Chamber and committees

Thank you for inviting me to attend the committee to talk through the statement of reasons that accompanies my draft proposal.

The bill proposal was lodged in response to reports that thousands of people were suffering from long Covid that they had contracted at work—most likely, workers in health, social care, retail and public transport, whom we all depended on and applauded throughout the pandemic. In the absence of any action from the United Kingdom Industrial Injuries Advisory Council, a Scottish council could commission research and come up with recommendations on how to support people such as nurses, care workers and supermarket staff who caught Covid, now suffer with long Covid and are no longer fit for work.

When I looked further into the industrial injuries system, it became clear that it is completely out of date. It really only recognises injuries and illnesses of male workers in occupations that were common in the previous century, it does not recognise modern occupations and it completely fails female workers. Only 6.5 per cent of applications under the prescription route come from women.

The purpose of this evidence-taking session is for the committee to decide whether to accept the statement of reasons that I have provided on why I consider it unnecessary to carry out a further consultation, but I wanted to give a flavour of the motives behind the proposed bill.

I note that the committee has received a letter from the Scottish Government. I hope to work with the Minister for Social Security and Local Government to overcome any policy differences and timetable issues. However, as the committee knows, nothing in his letter is relevant to the statement of reasons.

It is less than a year since the draft proposal was lodged and consultation began. It is only six months since the consultation summary was lodged ahead of Parliament rising for the election recess. That consultation was undertaken with the non-Government bills unit’s support, my thanks for which I put on record.

The proposal is broadly similar to the one that I lodged last November

“to establish a Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council”.

However, I have improved the wording to sharpen up the proposal and to reflect more precisely the purpose and role of the proposed council that was consulted on and the outcome of that consultation. There is nothing new that was not previously consulted on or on which views were not sought.

The additional terms in the proposal confirm that the council would be a statutory body, as was explicit throughout the consultation document and at question 1 in the consultation questions, and that it would have the ability to commission its own research, as was also made clear in the aims of the proposed bill and specifically consulted on at question 2. They also confirm that the bill would define the council’s membership, which was the focus of question 5.

The consultation on my previous proposal ran for 12 weeks and received responses from a range of individuals and organisations from relevant sectors. I wrote to a number of academics, civil society and third sector organisations, professional associations and business organisations, as well as occupational safety campaigns and, of course, trade unions. There is a breadth of responses across those sectors, which provides new, positive engagement in the social security space.

The consultation was publicised in comment pieces and blogs, notably in The Herald, in the Daily Record and on Reform Scotland’s Melting Pot blog. Media coverage in which I highlighted the issue raised in the consultation document—that Covid-19 should be prescribed as an industrial disease—was raised with the First Minster in December 2020. Close the Gap blogged about the gaps in provision for women under the existing benefit and about women’s health and safety more widely, and it also covered the issue of Covid-19 in the workplace. Two events, which were conducted on Facebook and via Zoom, were hosted by the GMB’s health and safety group. Separate focus groups were arranged with women members, who shared their experiences of health and safety in the workplace.

The consultation closed in February this year, and I do not believe that respondents’ views will have changed since then, or that there have been any material changes to the case for an advisory council. The UK advisory council has since refused to prescribe Covid-19, which perhaps strengthens the case for evolution of the benefit here, and the Scottish Government has not yet made any legislative commitment to establish a new council.

For a process that has been carried out so recently, repeating the consultation would seem to me to be an unnecessary duplication of work and effort, including for those organisations and individuals who took the time to respond to the previous consultation.

I hope that members will agree that further consultation is not necessary. I am more than happy to expand on any of the points that I have made, and to take questions.

I am proposing that the membership of a Scottish council include representation from the trade unions. It will take primary legislation to change SCOSS’s role to mandate that it have trade union membership so that it can consider workers’ lived experience of illness and injury at work. As the committee knows, SCOSS already has a lot of work on its plate, and I think it important that we create a new body that has not only the ability to look specifically at the very detailed nature of employment injury assistance, but a research function to look at illnesses and injuries that are emerging across the developed world and ensure that the Scottish system is fit for the 21st century, not the last one.

When I raised the issue in the chamber with the First Minister, I think that I received a sympathetic response. I also flagged up to the minister the consultation response and my intention to introduce legislation, but at that point he was only two or three days into the job, so the issue might not have been at the top of his list.

I really want to work with the minister on this. He has set out his concerns about policy and timetabling, but with my British Sign Language (Scotland) Bill, I have a track record of working with the Government to ensure that there are no concerns on either side. I would want to open a discussion with the minister and his officials and take a joint working approach to ensure that my proposal is right and that it works for the people of Scotland.

I am glad to hear that your inboxes are so full, although I am sorry for your staff who are dealing with that. It shows the strength of feeling in support of the proposals.

Ms Duncan-Glancy is right that the proposal will not, in itself, change any of that, but it is the first step on the road. The current entitlement is fit for the 20th century, not the 21st century. An employment advisory council would have the expertise of people with lived experience of 21st century workplaces. There would be expertise from epidemiologists and other experts in the field. There would be a gender balance on the council to ensure that illnesses and injuries in workplaces that are predominantly female were reflected. As I said in my opening statement, only 6.5 per cent of applications currently come from women. If an equality impact assessment was done of the benefit today, it would immediately say that that was entirely inappropriate.

For me, all those aims and objectives are the end point, but the starting point is to establish the council, with its expertise and its ability to commission research, to start to address those challenges.

The minister has set out that he intends to introduce legislation to establish employment injury assistance. That is obviously something that the Government has to do as a result of the Scotland Act 2016 and the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018. What the minister has not mentioned, and what the Government has not committed to, is establishing an advisory council to scrutinise the regulations on the new entitlement that the minister would lay. I believe that it is crucial that research is carried out in advance of that entitlement being established.

We can either lift and replicate what I feel is a failed and completely out-of-date UK system or we can get the expertise on board early, set up the council, advise the Government and scrutinise the regulations. All the parties in the Parliament and the Government have accepted that it is right to have an independent statutory body to scrutinise social security legislation—indeed, that is why we have the Scottish Commission on Social Security. I am just asking us to go a step further and create another body that has the expertise to look in depth at the range of injuries and illnesses in Scottish workplaces, with the aim of updating the benefit in question to ensure that it best serves the people of Scotland.

The debate is welcome. It allows me to expand on the evidence that I gave this morning to the Social Justice and Social Security Committee on my proposed Scottish employment injuries advisory council bill.

I am thankful that the committee accepted the statement of reasons, but I am even more grateful that it listened to the workers and trade unionists—to members of Unite the union, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, the GMB, the Community trade union, Unison, the Communication Workers Union, the Fire Brigades Union and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. They wrote to demand a voice on, and a role in, the new employment injuries assistance benefit. They did so because their colleagues who have caught Covid-19 in the workplace are now no longer fit for work or because women are apparently the wrong gender for that entitlement, although it is clear that they still get ill or injured through their work. Those women do not have access to the industrial injuries disablement benefit, or their entitlement is extremely limited, because that benefit is stuck very much in the previous century.

Any proposed bill will not, in itself, give women and those with long Covid access to the new employment injuries assistance directly. The Government and the Parliament need experts who have space, tenure and independence to research the illnesses and diseases and to make recommendations based on that. However, it is inconceivable that those issues would not be considered by a body with the authority and power to consider them and to make the first steps on the road to making the entitlement fit for the 21st century.

Trade unionists and workers who get ill at work must have a mandated seat at the table of a permanent, statutory and independent employment advisory council. Their expertise and lived experience of 21st-century workplaces are vital in making proposals that will form the benefit from the very start.

This morning, I asked the committee whether, when the Parliament considers regulations for a new devolved benefit, it would accept an equalities impact assessment that said that just 6 per cent of applications would come from women. It is clear that the answer to that question is no, we absolutely would not. However, that would be the case if a lift-and-shift approach was taken. Doing so would risk embedding a system that promotes inequalities and fails to reflect modern Scotland.

I thank the GMB women’s campaign unit, Engender, Close the Gap and Professor Andrew Watterson for their substantial insights on the issue of women’s health and safety at work. Currently, women have little access to the Westminster benefit because they have barely any entitlement to it. It is a benefit for the injuries and diseases that men got in workplaces that they predominantly worked in during the previous century. Cleaners with respiratory and skin diseases are not recognised by the current scheme, and breast cancer that is caused by shift work—that is the top occupational cancer in women—is not recognised. Even asbestos-related ovarian cancer, which is the most common gynaecological cancer in the UK, is not recognised. Women are missing from that scheme.

Care workers wrote to the committee to say that they risk injury at work daily. They have musculoskeletal disorders in the neck and upper limbs and injuries that are ignored by employers and the outdated UK benefit system.

Changes will not happen overnight, of course, but we need a system to do the work and consider that change. We do not currently have that in Scotland. New data and analysis and broad expertise and testimony will be needed to make the case for change.

I am grateful to the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, Thompsons Solicitors, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and the British Occupational Hygiene Society, which offered their support and insights.

The committee also heard from people who have long Covid or who have colleagues with long Covid, who likely caught that through the course of their work. The impetus for my bill proposal was in response to their experience. Should people who contracted Covid at work not have access to a newly devolved benefit? Workers in health, social care, retail and public transport talk about how they became so severely ill that long Covid was impacting their ability to continue to do their work in the jobs that they loved and about how something should be done to support them.

However, in March this year, the UK Industrial Injuries Advisory Council refused to recognise Covid in that context. That exposes the risk to our social security system in deferring to, and requesting advice from, a UK council over which the Scottish ministers have no power. There has, therefore, been less progress on Scottish benefits, and those key workers whom we depended on and rightly applauded throughout the pandemic have been offered no access to the industrial injuries benefit.

A Scottish council with powers to commission research and make recommendations on how to support people who have caught Covid at work could offer hope that the new benefit will give people the access to social security that they are so desperately lacking under the UK entitlement. In the coming weeks, I will lodge my final proposal for a statutory Scottish employment injuries advisory council that can research, shape and scrutinise the new benefit. We need to ensure that workers and trade unionists who are injured in the course of their employment, especially women and those with long Covid, are at the heart of that council.

When it comes to accessing Scottish social security benefits, I hope to work closely with the cabinet secretary, the minister, the Social Justice and Social Security Committee and members on all sides of the chamber to ensure that there is full and equal access to a new form of employment injuries assistance that is fit for the 21st century.

I draw attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests as the owner of a rental property in the North Lanarkshire Council area.

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to a report from Falkirk Council that states that the average cost of building a new affordable home is set to rise to £240,000, from £144,823 in 2014. (S6O-00316)

Even with the housing infrastructure fund, which is now available only to RSLs and local authorities for affordable housing, the proposed urban social rent benchmarks are set at £78,000 and £71,500, which will leave the providers considerably short. Homes for Scotland advised that, due to infrastructure constraints, new homes on brownfield land are often commercially unviable for any housing tenure. Does the support for regenerating brownfield sites for developments of all tenure go far enough? Does the Government have plans to give further support?

Previously, we have heard from Councillor Evison and COSLA about the principles that you think should shape the new fiscal framework. Are you now in a position to describe how that would work in practice?

That certainty of funding is critical. The United Kingdom Government has recently published a multiyear spending review. I know that COSLA wants the Scottish Government to deliver that, too. Early as it might be, following on from the UK Government’s announcement, what discussions have you had with the Scottish Government on confirming whether local authorities will receive multiyear settlements to give them that certainty and ability to plan?