Meeting of the Parliament 18 March 2015
People who work hard for their families, try to put some money aside and make the right choices deserve reward and the security of a decent standard of living. Creating the conditions for hard-working people to enjoy what they earn is one of our most important duties. I acknowledge that in-work poverty is a concern, but poverty for those who are not in work at all is also a concern.
I will first say something on the link between poverty and work. I have little doubt that work remains the most sustainable route out of poverty for most people. That is well reflected in the Scottish Government’s most recent publication on poverty, which was released earlier this week. It recognises that those who are most severely hit by poverty are likely to be those who are
“furthest from the labour market”,
with workless households tending towards the lowest income deciles. Although it acknowledges that, as the cabinet secretary said, employment is not “a guarantee against poverty”, it concedes that it is “a protection”. It also identifies, starkly:
“For families not in employment, there is little opportunity to increase income.”
Supporting people back to work must therefore be central to any plan to reduce poverty overall. To me, it is a deeply disturbing poverty of ambition that says that all that we can do for the worst-off in our society is to modestly boost benefits.
Let us put aside the notion in the Greens’ motion that our welfare system is “punitive”. It is a system that makes 258,000 payments to people in Scotland every day, spending more than £22 billion to help the poorest in our society in the past year.