Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener. I appreciate your welcome and the committee’s five weeks of evidence taking on the bill. I appreciate the in-depth look that you are giving it.

I will go into the motivation that lies behind the bill and give the committee a flavour of why I am here in the first place. I started thinking about the bill back when we were in the middle of the pandemic. I was thinking particularly about key workers who caught Covid in the course of their work, some of whom developed long Covid and have not been able to go back to work at all. The motivation was really about how we could get long Covid on to the list of prescribed diseases in order to support those key workers, who did not have the luxury of being able to self-isolate, and how we could support them through the new employment injury assistance, which is about to be delivered by the Scottish Government now that the benefit has been devolved.

However, when I looked deeper into the current scheme, which is industrial injuries disablement benefit, the failings in that system became apparent to me, and it was clear that it is more than just people with long Covid who are in desperate need of support. You have heard evidence about the range of people who are being missed out and left behind by the current system, and about the gendered nature of the entitlement as it stands, in that only 7 per cent of applicants through the prescribed route are women. It is a social security entitlement that essentially fails half of the population.

The current system is also outdated in terms of the types of employment that it covers. It does not reflect modern workplaces in the 21st century. Essentially, it supports the male-dominated heavy industry that existed in the 1960s and 1970s. You have heard compelling evidence from trade unions and workers’ representatives about the types of people who are being missed out, including firefighters, shift workers, care workers and footballers with head injuries. As I said, women are completely ignored by the current system. That is why, taking a step back from the long Covid aspect, I felt that a whole-systems approach was more appropriate and important, and that is how I have come to this point today.

The timing of the introduction of the bill and of the proposed council is important, because the Government and the Parliament will need concrete evidence on what the new benefit should look like, so the council will need to be in place to advise on modernising the benefit before it is fully devolved and delivered. The Scottish Government’s agency agreement with the Department for Work and Pensions says that it must have a business case and a plan in place for how it will deliver the new benefit by the end of March 2025. That is not very far away: it is less than a year and a half away. The Parliament and the Government really need to get on with the job of delivering what the new entitlement will look like.

In the evidence session last week, the cabinet secretary welcomed the wealth of work that we have collated. A lot of work has gone into the bill and the consultation before it. There is no need to reinvent the wheel; there is a ready-made proposal that the Government could adopt. There is a real risk that, running up to the March 2025 deadline, the Government could end up duplicating a lot of that work and having to do so in a hurry, which would probably cost it a lot more money.

The cabinet secretary and I have an outstanding meeting that we need to put in the diary. When we meet, I will say to her that there is a line in the bill that relates specifically to commencement. I am more than happy to discuss and negotiate with the Government what it thinks the best date for commencement is, and whether it would prefer to commence the bill by regulations and leave it entirely within its gift to choose the date. I am absolutely open to the Government on timing. However, as I said, we are fast running out of time.

The cabinet secretary also said that she thought that an advisory council is perhaps one piece of the jigsaw of employment injury assistance. I fundamentally disagree with that. I do not think that the council would be one piece of the jigsaw. It would be the body of expertise and lived experience that would design the jigsaw. It would advise the Government on designing it and putting it together; it would not just be a single piece of the jigsaw.

Members will see from the bill that the council would have the capacity to commission its own independent research. The membership criteria are clear. The council would draw on medical expertise, workers and their representatives and, crucially, those with lived experience of employment injuries and illnesses. There would be a balance of employers and employees on the council.

Finally, the crucial point is that the bill would deliver the Government’s aspiration to be a fair work nation. The Fair Work Convention supports the proposal, because one of the key planks of the ambition to be a fair work nation is giving workers effective voice. It is about giving workers—those with lived experience and real, in-depth knowledge of injuries and illnesses at work—their seat at the table and a voice in designing the new benefit and ensuring that it is what it could and should look like: fit for modern Scotland, 21st century workplaces, and the illnesses and injuries that workers get today and will get into the future.

I look forward to questions. Thank you for the time, convener.

That would require primary legislation like the bill, so it would take a lot longer and would push a lot closer up to the deadline that the Government has for taking over responsibility for the benefit. We would need to mirror the provisions in the bill on membership, the balance of employers and employees, and ensuring that the body included lived experience, so I guess that we would still need primary legislation to implement that. I am not sure how much financial saving there would be from creating a sub-group of SCOSS with essentially the same purpose and function, and it would probably take longer to get to the same point as we would reach by passing the bill.

That is why we have given flexibility in the membership. We have said that there should be a range—between six and 12—to give the council the flexibility that it needs to recruit a range of members while maintaining the balance on gender and between employers and employed members, with the membership criteria that we have set out. That gives the flexibility to recruit people with the level of expertise that we need.

You will have seen from five weeks of evidence that passionate people with a lot of expertise are desperate to get around the table and start doing the work, so I do not think that there will be a shortage of volunteers.

Absolutely. We need the membership to be clearly defined. It is important to look at the comparator body in the UK system. Although, as I said to Marie McNair, the set-up and the relationships of IIAC are not ideal, at least it has worker voices on it, and it was set up by primary legislation, so it cannot be disbanded.

Normally, we devolve things so that the decision makers are closer to the people who are affected and to be more progressive. In this case, the benefit has been devolved but we are cutting out lived experience. We will cut out workers’ involvement and trade union involvement if we do not establish a council. We need to fill that gap, irrespective of whether we do that now or later.

Let us not reinvent the wheel. As I said in my opening statement, and as the cabinet secretary has said, a lot of work has been done on the proposal. We could end up in a situation in which the Government replicates that at pace right up to the deadline, spending a lot more money in the process, rather than our just working together on the bill when it comes to stage 2 to get something that we can all agree on.

The council would purely make recommendations; it would not control the Scottish Government’s budget. It would be for the Scottish Government to decide whether to accept the recommendations and then to decide whether to find the funding. Governments make choices on priorities every single day of the week. It would be up to the Government of the day to decide whether to accept the recommendations on the basis of costs. The council would investigate, commission the research and make recommendations. It would then be for the Government to decide on those and how they were funded.

That will be the choice of the Government, which can choose to change or not to change it. That is not for anyone but the Government or Parliament to decide.

We modelled the information-requiring powers on those in the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. We felt that it was a good place to start. We also listed other organisations.

It is important to give the council teeth so that it can go after information and fill the data gaps that currently exist, to support its work. That said, I hope that it would have good working relationships with the organisations that are covered by the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, so that it is able to get information voluntarily and does not have to require it.

That was the initial thinking behind the provisions in the bill. They were modelled on the 2002 act, which we felt worked well. I know that you are doing work on freedom of information legislation, which might be updated at some point in the future.

The cabinet secretary said last week that she did not know what the new benefit would look like. If the cabinet secretary herself does not know what the new benefit will look like, I would say that the Government needs expert advice, which is what the council will provide.

The bill would put the council in place in advance of devolution of the benefit. Through its expertise and lived experience, the council will be best placed to tell the Government what the new benefit should look like. We are not simply devolving industrial injuries disablement benefit and introducing it like for like. The Government is changing the name and, I expect—

This bill, in and of itself, would not deliver a reformed benefit; it would be up to the Government to do that. However, if the Scottish Government were to consider the devolution of an inherently unfair and discriminatory system, in creating a new benefit, which you would hope would be in line with the Parliament’s progressive ambitions on devolution, it would surely want the people who were sitting round the table advising it on the new benefit to have lived experience—that is, people who have been left behind and discriminated against by the current system. That is where many of the stakeholders who are desperate for change are putting their argument. The best thing to do would be to set up the council, have it exist independently of the Government and get those people round the table to advise the Government on the set-up of the new benefit.

As I said, we are running out of time. There is less than a year and a half for the Government to put in place its plans for the new entitlement. To my mind, the best approach would be to have the experts and the people with lived experience design the new benefit from the get-go. Last week, the cabinet secretary said that she felt that an advisory council was a part of the jigsaw of EIA. To me, that is completely wrong. The advisory council would design the jigsaw, set it up and ensure that it best meets the needs of the people of Scotland who are becoming ill or injured in the course of their work.

I am a bit frustrated. It feels like I have been waiting for the consultation since 2019. The Parliament and the committee have been told almost on an annual basis that the consultation will come this year. I think that the Government told the committee that it would come this year, and the cabinet secretary said last week that it would potentially come next year. We have been waiting and waiting, and that is frustrating.

Introducing the bill in the absence of a developed policy of what employment injury assistance looks like is crucial, because we would want to have the expertise of the council. We would want to have the medical expertise, the trade union expertise and, more important, the lived experience of those who have been injured or have become ill because of their work and are not being supported by the current system. We want the council to be in place to advise on the development of the policy and the new entitlement in advance of the Government taking over full responsibility for the benefit.

On the timescale, the Government has its agency agreement with the DWP, and the DWP has said that there will be no extension to that. It has been fairly firm and robust with the Government that the Government must take over responsibility for the benefit by the end of March 2026.

The Government needs to have a business plan in place, as per the agency agreement, by the end of March 2025. That is less than a year and a half away. By that time, the Government will need to have set out its plans in full, including its business plan for how it will transfer the existing case load over to the new benefit and what the new benefit will look like in terms of levels of payment, entitlement and everything else.

It is important that, before that happens, we get the expertise in place to advise on how all of that is done. We are less than a year and a half away from that point, so we are running out of time.