Chamber and committees

Will the member give way?

It can take more than a decade for offshore wind farms to complete the planning and consent process. The Government wants to cut that time, but industry is sceptical that enough specialists and planners will be recruited. What can the minister tell industry to reassure it that the Government has made progress on that? In other words, how many more planners have been recruited in the last while?

One of the first decisions that I took when I became the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was to reverse our party’s previous opposition to the policy. I am pleased that the Government has increased the minimum unit price to 65p and I think that the supporting evidence is pretty compelling. Can the cabinet secretary try to understand the opponents of the policy whose arguments seem to imply that making alcohol cheaper will somehow deal with alcohol harm in this country?

Not just now. Although it is right to reflect on the decline of child poverty levels, we have not dealt with the root causes of why we have such high levels of child poverty. I am not saying that that is wholly at the door of the Scottish Government or wholly at the door of the Scottish Government to resolve, but I would have expected some kind of discussion today by the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice on the ambitions for reducing those levels.

Paul O’Kane was right to talk about in-work poverty and the need to boost the economy. I would have hoped that the Government would perhaps say that the high level of children who are accessing the payment is not good enough and that we must try to drive down those numbers, because that would be a reflection of more people being not just in work but in well-paid work.

I think that we are all learning from the impact of that period and the financial decisions that were made, and how those affect future decisions. That is right, and I have certainly learned lessons from that period. We would rather not have made some of those choices, but they were made because of the financial position at the time. Nevertheless, we all need to reflect on how we learn the lessons from that period.

I, too, have been briefed by the people from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health down in the garden lobby, and I understand the point that they are making. However, we need a greater emphasis from the Government on the economic aspects and the economic opportunity. There should be not necessarily a celebration of reducing child poverty but an impatience to deal with its root causes rather than just its symptoms, which is what the child payment is doing, in effect.

I want to deal with a couple of technical transitional issues. One has already been referred to, which is the delays with ADP. I understand the cabinet secretary’s point that, as a result of gathering information on behalf of the client, the process is taking longer, but that is having a big financial impact on the individuals who are having to wait longer. The target was eight to 10 weeks, but the waiting time is now 16.6 weeks, which is a long time. I cannot believe that, with PIP, the process is taking nine weeks. We should aspire to be much better than that, and I hope that there is an impatience on that front, too, to drive down those waiting times, because that is having a big impact.

My second point is on the transition. I have a constituent who was on PIP and had a change of circumstances when her health deteriorated. She applied to have that change of circumstance recognised, which triggered the transfer to adult disability payment. Subsequently, her payments have been backdated to the point of transition rather than the point of change of circumstance, which has resulted in her losing out on £1,000. For her, that is an enormous sum of money. We must have a means to backdate the funds to the point at which her circumstances changed. That is when she needed more money; it was not at the point of the technical transition from PIP to ADP.

I hope that the cabinet secretary can look at that problem and resolve it, because I do not want more of my constituents to face a loss of £1,000.

Collette Stevenson has made a not-unreasonable point, but does she accept the financial impact on people who have to wait so much longer to get benefits? Is that not a factor?

I appreciate that but, in principle, does the cabinet secretary accept that we need to backdate beyond the transfer from PIP to ADP to the point of the change of circumstance? Does she accept, in principle, that that should happen?

The leader of Fife Council, David Ross, has written to the First Minister to warn that Fife is teetering on the edge of a housing emergency. He has pointed out that the capital funding for the affordable housing budget has been reduced by 26 per cent, which, he says, is making the situation a whole lot worse. He wants the cabinet secretary to explain why that budget has been cut by 26 per cent when the overall capital budget has been cut by only 4.3 per cent.

When the minister was at Ibrox primary school this morning, did she discuss the very low take-up of the early learning and childcare provision for two-year-olds? We have discussed the issue before, but the latest figures show that there has been a reduction in the number of two-year-olds who are accessing that provision. What steps is she taking, together with the education team, to make sure that that figure increases?

John Swinney will recall how we got here. It was as a result of the Smith commission. I know that John Swinney was not wholly satisfied with the process, but there was significant movement through those cross-party discussions. At the start, I think that not many of the UK parties were in favour of the devolution of significant parts of the social security budget; however, by the end of the process, we agreed that, in total, combined with what had already been devolved, there would be a £3 billion budget for it. It was quite significant at the time, because it was probably the first time that a service was disentangled across the UK and a new service devolved to the Scottish Government. Therefore, the challenges of delivering it are not to be underestimated.

That is why at that time we committed to work in partnership across the Parliament to build a consensus on forging a new social security system, in many ways similar to when the national health service was forged after the war, although there was more collaboration then on building a consensus. I think that that commitment is to be welcomed.

However, I have been concerned slightly with today’s debate. I recognise that the child payment has significantly reduced the levels of child poverty—there is no doubt that it has. I do not think that Jeremy Balfour is right when he says that the Scottish Government has just replicated what Westminster is doing but in a more inefficient way—I do not think that that is correct.

I think that something has been missing from this discussion.