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Good morning to the minister and his officials. I will start on a point of agreement: I completely share the minister’s belief that the UK Government has not done enough to support people during the cost of living crisis.

I am interested in the promotion of education maintenance allowance as a follow-on benefit to the Scottish child payment. I know that it has been touched on already, but can the minister set out what the Government is doing to make that process as automated as it could be—or, indeed, automated entirely?

I thank the minister for the answer, but that sounds quite a bit like there is still a reliance on the individual to apply. Is there a reason—that I am not aware of—why there could not be an automatic follow-on?

My understanding from conversations with various people who work locally is that there is no referral system to another agency. The DWP, for example, can make a direct referral, but that direct referral option is not available in Social Security Scotland. It sounds like there is a more manual workaround in which someone will tell a client that they should speak to Social Security Scotland or Social Security Scotland will say to a client that they should speak to one agency or another, but there is no automation of the referral process or even any directly recognised referral process. Is that clearer?

I thank the minister for that, although it was possibly a statement as opposed to an intervention. I could have predicted—despite my forgetting that I could take an intervention—that that particular intervention was coming.

I was about to say that I understand that there have been some difficulties with roll-out. It was interesting that the minister mentioned that it had been the Scottish Government’s engagement with the DWP to get the data that had been the issue. Therein lies my concern. I believe that both our Governments should be engaging much better on matters of household finances, particularly at a time of cost of living pressures. I honestly think that we need to get to a position in which both Governments can work more closely on that.

I was also about to say that I am not terribly interested in some of the negotiations between the Governments. However, I am interested in the fact that the families of thousands of children were not able to access the payment from the date at which the Scottish Government and others considered that it would be necessary for them to do so. Regardless of whether the fault lies at the door of the DWP or of the Scottish Government, if those families had got it at that date, the past two years would have been significantly better for them.

I again put on record my frustration about the roll-out to over-sixes, but I will finish where I started: by saying that we welcome any extra funding through the Scottish child payment that affected families can get at this time, and that we will vote for the regulations.

Thank you. That was helpful.

I will, indeed. I had forgotten that that is an option at this point.

Am I right in thinking that you said that the payments are made by different organisations?

Thank you.

We will come later to issues of processing, minister. You say in the Government’s response to the report by the Scottish Commission on Social Security that existing signposting and referral pathways will be developed. Will you set out what those are? Having done various bits of engagement, I am not aware that there are referral pathways between Social Security Scotland and other public sector organisations, including the national health service and, possibly, local authorities, in the way that the DWP has those referral mechanisms.

I thank everybody for their contributions so far and for what they have given us in advance, too. The submissions have been really helpful, as always.

First of all, I have a question about the issue of participation, which we have just discussed. Given some of the barriers that we have heard about, how would you characterise your involvement in the budget and the resource spending review? Could Susan McKellar, Allan Faulds, Oonagh Brown and Clare Gallagher answer that briefly?

I know that that is a lot of answerers, but you could be really brief. I am just trying to get a sense of how engaged you guys have been in the budget process or how open it has been to you.

That was really helpful. I asked the question, because we heard earlier on about the importance of transparency. Obviously, we have already discussed that issue, but I just wanted to get a feel for where we are at so that the committee can understand the scale of the challenge.

My next question is in the same vein and is about minimum core rights and progressive realisation and what we need to measure in that respect. I know that those are big questions, and we have heard a lot about them this morning. I note that Audit Scotland’s submission highlights a gap between the rights that the Government encourages—or the rights that it says that people have or that it wants people to have—and the reality and that Susan McKellar’s submission talks about women being overlooked. Moreover, evidence from others including the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities—and, indeed, the letter to the British Institute of Human Rights in 2016—have highlighted some of the problems that we have.

We can look at the budget line for, say, social care and say that there might be more money going into that or into social security. However, we heard this morning from people with learning disabilities who are not even able to choose whom they live with. You can argue that the budget going up represents progressive realisation, but the lived reality does not even represent much of a minimum core, I would say. What do we need to measure and what framework can we use to help us get to a point where we can develop a minimum core and then ask sensible questions about the budget?

I throw that question open to anyone who feels that they want to give it a go.