Meeting of the Parliament 01 March 2016
I welcome the opportunity to speak in today’s important debate, and I am pleased that the Scottish Government is working with the UK Government on a smooth transition of the new powers to ensure that individuals who are currently in receipt of benefits continue to receive them on time.
Although the work of the Welfare Reform Committee, of which I am a member, has gone some way towards raising key issues around the delivery of social security, I am aware of some concern about the level of concrete preparation for the transition. I therefore urge the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights to do all that he can to ensure that the process is as smooth as possible. It is vital that existing claimants do not experience any delays in payments, but the Government’s recent information technology record does not fill the public with much confidence.
It is important to recognise that, thanks to the Scotland Bill and the work of the Treasury and the Deputy First Minister in reaching agreement on the fiscal framework, the Scottish Government will soon have more control over welfare than it has ever had before. We welcome the wide-ranging powers; they give us the opportunity to discuss important issues in depth.
For too long, debates about social security and welfare have simply been an exercise in criticising the policies of the UK Government; it has become something of a pastime for ministers and cabinet secretaries. The Scottish Government now has an opportunity to offer its alternative plans for dealing with the complex issues that are attached to welfare provision.
The Government has made much of the broad language of “fairness”, “respect” and “dignity” in terms of the overall culture of the social security system that it intends to create, and I am sure that those words would draw support from every member of Parliament and indeed the wider public outside the chamber. However, it is crucial that the cabinet secretary now sets out to the Scottish taxpayer some concrete proposals for the delivery of the powers and says how it intends to pay for any possible divergence from the policies of the UK Government.
Furthermore, in ensuring fairness, the Scottish Government also needs to show how it can improve the delivery of services in Scotland. In that regard, the Scottish Government has some pressing questions that it needs to address. I have no reservations in stating my support for a lower welfare, high-pay society. The UK Government’s efforts in driving employment to a record high go some way towards a sustainable solution—one that gets people back into the workplace and increases financial independence while at the same time building a system that is available to those in need of support.
In the past, the Scottish Government has taken apparent pleasure in condemning UK Government policies such as the work programme, which incidentally has managed to get more than 43,000 long-term unemployed Scots back into work since 2011, but the Scottish Government now needs to state how it will incentivise work and design a system of social security that discourages welfare dependency.