Chamber and committees

According to the 2019 Scottish household survey, only 18 per cent of people feel that they can influence decisions affecting their local area, which seems to be a significant reduction since the passing of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. Why has that happened? What are the barriers to people influencing decisions, and how will the local governance review address them?

How does the cabinet secretary believe that we can keep schools open and safe, in the middle of a pandemic, with no cleansing, catering or janitorial staff? They have had no pay lift at all for the duration of the pandemic and notice for industrial action on 8 to 12 November has been served. That could be just the beginning of a long winter of school closures and waste or recycling not being collected. Our children’s education has been severely impacted by the pandemic. What will the Scottish Government do to intervene in the dispute and keep schools open?

To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to help agree a pay deal that is acceptable to council and education workers in order to avert industrial action.

More than half of local government workers earn below £25,000 a year, and the current offer does not even bring the lowest paid up to £10 per hour. Given the trailed uplift of the national minimum wage, does the cabinet secretary believe that it is right that those workers should be paid fairly above that minimum hourly rate set by a Tory chancellor? The Scottish Government has intervened in pay negotiations for national health service workers and teachers, despite not being their direct employer. Will the cabinet secretary commit to intervening in the dispute, meeting the trade unions as requested, and funding a pay offer that puts local government workers on a par with their fellow key workers in the NHS?

Certainly, Presiding Officer.

Can the minister say when householders will know what their share of the £33 billion will be and what support they will get, or whether the Government just intends to regulate them into submission and debt?

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests as the owner of a rental property in North Lanarkshire. I thank the minister for early sight of his statement and for providing a copy of the strategy earlier today.

In the strategy, no longer does the minister who is responsible say,

“We will transform Scotland’s homes”;

instead, the strategy says that homes “must be” transformed. We agree that we need to decarbonise, improve the fabric of our homes and cut fuel poverty, but the strategy pushes a £33 billion bill and all the risk and disruption on to home owners, tenants and landlords, without enough funding or a partnership approach being evident so far. The extra £200 million that has been announced will not come close to reducing the burden on those who are least able to pay.

Tony Cain of the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers told the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee last week that the Government

“has not allocated enough resources”

and that its plans put

“an unbearable burden on social housing tenants’ rents.”—[Official Report, Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, 28 September 2021; c 25.]

Low-income households have been the guinea pigs so far. They have been subjected to useless, costly infrared heating panels in the Western Isles and have been disconnected from district heating systems in Glasgow. The Glasgow city region deal says—

As one of the co-conveners of the cross-party group on carers and a former member of the Social Security Committee, I am grateful to speak in this debate, because carers deserve this additional payment.

Being an unpaid carer is a 24-hour job, which is done out of love, not for the allowance, but unpaid carers have likely lost income in the pandemic and had the huge task of supporting severely disabled people, many of whom have been shielding in the past 18 months. Although they rightly get a lot of thanks from us, they have been waiting years for a carers allowance that makes the best of the powers that this Parliament now has.

When the minister and I were on the Social Security Committee, the supplement was one of the landmark policies that the whole committee agreed on. For my part, I was proud to ensure that the supplement was protected from inflation.

The pandemic legislation saw us agree to unique and substantial measures. The additional supplement, the £20 uplift in universal credit and the pandemic support payments to low-income families have all had a substantial positive impact on household budgets. They have not only been lifelines but made our social security more adequate, so they should never have been special measures in the first place.

When we look at the responses that the committee received to its call for evidence, we can feel the importance that the additional payment makes to carers. One says that caring

“can be very stressful for some carers”,

who are

“over worked and need a break”.

Another said:

“I get roughly 34p an hour to look after them I don’t get a break … sometime all day and all night. I care for them cause I love them I do it so they get best care”.

One carer said that the payment will relieve stress, and that

“December is the hardest time financially as I want to give my kids all I can but also need to be able to put food on table.”

Those responses show the impact that the payment has, so why should it be a one-off that is ending?

We should consider the possibility that this might be the final additional supplement, so it is similar to the decision to end the universal credit uplift. The Scottish Government has not done it with the same public malice as the Tories have shown in that debate, but the effect on carers’ income is no different because, if we do not see a similar intervention next June, their income will fall.

In its next budget, I hope that the Scottish Government will offer a permanent uplift to the supplement, and then set a route map to the incorporation of that payment into the weekly award.

It is time that the Government brought legislation on carers allowance to the chamber, to set out a long-term settlement for unpaid carers to look forward to, or even just to give them hope. Allowing full-time students to claim or offering a taper to end the earnings cliff edge would be a start.

The underlying allowance is low and is still delivered by the DWP, so we need to get to a point where carers have a choice—even certainty—over whether they get a better weekly payment or a lump sum. Although carers get a great deal of thanks from us, they have now been waiting years for a carers allowance that makes the best of the new powers of this Parliament, and they have been waiting long enough.

My question is about category 5, which covers houses, land and buildings, in section 4, which is called “Registration of Interests”. I have always been concerned that councillors seem to be held to a higher standard than MSPs and MPs, in that councillors need to register an interest in their family home, whether that is as owner, part-owner or tenant. Will you say why it was felt important to maintain that requirement?

There have been instances in which overzealous recording of a councillor’s property has meant that home addresses have been made available online, which has caused safeguarding issues. We have seen some high-profile safeguarding issues in the national press recently, and other instances of bullying, intimidation and aggression towards councillors. Was consideration given to putting councillors on a par with parliamentarians by taking out the need for them to register an interest in their home?

Are you saying that the distinction is purely that councillors deal with planning issues so there needs to be that connection with where they live?

Okay.