Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2024
I thank everyone who has worked on the bill, in particular the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. I also thank the Child Poverty Action Group, the Poverty Alliance and the Law Society of Scotland for their briefings for the debate and for the ministerial statement earlier today.
The bill deals with a range of important issues and lays the ground for care experience assistance, including a care leaver payment, which I and other Scottish Greens very much welcome and hope will not be long delayed. We are supportive of the bill, although we have some remaining questions—in particular, on the provision of information for audit. I will return to that issue later. For now, I want to focus on what is, for us, one of the most significant and potentially transformative aspects of the bill: the provisions that relate to the Scottish child payment.
We are proud of the role that the Scottish Greens have played in the development of the Scottish child payment to what it is today, on both the level of the payment and the number of families who are able to receive it. We know that it is already making an immense difference to the lives of those families, as was recently detailed by academics and policy experts in their evidence to the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. If anyone still doubts the efficacy of the payment, I urge them to read the Official Reports of those meetings. As Professor Ruth Patrick pointed out, the system of cash payments not only reduces the stigma that is associated with other types of assistance; crucially, it recognises and values parents’ own expertise.
Sadly, in practice, the Scottish child payment is not operating as it was originally intended to operate—as an extra payment that allows parents to give their children something more than the bare essentials for survival. Instead, very often—too often—it has to meet those bare essentials, to mitigate the effects of other events and policies.
One such event was the pandemic and what Jack Evans of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation described as the erosion of financial security that that produced. However, far more devastating was the epidemic that came afterwards—the crisis of greed that translated into unaffordable prices for the basic costs of living.
That oppression still continues, because as Stephen Sinclair of the Poverty and Inequality Commission explained to the committee, although inflation as a whole is lower than it was, the rate for essentials such as food and fuel, which account for a higher proportion of spending for low-income families, is higher than the headline figure.
The third factor—and the most destructive of all—is the UK Government’s social security system. As Ruth Boyle of the Poverty Alliance explained, that system
“is pulling people into poverty”,
with
“90 per cent of people who are in receipt of universal credit ... going without essentials”.—[Official Report, Social Justice and Social Security Committee, 30 May 2024; c 10.]
Ruth Patrick spoke of the way in which the two-child cap represents
“a divorcing of the relationship between need and entitlement.”—[Official Report, Social Justice and Social Security Committee, 23 May 2024; c 13.]
That relationship is fundamental to the working of a decent and just society.
Professor Danny Dorling described the UK as
“appalling in comparison with every other country in Europe”.—[Official Report, Social Justice and Social Security Committee, 23 May 2024; c 8.]
Last year’s UNICEF Innocenti report found that the UK had the largest increase in poverty out of the 39 countries that it surveyed, and that the rate of child mortality—the grief of generations—is now once more rising in the UK.
We welcome the space that will be created by the bill to place the Scottish child payment on a new footing, which will potentially make it not only a top-up that is dependent on other entitlements, but a stand-alone payment. It could be made available to those who cannot receive it at present, including families in the asylum system and young people over 16. As the Poverty Alliance highlighted, it could also be a vital step towards the implementation of a minimum income guarantee and all that that means for dignity, financial security and wellbeing for everyone in Scotland. We welcome the bill as a step along that journey.
15:26