Chamber and committees

Of course, Mr Dickie, in a Parliament of minorities, there is a balance to be struck in respect of how we split the direct cash in families’ pockets to tackle child poverty and all those other measures that you outlined. That budget process will go forward.

Mr Birt, do you want to comment briefly?

Professor Sinclair’s comments mean that I will have to ask about United Kingdom levers of power—in particular, universal credit—to tackle the issue for that group of people, about which Mr Balfour rightly raises concerns.

I want to ask more about the quality of the information that we have. When we were talking about keeping 100,000 children out of poverty or lifting 40,000 to 60,000 children out of poverty, I was conscious that, in previous evidence sessions, the committee has heard about the significant improvement that the Scottish child payment of £26.70 a week has made for young people who were in deep and entrenched poverty who have not reached that arbitrary line. It is not enough, but it has made a dramatic improvement to their lives that has not been captured in the data.

My colleague Liz Smith wants to ask a lot more about data. However—before we move on from the quality of data—are we masking some of the challenges when we talk about 40,000 to 60,000 children being lifted out of poverty, and are we also selling some successes short when we do not say more about those who remain in poverty but who have also been helped a heck of a lot by that payment, Professor Sinclair?

Could I ask a question?

I will break the habit of a lifetime to do that.

My question goes back to the Scottish child payment and is about something that came up during our work on getting people back into employment and on family and parental employment support. There is a cliff edge with the Scottish child payment because, once someone loses their entitlement to universal credit—which is a tapered in-work benefit—they lose all their Scottish child payment. Liz Smith spoke about data. Is there any data about the impact of that loss? The committee has looked at that before and I think that we will have to return to it. Mr Dickie or Mr Birt, do you have any brief reflections on that?

That is interesting. I said that my question would be split into two parts. There has been preventative work to promote best practice and prevent unintended things from happening in order to raise the quality of land management plans, but I am conscious that we have spoken about the benefits and drawbacks in relation to only a very narrow list of those who can allege a breach.

Have you considered whether there should be an explicit power whereby the land and communities commissioner would have a mix of light-touch and deep-delve, proactive approaches to making sure that there is adherence to land management plans, for lack of a better description? They could randomly pull out five or 10 examples, without any breach having been identified, and go and have a look to see what is going on. Other regulatory bodies take a similar approach. The commissioner could take a risk-based approach to compliance with land management plans. If they become aware of concerns, whether they report them or not, they should perhaps have a duty to investigate them.

I suppose that, in asking that question, I am taking the next step in considering how the power might be exercised, but the heart of it is whether there should be a power for the commissioner to do some proactive investigatory work without the reporting of a breach.

You are perhaps suggesting that there would be an implicit ability for the commission to do that, but not an explicit power. We might want to consider having an explicit power in the bill.

I turn to Malcolm Combe. Should the provision say not only that a plan must exist and be complied with but that it should be of appropriate quality? I appreciate that that is a hard thing to measure. It would be easy, surely, to develop and to secure compliance with a threadbare plan, but that would not provide a qualitative approach to ensuring that the spirit of the legislation was complied with.

Is that section clear enough? How should it be changed?

I have listened to all of this with great interest. Potential partners of Ferguson Marine will be listening to your evidence, as will competitors. Therefore, these evidence sessions, which the convener has been so diligent in scheduling, are important to the future wellbeing and prosperity of Ferguson Marine.

I will pick up on something that was said in answer to an earlier question right at the start. There was a senior manager in charge of completion of the entire vessel, but the vessel had not been broken down into sections. That meant that there seemed to be a lack of accountability on the shop floor—for want of a better description—to ensure that individual sections of the ship were nailed, and that, if a section was not, you could identify who was responsible for the slippage. Is that quite unusual in the shipbuilding industry? It seems to be crazy that one person would be directly responsible for the completion of an entire vessel. I am pleased to hear that the management and accountability structure has been changed. Mr Petticrew, was it a surprise to you when you found that was not already in place?

The point that I am making is about whether it was self-evident that there should always have been a senior manager who was responsible for each particular section of the ship.

If the current system had been in place years ago, do you think that we would be in the same situation now, or would performance have been better?