Chamber and committees

The Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum is an independent Ministerial advisory body which Ministers attend when invited. In the last 12 months, the Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum has met six times, on the following dates:

9 October 2012

12 December 2012

12 March 2013

9 May 2013

18 June 2013

18 September 2013

Further information on the Forum and its meetings is available on the Scottish Government website at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/Housing/warmhomes/fuelpoverty/ScottishFuelPovertyForum.

I attended the meeting on 12 December 2012 and confirmed that Scottish Ministers believe the Forum should continue to challenge the work of the Scottish Government when appropriate and continue to work with Ministers and Scottish Government officials to tackle fuel poverty.

The Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland (HEEPS) area based local authority schemes have a current budget of £55 million for this financial year and it is the Scottish Government’s intention that this is all spent on tackling fuel poverty and improving energy efficiency.

It should be noted that an unallocated amount of £5 million has been reallocated from the original budget of £60 million for area based schemes to mitigate the impacts of welfare reform. A further £5 million from underutilised accruals (i.e. unused provision) from 2012-13 takes the total contribution to £10 million.

Delays in the publication of the ECO guidance, leading to uncertainty about how the new schemes would work, and a shift in focus under ECO away from cheaper, easier to install measures, such as loft insulation, to more technically complex insulation techniques, has meant that there have been delays in developing ECO-eligible schemes.

It is not possible at this time to know how much Scottish Government funding has been spent as schemes are still developing and monitoring processes are being put in place.

The Scottish Government has a statutory duty, “to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, that people are not living in fuel poverty in Scotland by November 2016”.

The Scottish Government is committed to eradicating fuel poverty and is doing everything within its limited powers to achieve this. As fuel poverty statistics published in December 2012 show, Scottish Government action is mitigating swingeing fuel price increases. Despite 14% fuel price increases in Autumn 2011, Scottish Government action to improve household energy efficiency prevented a further 35,000 households falling into fuel poverty.

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

The Scottish Government spending plans of 11 September announced funding allocations of £79 million to tackle fuel poverty for each of the next two years ,2014-15 and 2015-16.

The Scottish Government is committed to eradicating fuel poverty and is doing everything within its limited powers to achieve this. We will continue to use this funding for the Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland to lever in private sector funding from the energy companies seeking to meet their obligations under ECO, to ensure the future of our £200 million fund to tackle fuel poverty.

The Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland (HEEPS) have a current budget of £74 million for this financial year and it is the Scottish Government’s intention that this is all spent on tackling fuel poverty and improving energy efficiency.

It should be noted that an unallocated amount of £5 million has been reallocated from the original budget of £60 million for area based schemes to mitigate the impacts of welfare reform. A further £5 million from underutilised accruals (i.e. unused provision) from 2012-13 takes the total contribution to £10 million.

It is not possible at this time to know how much Scottish Government funding has been spent as schemes are still developing and monitoring processes are being put in place. However, in June we announced the first £46 million of funding for local authorities from our HEEPS area based schemes and local authorities advise us that, currently, they intend to leverage almost £130 million of ECO funding from energy companies.

Information on HEEPS spend will be published in due course.

The Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games Organising Committee invited the Deputy First Minister on 9 February 2012 to participate in the event to announce their sponsorship agreement with Atos, which took place on 16 March 2012.

All Games Partners including representatives from Glasgow City Council, Commonwealth Games Scotland and the Scottish Government attended the event to mark the significant contribution which Atos sponsorship will make towards the successful delivery of the Games.

Atos is providing technology that will be used for accreditation services, volunteer recruitment and the instant relaying of results, all of which shall enhance the Glasgow 2014 Games experience. All Games Partners were pictured to mark the announcement.

The SG has every sympathy with individuals and families who have been adversely affected by the UK Government’s welfare reforms. Whilst appreciating that an assessment process is necessary, the alarming stories of peoples’ experiences suggest that what is in place just now is causing a great deal of undue stress and hardship to people across Scotland.

That is why Housing Minister, Margaret Burgess, wrote recently to the UK Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, highlighting the Scottish Government’s concerns at Atos and DWP’s administering of the Work Capability Assessment process and urging him to take the necessary steps to ensure that the very worrying cases that are being reported are never repeated.

Securing sponsors is a matter for the organising committee and it should be acknowledged that Glasgow 2014’s contract with Atos do not relate in any way to the services it provides on behalf of DWP. In addition, securing sponsorship is vital to the success of the Games and to reduce the need for additional public funds to stage them.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information.

The Scottish Government does not hold data centrally on (b) informal or (c) other kinship care arrangements. Individual-level child protection data is only held centrally as at 31 July 2012, so data for (a) formal care is not available over time.

On 31 July 2012 there were 149 children with formal kinship care arrangements who were also on the child protection register.

Source: Scottish Government Looked after children and child protection data 2011-12.

People from minority ethnic (non-white) groups are more likely to be in relative poverty (before housing costs) compared to those from the “White” groups (28% and 15% respectively).

Table 1 - Percentage of people in relative poverty (before housing costs) by ethnic group: Scotland 2009-10 to 2011-12

Source: Family Resources Survey, Households Below Average Income datasets - figures aggregated from three years of data from 2009-10 to 2011-12 inclusive.

We are committed to promoting race equality in Scotland and working with others to do so. We are providing £5.3 million of funding in 2012-15 to address issues around race equality in Scotland. In April we published our current thinking on how race equality should develop over the next three years, and in Spring 2014 we intend to publish an updated Race Equality Statement, providing more detail on how we intend to take forward our plans in practice.

Alongside this, the Child Poverty Strategy for Scotland expresses our commitment to tackle the long term drivers of poverty through early intervention and prevention. That commitment includes a range of actions such as harnessing over £125 million across government and our agencies to support young people towards and into work across Scotland.