Meeting of the Parliament 01 March 2016
As a fellow member of the 1999 intake, I pay tribute to Hugh Henry, who has served in this Parliament for the past 17 years as a minister, as a back bencher and as the convener of a committee. During that time, he has made a distinguished contribution to the Parliament and we thank him for that. I also wish Drew Smith all the best, given that he is standing down after five years. I am sure that he is young enough—as Hugh Henry is—to come back at some future date.
I begin by underlining the commitment that I have given—with a nod to Kevin Stewart—about fast tracking benefits for people who are terminally ill. In any humane society, we would all want such an undertaking to be given, to ensure that anyone who is suffering from a terminal illness is fast tracked for assessment and payment.
That is a good example of many of the improvements that we can make to the social security system that do not cost a great deal of extra money. For example, I have announced that we will use flexibility to offer people the opportunity to have universal credit payments made fortnightly instead of monthly, because sometimes monthly means five-weekly. For many people, it is difficult to budget on a monthly or five-weekly basis with the meagre income that they have. There is little additional cost to the system in offering those people the choice of being paid twice a month—if they so wish—instead of just once a month.
Similarly, every stakeholder, including tenants organisations, has asked us to revert to the older system of housing benefit, under which the benefit is paid directly to social landlords and not to tenants. Under that system, 96 per cent of people wanted and had their housing benefit paid directly to the landlord, and tenants want to go back to that system. Of course, every tenant reserves the right to change that if they so wish, but every stakeholder believes that that system would be an improvement. That would not cost much money at all to implement and we are committed to that.
I will mention a couple of other areas that we are looking at. For example, if we were able to time winter fuel payments to help people who are off grid, that would materially improve their situation, and only an administration cost would be involved. Similarly, I believe that there should be much more co-location of those who dispense benefits and make decisions about individuals in relation to benefit applications and those who provide welfare rights services. That would mean that people could check almost right away whether they had been allocated the right level of benefit—they could get their award double checked to make sure that that had happened. That would help enormously by taking a lot of frustration out of the system. If that were possible, it would cost very little to do.
I turn to other issues that were raised. John Lamont mentioned IT systems. He might be glad to know that, for benefits that rely on major IT systems, in the initial period we will continue to use the DWP’s IT systems. We have decided to do that out of necessity because, if we were to invent our own IT system, it would delay the acquisition of the powers by some years. That is a worthwhile trade-off, even though we will have to pay the DWP for the pleasure of using its systems. In the interests of ensuring a smooth transition, it makes sense to continue to use those systems—which were undoubtedly designed by a Scotsman anyway—until we are in a position to have our own IT system.
I think that Willie Rennie mentioned the benefits of the work programme. We share his thoughts on the matter. Unfortunately, since the decision was taken to include in the Scotland Bill the devolution of the work programme to the Scottish Parliament, the budget that is allocated to the programme at UK level has been reduced from nearly £1 billion to just under £100 million. That means that although, when it was announced that the work programme would be devolved, we expected to inherit a budget of nearly £100 million, the budget that we will inherit will be more like £13 million.