Hansard

The Welfare Reform Committee’s report on women and social security is surely one of the most important reports that the Parliament has produced in the current session. It is a substantial piece of work that highlights the impact of welfare reforms on women and puts on record—possibly for the first time in one document—how many of those changes have served to aggravate existing inequalities that women experience.

There are numerous examples in the report that illustrate those inequalities across the whole spectrum of welfare reforms. Covering universal credit, the sanctions regime and the impact on women carers and single parents, the report shows how women in particular are affected as a result of the welfare reform agenda.

One of the most startling figures to come to light—as several members have mentioned—comes from the House of Commons library. Since the reforms began in 2010, some £26 billion-worth of cuts have been made, and a staggering £22 billion of that has been taken from women’s income.

The committee has made a large number of recommendations for both the Scottish and UK Governments to consider, and I am pleased to read the detailed comments from the Scottish Government indicating that work is already under way to bring about the changes requested. I am not aware whether the UK Government has responded to the report as yet. We should pay tribute to committee members, past and present, to all those who gave evidence and to the clerks for putting the report together.

Some concerns were raised about universal credit and the system of single monthly payments, and the issue of a person in the household—usually the male—being the recipient of the payments, including those intended to cover things such as rent. The worry is that that makes it much more difficult for a woman to negotiate and manage the household income in terms of family priorities. The Scottish Government’s response supports a move to twice-monthly payments and direct payments to landlords in order to remove some of the concerns on the matter. People will have the choice of how they want to manage their account, giving them more control of their own affairs.

In addition, women are far more likely to earn less than their male partners and therefore to be regarded as the second earner. Professor Diane Elson commented that, when earnings disregards and tapers are taken into account, it is not financially worth while for many women to take on a job at all. The committee has asked the UK Government to re-examine the allowances for second earners to overcome that problem, which greatly affects the ability of women to enter the labour market.

One area where the committee heard about the severe negative impact, particularly on women, is in relation to sanctions. One of the most common problems was when appointments are delayed or cancelled by jobcentres and women in particular are unable to attend on the rescheduled dates due to childcare issues or the unaffordability of transport costs for repeat journeys. The Scottish Women’s Convention noted the hypocrisy of the DWP, because if it makes errors and causes delays, there is no impact, but if a person makes a mistake, it usually leads to a sanction being imposed.

Sanctions and delays in benefit payments are one of the main causes of people being driven to food banks in order to survive. I have seen countless constituents in my Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley constituency coming to food banks citing both those reasons as being the main factor in their being there. The effectiveness of sanctions has been questioned. Howard Reed from Landman Economics told the committee that there was no relationship between sanctions and employment levels, and that areas where sanctions had been employed with greater “gusto”, as he put it, showed employment rates that were slightly lower. He also informed the committee that there is no UK Government data on the impact that sanctions have on people and families as a whole. The committee therefore called on the UK Government to conduct an independent review of the sanctions process to establish the impact that sanctions are having and whether they help people into work, and to revise the appeals process so that it can be carried out much more quickly.

One of the biggest barriers to women taking up employment is finding suitable and affordable childcare. Carers Scotland said that women are four times as likely as men to have given up work because of multiple caring duties and that 85 per cent of people who care for children and an adult—sometimes called sandwich carers—are also women. As members will know, the Scottish Government will double childcare provision to about 30 hours per week—on a flexible basis, too—by the end of the next session of Parliament. Barnardo’s commented that the flexible and wraparound nature of that childcare is just as important as the funding itself. That should have a hugely positive impact on the ability of women—and men—to get into work and maintain their family duties and obligations.

I will just say a few words in support of lone-parent women. We note in the report that 92 per cent of single parents are women, which means that we have more than 150,000 single-parent women in Scotland. There are 12 safeguards that the DWP is supposed to apply to protect lone parents from having their circumstances worsened. However, we heard from the Single Parent Action Network that only a quarter of the women affected have agreements with their local jobcentres allowing them to restrict their job searches to school hours, which is one of the 12 safeguards that are particularly important for women.

The impact of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 on women in Scotland is particularly unfair. I know that the Scottish Government is working to mitigate much of that as far as it can, spending some £300 million already in undoing the damage that would have been done to thousands of women in Scotland had it not acted. However, it is not all about money; it is also about restoring a sense of fairness, dignity and respect at the heart of the system so that it values its citizens and offers genuine equality for Scotland’s women. I hope that the new Scottish social security system will begin to put in place such a framework. Again, I commend the work of the committee in bringing this report to the Parliament.