Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 08 June 2021
I, too, welcome the cabinet secretary to her role; I look forward to working with her in the coming months and years.
At the heart of our collective wellbeing must be social security—not as a system or an idea but as a fundamental right. The societies that guarantee their citizens’ social security are those that perform best—they have the longest life expectancy, the lowest levels of crime and the highest levels of innovation and economic performance. We know that poverty has a lifelong scarring effect—the damage of child poverty is felt for decades—and we as a society pay for it, as people die younger, lose the opportunity to fulfil their potential and suffer the consequences of life chances denied.
We tackle poverty because it is the right thing to do, but we also tackle it because the social and financial costs are too great not to. Austerity, which we have seen Westminster implement, is immoral, but it is also a gigantic false economy, as we have seen in the pandemic in the past few months. That is why we must find a way to end the benefit cap and with it the degrading two-child limit and the rape clause.
This Parliament has already shown itself willing to break away from a punitive benefits system, when we found a way to mitigate the impacts of the underoccupation penalty—the hated bedroom tax. We need to explore options to do exactly the same thing for the benefit cap, which costs some of our poorest families up to £2,200 a year.
The societies that have performed best during Covid are more equal. Not for them the fate of the thousands who were sacrificed to a delayed lockdown and bungled Government response. It is clear that we should have increased our statutory sick pay provision but, instead, Westminster wasted billions on the disastrous eat out to help out scheme, which did much to create the second wave of Covid last autumn. That was a clear case of putting the Westminster priority of punishing workers ahead of the health needs and even the economy of the nation.
The Scottish Greens welcome the pandemic relief payment scheme, which will supply essential additional income for families this year—right now. That is particularly important at a time when financial uncertainty has caused so much anxiety. We also call on the Scottish Government to introduce a permanent doubling of the Scottish child payment at the earliest possible opportunity. That measure would lift 50,000 children out of poverty.
Those are important fixes to a broken system, but we are actually here to fix the system, rather than to patch its flaws. We are here to make hope possible, and that requires us to be radical. Now is the time for a universal basic income: a basic commitment that could, at a stroke, eliminate poverty, and which would have helped so many through the Covid-19 pandemic. It would be a regular payment to all, to ensure human dignity, and a universal measure that would create the basis for social security, social solidarity and the care ethic on which we must base our society. That is why we call on the UK and Scottish Governments to work together to bring forward pilots and to take action at the earliest possible opportunity to introduce a universal basic income, which would end child poverty and go a very long way towards creating a society that has social security as a fundamental right.
I move amendment S6M-00263.4, to insert after “eradicate child poverty;”:
“welcomes the pandemic relief payment scheme, which will provide an essential additional income for families this year; calls on the Scottish Government to introduce a permanent doubling of the Scottish Child Payment at the earliest possible opportunity; notes that a Universal Basic Income would have helped many through the COVID-19 pandemic and calls on the UK and Scottish governments to work together to bring forward pilots at the earliest possible opportunity; commits to exploring funding options to end the benefit cap;”
15:56Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.