Hansard

In response to the shocking and developing situation in Ukraine, the Scottish Government continues to take urgent steps to resettle people who are fleeing here.

The Home Office has announced the creation of new schemes through which Ukrainian people may come to the United Kingdom to settle: the Ukraine family scheme, which allows people who live in the UK and who have family in Ukraine to bring family members to the UK to settle; and the homes for Ukraine scheme, which allows individuals, charities, community groups and businesses in the UK to support a Ukrainian person to come here.

Normally, many forms of social security assistance have eligibility restrictions on people who are subject to immigration control. However, people who come from Ukraine will not be subject to immigration control, which means that they will not be affected by any such restrictions.

Moreover, the immigration restrictions are not the only obstacle that people arriving from Ukraine, including those who already have the right of abode in the UK, would normally face. Yesterday, the Department for Work and Pensions laid emergency regulations, which come into force today, that seek to exempt such individuals from two remaining obstacles to immediate eligibility for social security assistance: the habitual residence test and the past presence test.

Those tests appear in UK and Scottish social security legislation. Application of them, each of which requires an individual to have spent a certain amount of time in the UK in order to establish their eligibility, would be likely to stop individuals who are arriving from Ukraine being able to claim support until they had been here for up to six months. The DWP regulations seek to disapply those tests for people in specified groups who arrive from Ukraine. If the regulations are agreed to, they will enable such people to access social security benefits from day 1. I commend UK ministers for their actions in that regard.

The regulations that are before Parliament include mirroring modifications to devolved social security legislation. The amendments will be made to UK benefits that are delivered under agency agreement in Scotland, and to regulations that have been made under the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018. In addition, we are making, in the same instrument, equivalent amendments to the regulations on council tax reduction entitlement.

I appreciate that Parliament has not had its usual opportunity for full scrutiny of the regulations, and I am aware that that is far from ideal. However, the pace at which the legislation has had to be developed in order to meet the necessary timescales means that normal scrutiny is simply not possible, in this case. I hope that Parliament empathises, given the situation and the circumstances.

I am grateful to the Scottish Commission on Social Security for working with Scottish Government officials to help them to introduce this urgent legislation in the shortest possible time. It is commendable that Scottish Government officials also worked at pace with UK Government officials.

Scotland is a welcoming country, and it wants to be so for new arrivals from Ukraine. I hope that colleagues will agree that the instrument that is before them is necessary so that we can ensure that people who arrive from Ukraine, who are fleeing situations that we cannot even imagine, can access crucial social security support on their arrival in Scotland.

I move,

That the Parliament agrees that the Social Security (Residence Requirements) (Ukraine) (Scotland) Regulations 2022 [draft] be approved.