Hansard

I worked as a front-line housing officer for around six years. It was a very rewarding and, at times, tough job, and it offered a good grounding for becoming a councillor and a member of the Scottish Parliament, because I saw at first hand the daily struggles and challenges that are faced by people who are just trying to get by.

In that job, dealing with the benefits system—in particular, the housing benefit system—took up around half my workload. Helping tenants to complete new claim forms, providing evidence of income or changes of circumstances, advising when people started or ended a job and dealing with errors, mistakes and overpayments dominated my work. All those aspects impacted on the ability of the tenant and their family to afford their rent, feed their family and, ultimately, keep a roof over their head.

Like almost every housing officer in the country, I had to go through the formal process of evicting people. If I recall correctly, I think that I did it a dozen times. On only two occasions was the tenant still at the property when the eviction took place. Every other time, the tenant had abandoned the property in desperation; on the odd occasion, they had never moved in. The occasions when someone was there were awful. It was a horrible experience and a desperate situation. Every housing officer in the country bends over backwards to avoid such a scenario.

Today, those staff are dealing with people who are in crisis. They are dealing with individuals or families with illness or disability, people who might be suffering a mental health crisis and people in debt, who cannot feed themselves or their family and who are at risk of destitution. Many families in such a position have working parents who are doing their best but are having to battle a system that is broken.

Universal credit is in chaos—the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, the Poverty Alliance, Citizens Advice Scotland, councils and charities all tell us that. The only people who pretend that it is not are members of the Tory party, who appear to be saying that all those organisations must be telling lies. There has been a series of problems with delivery. People lose out because the conditionality goal posts have moved. The use of sanctions is increasing. There are delays in payments: there is a five-week wait for initial payment as well as delays in on-going payments. There is a lack of support for people who do not know how to use IT systems. Those are all very real problems in the here and now.

I am sure that all of us support the principle of simplifying the social security system, but simplification is just a cover story for what the welfare reform process is really about. It is about the systematic slashing of the benefits safety net for the most vulnerable people. It is about a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. It is all part of the Tory class war on the poor, which was so cruelly articulated by Michelle Ballantyne in her offensive and discriminatory comments of two weeks ago, which were passively endorsed by every Tory member—not one of them has spoken out about those comments.

No one in Scotland or across the United Kingdom should face destitution or abject poverty—the UK is the sixth richest country in the world, for God’s sake. We should be ashamed of that fact, and we should be ashamed that life expectancy is falling for the first time in decades and that one in four Scottish children lives in poverty.

We hear a lot of clichéd talk about the state being a corporate parent. What kind of parent, as an act of policy, inflicts such misery on their children? What kind of parent forces a £28 a week cut on households with a disabled child? What kind of parent penalises their children because their mother was raped? What kind of parent supports a policy that results in an increase in the number of evictions of families with children? I will tell members what kind of parent—an uncaring, neglectful and abusive corporate parent.

The welfare reform process is an all-out assault on the low paid, the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Families are losing thousands of pounds a year. In Scotland, 470,000 people are not getting the real living wage of £9 an hour. That represents an increase of 30,000 on the previous year. We have heard about the rise in the use of food banks. Kettle packs are being distributed to allow people who do not have a cooker or cannot afford to put it on to feed themselves. The need for crisis loans is up and rent arrears are up. In local government, support services such as lunch clubs, breakfast clubs and youth work are being decimated. There is a crisis in mental health, whereby desperate people are unable to get the support that they need. It is the toxic combination of low pay, benefit cuts and the erosion of essential public services—the ones that hold our society together—that is causing so much damage.

Tory politicians have the brass neck to come to this Parliament and talk about mental health, inequality, poverty and housing. It is the duty of every one of us to call them out on their hypocrisy, their unwillingness to face reality and their disregard for people in our society whom they deem unworthy of support.

The Tories exist to increase inequality. They exist to attack the low paid, the disabled and the vulnerable. Let me tell the Tories this: we will not give them a moment’s peace until this appalling system is scrapped.