Hansard

No, I am not surprised to hear that, because I know that. While I oppose many of the benefit cuts, I think that this one—particularly the rape clause that flows from it—definitely goes too far in the wrong direction. However, it is the sort of policy that we have come to expect from the UK Government. The implications of this policy, as the rape clause so vividly illustrates, are truly abhorrent. The very need to provide an exemption from the two-child cap for women who have been raped shows the callousness of the cuts in the first place.

The rape clause is wrong in principle. The Equality and Human Rights Commission said at the end of last week that, because of this policy, there is a clear risk of the retraumatisation of rape survivors. No woman anywhere should have to prove that she has been raped in order to get tax credits for her child. I cannot believe that, in 2017, I am having to make that argument in the Scottish Parliament.

The policy is not just immoral, although it definitely is; it is also unworkable in practice. The proposal for third-party verification puts an unacceptable burden on health workers and rape crisis centres, as well as on officials from the Department for Work and Pensions. Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, NHS Scotland and many others have quite rightly refused to collude with the rape clause. That is one of the reasons why, although it has now passed into law, no one in the UK Government is able to explain how it will work in practice. Many basic questions are still completely unanswered. What burden of proof is required? How will the claim be verified and recorded? How can the process possibly take place without the woman fearing that it will be hugely stigmatising for her and her child?

I ask Ruth Davidson not to dodge those detailed questions but to do what no one has done thus far—to answer them. As she does so, I ask her to imagine the trauma for any mother who is already a victim of rape who has to go through such a process. Imagine having to report the most personal and painful information imaginable and then having to go through a process of verification, and having that information recorded for years as a condition of one of your financial lifelines. The moment anyone considers all that must surely be the moment when the sheer inhumanity of the policy becomes clear.

Of course, the Tories’ argument today will be that we should just ignore the policy’s inhumanity and put up with whatever callous cuts the UK Government wants to introduce. According to the Tories, instead of arguing for the repeal of policies such as the rape clause on grounds of principle and common humanity, the Scottish Government should just apply a sticking plaster. I want to address that ridiculous argument head on.

First, let us be clear about the fact that the Scottish Government cannot abolish the two-child cap or the rape clause. We do not have the legal power to do so. Given the complexity of tax credits and universal credit, trying to mitigate the impact of these cuts would be significantly more complex than simply compensating people for the bedroom tax.

That is not the only issue. The real issue here is the financial impact of mitigation on other services. A key point is the fact that, when the UK Government makes such cuts, it does not pass Scotland’s share of the savings on to the Scottish Government. If it did, we could make our own choice about whether to reverse the cut or to follow the UK Government in spending the money elsewhere. The UK Government keeps the money from the savings. That means that any decision by the Scottish Government to mitigate one of these cuts involves taking money that has already been allocated to schools, hospitals and other services.

Notwithstanding that, we have mitigated where we have been able to. We should not have had to, but we have. Since 2013, this Government has spent £350 million mitigating the bedroom tax. Where we control benefits, we make our own choices—for example, we will not apply the two-child cap in our council tax reduction scheme—but we simply cannot accept a situation in which the Tories can implement whatever heartless cut they want to and the only answer is for the Scottish Government to take money from elsewhere to plug the gap, because where does that end? If we accepted that argument, there would be nothing to stop the Tories deciding to no longer pay any benefits for people in Scotland, pocketing the savings and looking to the Scottish Government to step in. It is a ridiculous and unsustainable argument. I say to the Tories that, if they think that the Scottish Parliament is better placed to take those decisions—I certainly agree with that—let us forget the sticking-plaster approach, let us devolve control of tax credits and universal credit and the budgets that go with them and let us then make our own decisions in this Parliament.

The only appropriate mitigation here is for the UK Government to abandon the two-child cap, which would then render the rape clause unnecessary. Just as the UK Government reversed cuts to tax credits two years ago in the face of mounting protests, it should ditch these policies now because they are unacceptable and unworkable. Let me make this clear as well: they are unacceptable and unworkable not just in Scotland but right across the UK.

The Tories here had a choice on this issue: to stand up for what is right or simply to be a mouthpiece for the UK Government in defending the indefensible. The fact that they have chosen the latter is to their shame. It proves that, if Scotland is looking for strong voices to protect all that we hold dear, the last place we should ever look is to the Scottish Conservative Party.

I said at the start of this speech that the issue is not fundamentally one of party politics but one of human rights and morality. The overwhelming consensus in this chamber demonstrates that fact. The vote on the motion today gives all of us an opportunity to reaffirm that and to reaffirm that, despite the differences that we have on so many issues, we all share a basic belief in social justice and recognise the importance of humanity, dignity and equality in our social security system. By doing that, we can add our voice, as Scotland’s national Parliament, to an outcry against the two-child policy and the rape clause that I hope will grow right across the UK. We can take a clear stand against a policy that I would argue has no place in any civilised society and we can reaffirm this chamber’s commitment to progressive values.

For all those reasons, I urge everyone across this chamber to support the motion in my name.

I move,

That the Parliament is fundamentally opposed to the UK Government’s imposition of the two-child limit on child tax credits and universal credit, which will push families into poverty; notes that the Institute of Fiscal Studies states that, across the UK, these cuts will lead to around 600,000 three-child families being £2,500-a-year worse off, and 300,000 families with four or more children being £7,000-a-year worse off, with on average two thirds of the families affected having at least one adult in paid work; utterly condemns the disgraceful and repugnant "rape clause", which will force victims of rape seeking to claim child tax credits to prove to the UK Government that their third child was born as a result of non-consensual sex; believes this policy to be unfair, unequal, morally unacceptable and deeply harmful to women and their children and a fundamental violation of women’s human rights; supports those third sector and healthcare organisations that will not be third party assessors on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions, and calls on the UK Government to urgently change its position and remove the two-child cap and therefore scrap the "rape clause".