Chamber and committees

Another aspect, which I alluded to earlier, is the fact that the spend on, in particular, adult disability payment and child disability payment, is preventative. If we were to reduce the amount of support that we are giving to people, would we then see an increase in demand on our health services or on our social care services, for example? There is a need for us to consider the implications of reducing a benefit on, for example, the health service.

Another area attached to that is that, if you reduced the eligibility for disabled people, you would also, by default, reduce the eligibility for carers benefits, and many unpaid carers in our constituencies would then not receive the financial support that they currently receive. Although I do not have the figures to hand, we can provide to the committee the discussion—which the committee will be well aware of—about the contribution that unpaid carers make and the impact that it would have on our health and social care if they did not do what they do. So, it is about the important aspects of what would happen within health and to those unpaid carers if we reduced expenditure on social security. We can provide further information on the issue after the meeting.

It was initially a Jeremy Balfour amendment, but then it was a Scottish Government amendment. We will have to check the record to see how that vote went. We were already required by statute—the 2018 act—to increase certain benefits, but Parliament voted to extend that universally.

Yes.

Again, we would separate the £36 million from what currently happens with the benefits. Ian Davidson could furnish the committee with further details about the current discussions with the DWP. The type of information that we need is, for example, the benefit on which an overpayment has been made. That will assist us in our approach to tackling that. Until we get that information, it is quite challenging to hypothecate that money—to say where it will go.

I hope that it is useful for the committee to point to the work that we currently do. The agency already undertakes that type of work to enable it to deal with overpayments in instances of both error and fraud, which are treated differently, as I hope that the committee agrees that they should be. We will continue to do that work, which, in essence, provides a guide to the types of work that could then be done to recover some of the £36 million. To be clear, the DWP would not have recovered the full £36 million in any scenario, because there are different success rates for recovery across various cases.

We need information about the £36 million. What we do to recover the money will be based on the agency’s work. David Wallace can go into further detail about how we do that for different benefits, if it would help to provide the committee with examples. We take those issues very seriously, but cases are dealt with differently depending on the individual context.

As I say, part of the challenge around that figure, which David Wallace mentioned, is that many of those cases will still be in train. We would start off with the initial approaches to recover that money, and if it is not possible to do so, the case can move through the process. David might want to provide some further information on that.

I will always challenge the agency—as the agency will challenge itself—to improve those numbers.

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.