Meeting of the Parliament 01 March 2016
I offer some respect to Hugh Henry. If that was his valedictory address to us, there is no better subject that he could have been speaking about. He is not someone with whom I have agreed on every detail, but I absolutely share his commitment, which I acknowledge, to trying to make the lives of people in Scotland better—even if sometimes we differ on the methods of doing that. By saying that, I think that I have addressed dignity, fairness and respect, on which the cabinet secretary quite properly anchored the debate.
Sir William Beveridge’s report underpinned much of what we are engaging with today. Social security has evolved a lot since the Beveridge report was started in 1941 with a survey, but nonetheless the approach that was taken then is one with which we live today.
Perhaps an important question to think about is: what is the society of which we are a part and what is the society of which we wish to be a part in the future? We would all accept that we can all contribute to society. However, I am not certain that the Conservatives would agree with my assertion that we do not have to be a worker to contribute to society. The Conservative amendment anchors social security and support on being in employment. Lots of people contribute to society without being in employment, or without being able or willing to be in employment. We must separate the needs of people in our society from their ability to be part of our society financially. Many people simply cannot be that, and I fundamentally disagree with Conservative colleagues.
Quite a lot of the debate has been about mechanical issues. Inevitably, the cabinet secretary talked a great deal about how we will do this. In his budget for his proposed system, Beveridge interestingly capped the administration costs at 5 per cent. That is a pretty good starting place that the cabinet secretary could perhaps think about. In the modern, efficient world, with good-quality computer systems, we might do rather better.
It is also worth thinking that smaller uplifts in how much we expend could perhaps have bigger impacts than we think. Beveridge’s system increased expenditure on social services by only 50 per cent. One would have thought for the radical transformation that it effected that it would have been much more than that. More fundamental, the changes refocused what we were doing. The system that had preceded it for the previous 30 years came, of course, from Lloyd George, who introduced the Old Age Pension Act 1908. The House of Lords had vigorously opposed the bill and, in 1911, its sails were trimmed, so that its powers to block legislation were reduced.
I fear that we are back in the position of the House of Lords having undue influence over public policy—the Tories plan to add members to it to that end—but we will see. The bottom line is that we must focus on people.
The original system was the Chelsea pensioner system, which was introduced in 1689 by King William and Queen Mary. My great-great-grandfather was a Chelsea pensioner from 1818 because he was an army pensioner.
Today, we are in a different position. We must ensure that we are able to afford what we do, but we must focus—first, middle and bottom—on the people whom we are trying to support. I am sure that we will do that.