Social Justice and Social Security Committee 18 December 2025
For me, whether it is a four-nation or bilateral approach, it is about how we get past me saying what I would like, the UK Government giving its position and there being no genuine discussion. We need to find a way through that.
I am conscious of the fact that, on the day that the strategy was launched, Scotland Office ministers suggested that they were disappointed that the Scottish Government was obsessed with process issues, saying that we should get down to the details. However, it is exactly because we wanted to get down to the details that we needed a process—to allow us to do that.
The type of thing that I would like to see next year is a genuine discussion, whether it is about difference in policies, lessons learned, monitoring and evaluation, or whether it is about looking in more detail at the strategy that the UK Government has developed and how it impacts on Scotland. For that to be meaningful, we need to get past the transactional nature of the discussions that we were in at the start of last year and get down to a genuine discussion.
I would very much welcome that, and we are in the middle of drafting our child poverty delivery plan, so there is absolutely the space to do it. I hope that the UK Government can find a way to think that that might also be useful as it looks to implement its policy.