Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 24 June 2020
When I received a call from the cabinet secretary’s office for an urgent meeting on the Social Security Administration and Tribunal Membership (Scotland) Bill, I was at first surprised that there were so many omissions from the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018. The Social Security Committee and Bob Doris, who also attended the meeting, were only too willing to get on with the job that the committee is set up to do, which is to make sure that the provisions in the 2018 act are as they should be and fit for purpose.
As has been said, this short bill has five specific provisions. As other members have done, I thank the many organisations that gave evidence and made observations, and all the officials who worked on the bill.
However, the bill needs further amendment. It is an administrative bill. Mark Griffin and Bob Doris have said clearly that there is much work to be done—particularly on urging the Scottish Government to bring forward, whenever practically possible, the child payment that is so needed.
The circumstances of terminally ill patients are a campaign issue for organisations such as MND Scotland and Marie Curie, which never gave up on finding a solution to fast-tracking benefits for terminally ill patients. The bill seeks to expand the scope for health professionals, other than doctors, to be able to sign off on a terminally ill patient to allow quicker decisions. Between 2013 and 2018, nearly 8,000 people had claims for PIP refused by the DWP and died within six months of their claim. That illustrates how necessary the bill’s provisions are.
The cabinet secretary said that she will lodge amendments at stage 2 on the duty to inform, and I welcome that commitment. Mark Griffin has also spoken to that. The duty to maximise uptake is critical to the ethos behind the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018, which we all agreed, and if amendments are lodged on that at stage 2, they will be whole-heartedly welcomed, certainly by the Labour Party. I still want to see progress on other ways to increase the uptake of benefits, such as automation, which I know that the cabinet secretary has been in discussions about.
We need to get the Scottish child payment cash into the pockets of families and many anti-poverty organisations have already set out to the Social Security Committee other ways of bringing forward perhaps a lump sum payment equivalent to the proposed child payment. I hope to see an uptake around the suggested target of 85 per cent when we can undertake that work. As I think almost every other member mentioned, one of the most significant areas that requires amendment is the part 1 provisions on challenging an appointee in order to prevent deception and exploitation. Brian Whittle, Keith Brown and Alison Johnstone mentioned cases. If anyone needs convincing, listening to those speeches makes it clear that we need to get those provisions right.
I will conclude with two major points. First, I agree with Gordon Lindhurst on the question of the temporary appointment of judges. Throughout the passage of the bill I have raised the need for all judges in the system to have clear training on the ethos behind the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018. Similarly, while extending the franchise means that the workload can be dealt with, and I totally accept that the judges must have expertise, they have expertise in a UK-wide system that has a different ethos. My concern is that at some point there need to be proposals to ensure that all the judges making decisions on social security are making them from the standpoint of the ethos behind our 2018 act, which we all agree should produce something different.
Gordon Lindhurst might have been referring to a case that I think is quite old now. The temporary appointment of judges is always risky, and it has led to problems in the past in situations in which the appointment goes on for so long that it is not really temporary any longer and the appointee might not be seen as independent.
Lastly, I want to use the opportunity to say that, in the future, we need to keep an eye on social security reform. The need for anti-poverty measures has probably never been greater. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Save the Children, in their briefing, mentioned that 70 per cent of the families that they have surveyed have taken out some loan or other in order to get themselves through the pandemic and the crisis that we face.
It is important to finish the work on the bill and to take it through to the end of its passage and ensure that it is signed by the end of the parliamentary session, but we must also think ahead to how we can ensure that our social security system is fit for purpose, given the fact that the past three months have changed people’s lives a little bit. We support solid commitments such as the child payment and many of the other things that the Scottish Government has done, but we must also be flexible and assess what the nation needs from its social security system.
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