Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 26 May 2022
We are talking about holding the Government to account and ministers made the specific promise that the new system would be fully in place before the 2021 election. Indeed, only last week, Audit Scotland warned that the timescales for the delivery of the new benefits are also challenging. As I have said in previous debates, it is in all our interests that Social Security Scotland should succeed. We all want that, but the organisation must deliver efficient and cost-effective assessments and payments, and we will continue to hold the Government to account on that.
As is the case with any Government body or quango, the Scottish people rightly expect its resources to be managed effectively and efficiently, and that they will deliver value for money. As the Social Justice and Social Security Committee has recently heard, projections around spend on devolved benefits estimate that there will be a gap of at least £0.75 billion by the end of the current parliamentary session. As my colleague Jeremy Balfour has previously said, SNP-Green ministers have also not outlined where we are seeing costs for rebranding around the personal independence payment, for example, which is ostensibly just a repeat of the same system. Ministers have not set out any changes that will be made to that payment, and that is something that the committee and members across Parliament want to see.