Chamber and committees

I reiterate your point about intergovernmental links, which must be improved. You mentioned records that are on paper. What percentage of records that are now within Social Security Scotland are in paper form?

From looking at the original estimates, the Social Security Scotland staff requirement has doubled from the original estimate of 1,900 to more than 3,500, so what you have just said does not stack up against what has actually happened.

Bob Doris will be aware that I am on the record supporting an extension of that payment. I note that the Scottish Government’s motion does not include any mention of the issue. What is on the table, though, is my amendment calling for doubling of the Scottish child payment within this financial year. Will the member support my amendment this evening? He seems to have lost his voice on the issue. I respectfully suggest to SNP and Green members that they, too, get their houses in order when they come to the chamber to ask questions of Opposition members.

One of the areas in which I believe urgent action is needed is the long-term impact that lockdown has had on children’s learning, which we heard about during education questions. Long-term system-wide support is required if every child is to catch up and recover from the educational disruption that we have seen during the pandemic, which has had an impact on child development across Scotland. We know that prior to the pandemic SNP ministers were failing to close the educational attainment gap; indeed, the Audit Scotland report that was published in March this year exposed the lack of progress in closing the poverty-related attainment gap.

That is why Scottish Conservatives want the Scottish Government to focus more on prioritising young people’s education with delivery of additional support for catch-up schemes for disadvantaged children and young people.

It is also important to consider the skills and training opportunities that are available for young people to find work in key growth sectors. The loss of more than 100,000 college training places under the SNP Government has clearly impacted on the number of opportunities that are available for young people. Making sure that young people in Scotland who are not in training or education have opportunities to access schemes and apprenticeships, for example, is critical and is something that we all need to work to make happen.

I want to take this opportunity, as I did in Tuesday’s debate on health and social care, to specifically thank and highlight the contribution that is being made by unpaid carers, especially young carers, during the pandemic. The pandemic has significantly increased the number of unpaid carers across our country. Research in June 2020 showed that 392,000 more people had become unpaid carers, taking the total to more than 1.1 million of our fellow Scots now taking on caring for a family member.

It is estimated that 45,000 young people across Scotland are now carers. Undertaking a caring role is a key factor that contributes to poverty. Whether someone is a paid carer or an unpaid carer, they are more likely to live in poverty as a result. Given the importance of care to people and our society, and the invaluable contribution that unpaid carers make, that cannot be right.

The pandemic has exposed the extent to which our NHS and social care services rely on unpaid carers. Scottish Conservatives welcome the doubling of the carers allowance supplement, and we want more progress in support for Scotland’s carers, especially our young carers.

Scottish Conservatives support early action to extend payments for carers after a bereavement and we support a new support package for carers, who often have to give up work to care for a loved one. We also want there to be help to access training, and more mental health support.

I hope that ministers will work with the Scottish Conservatives to seriously consider as soon as possible reforms to the young carers grant and reforms to entitlement, in order to allow younger carers to qualify for the carers allowance supplement.

For care-experienced young Scots, we need to ensure that the Government retains a real focus on improving access to services, transition and care. The recommendations of the independent care review were widely supported across Parliament, but we have seen little progress from ministers on implementing that promise, or a national minimum allowance for foster carers, as was previously committed to and as is in place in other parts of the UK. My colleague Meghan Gallacher will outline more on that important issue later. Care-experienced young people expect the promises that have been made by ministers to be kept and action to be taken to implement the recommendations of the review.

I turn to the critical issue of housing and homelessness. The number of children in temporary accommodation reached the highest level on record before the pandemic. At the end of March 2020, there were 7,280 children living in temporary accommodation due to homelessness. That is the highest number since records began in 2002 and represents a 7 per cent increase on the previous year. In the year leading up to the pandemic, someone was made homeless in Scotland every 17 minutes. We know that the number of people and families in temporary accommodation has increased over the course of the pandemic.

I apologise for the length of the title of my motion, Presiding Officer. I am grateful to members for supporting it, and to those who have remained in the chamber to take part in the debate.

Across Scotland, there are young people who face barriers to employment, which are often multiple and complex. One of the key barriers is caring responsibilities, but learning disabilities or health issues can also make it hard for someone to get or maintain a job. Now, more than ever, those who are furthest away from the labour market face multiple disadvantages, which are compounded by the impact of the pandemic.

However, it is my pleasure to be able to offer some good news—and don’t we just need that? Today, we celebrate the 10,000th person to find a job through the community jobs Scotland programme. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations set up community jobs Scotland 10 years ago, in 2011, and employers and young people in every part of Scotland have benefited from the programme. It was originally set up to reduce youth unemployment, but it has now become more specialised, and it supports the most disadvantaged young people in Scotland. That includes people who are care experienced or are carers themselves; armed forces early service leavers; people with criminal convictions; and people who have disabilities or health or mental health issues. The jobs are real jobs, with a fair wage.

There are many examples of the positive outcomes that the programme has delivered over the years, and I will share one with members today. Isabelle was employed as a youth worker and community centre assistant at Centre 81 in Garelochhead. She said:

“At the beginning of my placement, I lacked confidence, I was very shy, I had really low stamina and this really worried me in relation to whether I could maintain my placement. Over the months, I have been really supported by my colleagues and my confidence has grown. I can now talk to people much better and my stamina has definitely increased, and I feel much stronger and able to move on to the next part of my life. I have gained knowledge and experience and my communication with others has also dramatically developed. I have also gained skills such as patience, reliability, motivation, dependability and flexibility. As well as having my goal of further education, I feel I have greatly improved my future employability prospects through this placement.”

Community jobs scotland is also good for employers, one of whom said:

“Through Community Jobs Scotland placements, we support, develop and grow young people’s confidence on placements. We are a youth project. While utilising their skills to further develop youth work and outreach work, there recently has developed social enterprise growth and development within their organisations.”

In having the debate, we are recognising the positive impact that community jobs Scotland has had on the lives of over 10,000 young people across Scotland. The programme has provided young people with much-needed security while they have built up their skills to get meaningful and valuable paid experience with real responsibilities. CJS provides flexibility and personalised support and has given young people hope for their future and set them on the road to success.

Those third-sector jobs have also benefited every local community across Scotland, which means that charities, social enterprises and community organisations can build their capacity and increase and enhance the vital services that they deliver. We have all seen how important it has been over the past 18 months to have the support of the third sector especially. The 10,000th job has been created in Impact Arts, which is a great charity here in Edinburgh—and in Glasgow, Ayrshire and beyond—working in community art projects across Scotland. Over the years, Impact Arts has employed 155 young people through community jobs Scotland, from furniture restorers to graphic designers. Not only have so many young people been supported to develop their skills and get the secure, paid fair work that they need, but Impact Arts has also hugely benefited.

In my area in Edinburgh and the Lothians, there are countless examples of interesting and conscientious businesses, such as HomeAid West Lothian and its sister programme the Midlothian Advice & Resource Centre—MARC—which has taken on and employed numerous young people since the start of the programme 11 years ago; or the Cyrenians community hospital gardens and many more. This year, the community jobs Scotland programme is expected to support up to 560 young people, involving 176 employers across the country, which could be large household names, charities or small community groups.

Like Isabelle, most of the young people who come through community jobs Scotland go on to successful outcomes. Indeed, community jobs Scotland produces better outcomes for some of the most disadvantaged young people in the country than any other employability initiative in Scotland. We are here tonight—this afternoon, even—to acknowledge the success of community jobs Scotland. [Interruption.] It has been a long day, Presiding Officer.

We also need to recognise that we need to do everything that we can right now to make sure that this generation of young Scots get the support that they need and that they do not become a lost generation when it comes to employment. The SCVO’s recent submission to the Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee called on the Scottish Government to extend and fund programmes such as the community jobs Scotland programme for another year at least, until local employment partnerships are ready to deliver more employability programmes, and to ensure that the voluntary sector is included in a comprehensive and inclusive whole-system response to the pandemic. I hope that, in closing the debate, the minister can outline whether that will be taken forward by the Scottish Government to ensure that we have additional funding available.

I thank members for their support for the motion.

Over the past decade, the member’s party has supported the SNP when it has cut local government budgets. We have seen a 7 per cent reduction over the past decade. Now that her party is in government, will that be turned round, with fair funding for local government delivered?

What impact does the minister think cutting £20 million from alcohol and drug partnerships has had in the city of Dundee?

The support that has been provided and the reforms that we have seen have been to try to prevent that very issue. I welcome the steps that local authorities have taken to provide emergency accommodation during the pandemic. However, we now need a long-term plan to end homelessness—something that SNP ministers have failed to do for 14 years. Rough sleeping and homelessness need a system-wide shift towards a preventative model. I agree with the cabinet secretary: I hope that there is genuinely an opportunity for us to look at that.

SNP ministers pledged to tackle homelessness by scaling up the housing first approach, as my colleague Stephen Kerr mentioned, but we have missed previous targets of supporting 800 people into housing first tenancies. The 2021-22 programme for government states that ministers will

“invest ... in a new Ending Homelessness Together Fund”

and that

“Funding for rapid rehousing will also support the scaling up of Housing First”.

However, we know the pathfinder total number of people moving into their own home through the housing first project. Only 381 people, not 800, had actually entered secure tenancies by the end of November 2020. We know that there has to be improvement from the Government.

There is a huge amount of work to do and, as Crisis Scotland stated in its useful briefing ahead of today’s debate:

“Ending homelessness does not mean that nobody will ever lose their home again. It means that, through prevention, homelessness only happens very rarely.”

At present, around 8 per cent of the Scottish population, or one in 12 people, have experienced homelessness. I very much support the calls to bring forward the preventative model, so where we can we will work with ministers to achieve that. Action to prevent homelessness should start six months before a person faces losing their home. Public bodies including health services should ask about people’s housing situations in order to try to identify issues earlier.

I hope that the recommendations that were set out to ministers through the homelessness prevention review group will now be taken forward. Those recommendations were supported by every party in Parliament, and I hope that the discussions that I have already had with the cabinet secretary can help to ensure that we make the issue a national priority.

It is clear that we need proper cross-portfolio efforts to make progress in addressing poverty, in achieving specific reductions across the board and in meeting the targets that we all supported.

There are also longer-term issues that the Parliament must consider, if we are to bring about real change. For example, we must take action to address intergenerational unemployment and we must provide opportunities to genuinely improve social mobility.

As I said at the start of my speech, I hope that Parliament can, where possible, find agreement and consensus on many issues and areas of work, so that in five years’ time we can all be proud of the effort that we have put into tackling poverty and inequality in Scotland.

I move amendment S6M-01248.1, to leave out from first “welcomes” to “across society” and insert:

“agrees that tackling child poverty is a national mission; calls on the Scottish Government to double the Scottish Child Payment within the next financial year; notes with concern the recent figures that show that 5,000 families have been living in temporary accommodation for at least a year; further notes that an Audit Scotland report released in March 2021 exposed the lack of progress that has been made in closing the poverty-related attainment gap and calls on the Scottish Government to do more to prioritise young people’s education; notes the recommendations of the Independent Care Review and calls on the Scottish Government to set out in more detail how it plans to implement The Promise Scotland; calls on the Scottish Government to implement a national minimum allowance for foster carers, as has been previously committed to; welcomes the doubling of the Carer’s Allowance Supplement this year, but regrets that the Scottish Government will not take control of all devolved benefit powers until 2025”.

The number of homeless deaths in Scotland rose by nearly a third over two years. Would the member support my calls for the Government to hold a full review of access to healthcare for homeless people and rough sleepers, especially given the drug deaths that we have seen recently?

I will say exactly the same as I said to one of our back benchers. My motion seeks to make sure that we double the Scottish child payment during the current financial year. Will members support that, or are they about to vote against it?

Is the cabinet secretary concerned that the costs of setting up Social Security Scotland have now doubled and that we are now looking at £100 million being spent on staff in 2022, to deliver just £386 million of additional benefits? What work is the Government doing to look at the cost overruns?