Meeting of the Parliament 20 February 2024
It is interesting that Ms Haughey has brought up the matter of pensions. We do not have any detail from the Scottish Government on pensions in an independent Scotland. She wants to have a debate about pensions right now, but the SNP does not have a paper on pensions, it does not know how it is going to pay for them, and it does not know about the currency. What a Labour Government will quite clearly do is fundamentally reform the social contract—as we did when we were last in government, to take a million pensioners out of poverty—to make things fairer and better. That is what Labour Governments do.
I am conscious that I have been generous with interventions and that time is getting on, so I will draw my contribution to a close.
The change that Scotland needs is not another self-indulgent fantasy paper to make SNP ministers and back benchers feel good—I am sure that it feels great to be in the Parliament, talking about that. The reality is that people need help right now. We have been clear throughout that a UK Labour Government will provide change in the form of the fundamental reform of the social contract that is required.
More than that, it is about supporting people into work as a route out of poverty; ensuring that people have good, high-quality jobs, a living wage and trade union rights; and ending zero-hours contracts and insecure work. That is the change that a Labour Government offers. We did not see anything in the paper about routes into work and about jobs, and we did not hear anything about them in the cabinet secretary’s contribution. All that we heard was more of the same.
The reality is that we need to see change, and we can have change faster with a Labour Government. That is what we need, not more debates about a fantasy independence prospectus that may never come to pass.
I move amendment S6M-12203.2, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:
“acknowledges that the people of Scotland would be best served by a social security system that embeds dignity, fairness and respect and provides a safety net for all in a strong and growing economy; notes Scotland’s devolved social security benefits; acknowledges that delays in processing adult and child disability assessments have left disabled people stuck in limbo and out of pocket during the worst cost of living crisis in decades; notes that the Scottish Government’s decision to cut affordable housing budgets by 27 per cent in the face of a housing emergency has been labelled as baffling by organisations like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; acknowledges that cutting vital funding for affordable housing and employability schemes harms the eradication of the causes of poverty; notes that between 2017 and 2021, 12 per cent of people have remained in persistent poverty after housing costs, and recognises that the paper, Building a New Scotland: Social security in an independent Scotland, is the latest in a series of theoretical future plans by the Scottish Government, which has already been too distracted to focus on the here and now and make the devolution of social security work for the people of Scotland.”
15:32Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.