who wish to see the spend on social security come down need to tell me where changes to eligibility will take place. In essence, eligibility is the biggest, most substantive change that we can make to affect the trajectory of spend.

Aside from that, we need to ensure that the system is as efficient and effective as possible, which we are doing through the mid-term reviews that have been mentioned. We need to consider continuous improvement. Mr Marra may be frustrated with me for not saying whether a certain aspect is a success, but it goes back to our continuous approach. I would never sit with my officials in our internal meetings and say that what we have at the moment is all that it should be. We discuss how to improve—how the system can get better—and how we interpret that going forward.

On the bedroom tax mitigation versus free school meals, I do not look at it in that way. With the bedroom tax, we are carrying out a sense check on what difference the mitigation makes. One key reason why we continue to mitigate the bedroom tax—people just assume that it was abolished; it has not been, and we mitigate its cost—is that it is one of the ways in which we attempt to prevent homelessness and assist people. In essence, the mitigation of the bedroom tax is an important aspect of our housing policy that helps people to stay in housing. The benefit is not just about social security; in essence, it is part of housing policy that we deliver through social security.

Indeed. That takes me to my next point, which is the very important part that child poverty delivery plans play. Social security is only one aspect of assisting people with poverty; the others are about ensuring well-paid employment and allowing people to take part in education and training.

There are different ways of dealing with poverty. Social security is a very important one, and some of the evidence that has come to the committee and others shows that it is making an impact. However, we can tackle poverty in other ways. That is why there are several legs to the child poverty delivery plan stool: employment is one of them, and the way into employment through education is clearly very important, too. It ties into the wider opportunity costs that we have in Government.

I am happy to provide further information about eligibility for two-year-olds. It is not to do with being out of work per se. The terminology that was used—

Yes. The eligibility criteria are about providing families who would benefit from additional support for those young people—

That is because we know that one of the important aspects of childcare and other services is preventative spend. Creating generational change in young people’s lives is about the impact that we can make in the earliest years. That was the reason for the term “vulnerable two-year-olds”. We now talk about “eligible two-year-olds” in relation to early learning and childcare, but that type of preventative spend is an important part of our work to improve our longer-term rates and make systemic change in relation to poverty.

As I said in my opening remarks, we recognise that, by 2029-30, additional investment is projected to be around 3.5 per cent of the total Scottish Government resource budget. That is an increase of less than 1 per cent compared with the current year, but it is still an increase.