Meeting of the Parliament 24 February 2016
I, too, thank Jayne Baxter for bringing the debate to Parliament today. The fairer Fife commission was an important step in the right direction in looking at how we tackle inequality and poverty in Fife, and I congratulate those who served on the commission for the report that they produced. However, it is important that we start to look at all 40 of the commission’s recommendations and that the partners in Fife who set up the commission start to set out in detail how they intend to put the recommendations into action. They must set out a timescale for the actions that need to be taken and say by whom they should be taken.
I had the pleasure of chairing the Fife partnership over a period, but it was not always clear—as is the case in community planning generally—what each partner brought to the table and what their role was. That is not a criticism of the Government, because I know that the Government is as committed to community planning as I am. However, we need to start getting much clearer outcomes and clearer information about who is responsible for what, what they are going to deliver and how all that comes together.
For example, one of the recommendations in the report is about the living wage. Employers have a large part to play in delivering the living wage, as they do in delivering apprenticeships, but I was never convinced about the role of employers and those who represented them at the table in the Fife partnership. Indeed, I would say the same about the third sector—I was never convinced that the body that came from the third sector actually represented all third sector organisations in Fife. Therefore, although the commission was a step in the right direction, there is a lot more work to do.
Back in the first half of the last century, the five evils that Beveridge talked about in his report were want, squalor, idleness, ignorance and disease. He set out clearly why we had to tackle those five giant evils in society, but the reality is that, in one shape or another, those five evils are very much with us in Fife and across Scotland today. The fact is that 75,000 people in Fife are living in poverty. Indeed, poverty in Fife has grown, in absolute terms, over the past five, six or seven years and because of the welfare reforms that we are now seeing. The evidence of that is the fact that we have food banks. Absolute poverty can be defined as people not being able to access what we would describe as the basics that are needed to survive, and I suggest that being able to eat and to feed your kids is a basic need. The growth of food banks in my constituency in Crosshill, Cowdenbeath, Rosyth and Inverkeithing—in fact, the growth of food banks right across Fife and Scotland—is the evidence that absolute poverty exists in our communities, and we need to work out how we are going to tackle it.
As Roderick Campbell said, the report makes a lot of recommendations. They are all worthy, and we need to see a programme for how they will be implemented.
I will use credit unions to illustrate my thinking. I am a member of the Dunfermline and District Credit Union, and I save and borrow at its Kelty branch. We need to see the development of credit unions not just for poor people but for the whole community. More must be done, and I believe that local authorities can do more. We can say nice words about the need to grow the use of credit unions by employers. Although I agree that we must do that and that part of the partnership should be about that, we need to set a clear strategy, with measurable outcomes, for how we are going to grow credit unions across communities.
One of the most successful credit unions in Scotland is Benarty and Lochgelly Credit Union, which is a small credit union in Ballingry. It has millions of pounds’ worth of assets. It has helped thousands of people in those communities over the years. It is a massive success story. Again, there are lessons to be learned there.
The key points are that I welcome the report and the work that has been done. However, all the partners need to look at the report and set out clearly how its recommendations can be progressed and achieved, how they will be measured and, more important, who is going to do what to try to achieve that.
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