Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 September 2020
I am glad to be speaking in the debate led by the Conservative Party, but I note that in lodging the motion and telling the SNP to focus on closing the attainment gap, the Conservatives have failed to give the matter at hand its full title: the poverty-related attainment gap.
I say to Mr Gray that the inconvenient truth of the afternoon is that the Conservatives are responsible for the austerity policies that cause poverty and that they hold the levers of power to address the issue fully. That leaves the Scottish Government mitigating for poor ideological decisions that are taken elsewhere—a conundrum that would easily be solved by a vote for independence.
The Scottish Government has tackled poverty. We are still in the delivery stages of every child, every chance. That will deliver £12 million of investment in intensive employment support for parents, increased funding for the workplace equality fund to support employer-led projects to advance equality at work and a new minimum payment for school clothing grants. An additional £1 million will be provided for practical support for children who are experiencing food insecurity during school holidays. There is also a new focus on families in the warmer homes Scotland initiative; £3 million of investment has been made in the new financial health check service; and the UK Carnegie Trust affordable credit loan fund has been delivered. All those measures are designed to improve the poverty situation that causes the attainment gap.
When I sat on the Welfare Reform Committee during the last session of Parliament, we commissioned Sheffield Hallam University to report on the cumulative impact of welfare reform on households in Scotland. It was known that welfare reform would reduce incomes in Scotland by £1.5 billion a year—that is £440 for every adult of working age. Families with dependent children are one of the largest losers in the welfare reform agenda. Couples with children lose an average of £1,400 a year, while lone parents lose up to £1,800 a year. Those cumulative impacts have been largely hidden. Families with children lose an estimated £960 million a year, which approaches two thirds of the overall financial loss to Scotland from welfare reform. Nearly half of those benefit cuts were expected to fall on in-work households.
Since then, the Scottish Government has invested over £576 million in tackling the poverty-related attainment gap. The UK, on the other hand, has binned statistics on child poverty, cut benefits and introduced the despicable “rape clause”.
The Scottish Government has made its central mission the delivery of both excellence and equity across our education. I will not reiterate the successes that have been mentioned this afternoon. The SNP Government has brought in a host of measures and achievements to attain the goal of excellence and equity in education, but that is not what the Conservatives are interested in. They have chosen to position their own debate on education around constitutional politics.
I will accept the Conservatives’ invitation and discuss the constitutional situation in Scotland. The Conservatives do not accept that constitutional constraints on the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government have a direct impact on our ability to deal with issues that the Opposition professes to care about. Constitutional constraints have a very real and tangible impact on our ability to legislate and invest in policy areas that matter to the people of Scotland.
The Scottish Government is delivering on its commitment and, at the same time, polls show that a consistent majority in Scotland are in favour of independence. The Conservatives believe that those issues are mutually exclusive, but I disagree. I do not agree that independence comes at the expense of all other issues, and neither, it seems, do the people of Scotland.
Conservative members seem rancorous when independence is even uttered by the members of the SNP, but they are content for their own party to drive a coach and horses through our constitutional arrangements. They are silent when faced with UK legislation that will rip up the devolution settlement, but irate when the Scottish Government suggests that it should take its own decisions when they will affect the people of Scotland.
In an interview answer, it was said once that the first referendum would be a once in a generation opportunity and that has been held to be sacrosanct, yet binding laws that arise from an international treaty are being broken at will by the UK Conservatives. They cannot have it both ways.
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