Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 26 May 2022
That is not what I am suggesting. However, as the committee heard this morning, there will be a two-tier system, particularly for the 38,000 people who are currently on disability living allowance and will be moving to adult disability payment.
It is possible, where there is the will, for the Government to find solutions to those problems. What matters more than anything is that people are not facing DWP systems that do not give them adequate money to live on and that rule people out of access to support because of arbitrary figures such as the 50 per cent rule and the 20m rule. The sooner that we, in Scotland, can do away with that, the better.
At this rate, any substantial changes to eligibility for and the adequacy of adult disability payment will not be in place during this session of Parliament, despite both financial and legal competence having been entirely devolved for years.
The system does not meet children’s needs either. Child poverty remains at shamefully high levels. I engage with third sector organisations, as, I know, the cabinet secretary and the minister do. They have shared stories about families sharing blankets and children sharing their free school meals. People are coming together to support each other while Governments fail to step in. Last week, Aberlour told the Social Justice and Social Security Committee that it sees not relative but absolute child poverty—complete destitution.
The tackling child poverty delivery plan 2022 to 2026 concluded that, with a fair wind and on a good day, we might scrape through the relative poverty target next year. I hope that we do, but the plan also admitted that, even with the same optimistic outlook, the absolute child poverty target for 2023-24 will be missed and 16 per cent of children will remain in destitution.
The Scottish child payment is welcome, as I have said before, but, at its current rate and in its current unfinished state, it does not do enough. Three out of four children living in poverty are not receiving the money that they should be getting from that payment. The clumsiness of the roll-out is costing the poorest children upwards of £5 million a week. The Government blames the DWP but, as I said, the committee has heard that the Government has not asked quickly enough for the information. The SNP made yet another headline-grabbing announcement but has not had the plans to back it up. People deserve and expect better than that.
Then we come to bills. A quarter of people in Scotland are in fuel poverty—a figure that is only going to get worse after Tuesday’s announcements about the fuel price cap. Neither Government is doing enough to address that. Fuel poverty is another example of the Government failing to live up to its rhetoric. The fuel strategy rightly recognises that disabled people of all ages have a higher cost of living as a result of fuel costs, yet, when the Government had the opportunity to extend child winter heating assistance to all disabled people, regardless of age, it did not do that. It had the power but did not use it.
Fuel poverty already affects 619,000 households in Scotland, a number that will increase. People who were already struggling are finding that they cannot make ends meet and cannot pay their bills. Of those households, 218,000 have older people in them. That is why we proposed fully costed plans that would have given people on pension credit £400 to mitigate some of the rises in energy bills. We would have given the same amount to people on carers allowance supplement, child winter heating assistance and council tax reduction.