Hansard

It is a great privilege to open the debate for Scottish Labour. I welcome the cabinet secretary to her new role and look forward to working with her and the Government.

In Scotland today, 1 million people live in poverty. We are set to miss the child poverty targets that we set ourselves in law; half of families living in poverty have a disabled person in them; precarious work is all too common; 400,000 people still earn below the living wage; 83,000 people are on zero-hours contracts; more than 200,000 people use food banks; and the pandemic threatens to bring even further precariousness to people’s lives. However, when we need it the most, our social security system fails us. One Government is implementing welfare reforms each of which is worse than the last and the other is failing to use the powers that it has and is taking too long to deliver the change that people in Scotland need.

We cannot go on like this. We have to go hard and fast on poverty and inequality, but neither the UK Government nor the Scottish Government is doing nearly enough. While the UK Government continues to impose the two-child limit, cuts the incomes of people on legacy benefits and ends the universal credit uplift, it cannot claim to be serious about human rights or ending poverty. That is why, when I meet the shadow DWP team every week and add the voices of the people of Scotland to those of the millions of people elsewhere who need those policies to end, we discuss all the ways that are open to us in the UK Parliament to end those rules as soon as possible.

However, members should not fall into the trap of believing there is nothing we can do here, in Scotland. In my experience, when people say that we cannot act, it is because they have not seen the potential to do so—and we have so much potential in Scotland. That is why the amendment that we have lodged, which I have spent the past few days developing with colleagues across the chamber, focuses on action that we can take right here, right now, starting with social security.

The Scottish Government can and should use all the powers that it has to establish a minimum income guarantee in Scotland. That would include using all the levers available to it to increase income from work, to reduce housing and transport costs, to support people who cannot work and to make payments to protect the people who are furthest from economic equality, such as lone parents, disabled people, carers and students. If the Government does that, we will support it.

Doubling the Scottish child payment and adding a £5 supplement for families with a disabled person in them would help to protect those groups from poverty, too, and it would bring their income up to the level that they need to flourish. That is why we believe that the Scottish Government should do that immediately—not in five years’ time.

All that we are doing right now with the powers that we have over disability benefits is improving their administration. I concede that that needs to be improved, but our ambitions must be bigger than administering disability benefits a little bit better than the Tories did. Several years after getting further powers in the area, we are still using the rotten old DWP rule book and it is still the people whom the DWP says deserve the support who get it.

We did not set up the Scottish Parliament to be the DWP lite—I think that we all agree on that. We are here to transform lives, which is why, ahead of the debate, we asked all the parties across the chamber to seize the moment and do things differently. Our amendment asks the Government to move swiftly on disability assistance, to open eligibility for it so that people with fluctuating and mental health conditions can access it, and to pay it at a rate that meets the extra costs of being a disabled person. Disabled people cannot wait; we need to work with them to achieve that now.

There are an estimated 788,000 unpaid carers in Scotland, and they need us to go hard and fast in tackling the poverty that they face, too. That is why our amendment asks the Government to let carers earn more from part-time work and to end the full-time study rule.

Our social security system must be easy to use, simple to access and automated when that is possible. It should protect people who are in precarious work, such as creative and hospitality workers; it should be there for those who cannot work; and it should provide payments to people when times are tough.

However, tackling poverty is not just the social security system’s job; it is a mission that needs all of the Government to be focused on it. As the Government’s motion says, it should be “a national mission”. If the Scottish Government was serious about that—if it made a minimum income an organising principle for work across the Government, as has been suggested by the Institute for Public Policy Research, and if it took action now—it could help everyone in Scotland to get there. The Government could bring down housing costs by capping rent rises, and it could reduce transport costs by providing free bus travel for under-25s. It could ensure that work pays by enforcing the living wage and collective bargaining through procurement and business support, and it could create more good, fair and unionised jobs. If the Government did all those things, it would lift thousands of people out of poverty and up to a level where they had enough money to live on.

That is how we can ensure that the people of Scotland have a minimum income to live on right now. We do not have to wait, as the Government’s motion and the Greens’ amendment say. The cabinet secretary knows from my reply to her letter that I and Scottish Labour would welcome the transfer of employment law responsibility to the Scottish Parliament in order to provide vital protections—protections that workers won—for people’s lives and livelihoods. We believe in and would welcome working with trade unions to shape the request and develop a UK floor across employment rights so that we have a race to the top and not the bottom. We will work with the Scottish Government on that.

The cabinet secretary also knows that I feel strongly that the Scottish Government must use to full effect the powers that it already has. I was not elected to the Parliament to talk about what we cannot do. We sit in the chamber with significant powers to reduce poverty and inequality—powers over social security, procurement, housing and transport—but I hear a lot about what we cannot do yet.

If I had given up every time I was told that I could not do something, I would not have gone to a mainstream school, I would not have the care that I have now, I would not have the master’s degree that I have now, and I would not have the job that I have now. I ask everyone who is here today not to give up on the people of Scotland. If we want to change lives and do something, we can find a way to do it. Where there is a will, there is always a way. We can change lives with the powers of this place, and we should do so now.

I move amendment S6M-00263.3, to leave out from the second “the impact of” to end and insert:

“that it is the responsibility of both the Scottish and UK governments to work for the eradication of poverty in Scotland and to implement social security policies that support this goal; believes that further steps are required to make workplaces fairer, including through payment of the Scottish Living Wage; commits to using all the powers available in Scotland to reform carers benefits, move from the ‘safe and secure transition’ of disability benefits to addressing their eligibility and adequacy as soon as possible, to increase incomes and lift people in Scotland out of poverty, and calls on the Scottish Government to double the Scottish Child Payment to £20 a week at the earliest opportunity and introduce a supplement for families with a disabled person in them”.