Seòmar agus comataidhean

That is a very pertinent question. We have committed to delivering 110,000 affordable homes by 2032, of which at least 70 per cent will be available for social rent. We have also committed to 10 per cent of those homes being in remote rural and island communities. We have increased to £23.6 billion the total that is available for delivery of social and affordable homes in this parliamentary session. That continued investment in social housing will ensure that even more people can access an affordable home, which will further drive down child poverty. The links between affordable housing and child poverty are clear.

Progress with affordable housing delivery is reported through quarterly official statistics publications, along with more detailed annual outturn reports. An estimated 2,100 households with children were helped into affordable housing in the year ending March 2021. Keeping social rents lower than market rents benefits approximately 110,000 children in poverty each year. We have had the affordable housing supply programme for many years, but it has become more important as an investment that is also one of the levers to tackle child poverty.

We have made good progress so far, and there is more to be done. Obviously, there has been a Covid impact, because construction was paused for a period during the pandemic, and construction and labour costs are very high at the moment, which has impacted on the price of some projects that are coming through. However, housing associations and councils are working really hard to keep that pipeline of projects coming through, so that we can keep the momentum going here. Also, local authorities and housing associations are operating in quite innovative ways, such as off-market purchases from private sector developers, as well as purchasing on the open market, in order to meet the particular needs of families. There is a flexibility there, which allows us to try to meet needs.

Earlier, I mentioned the need for more larger homes. It would be fair to say that we need to get better at ensuring that homes can meet the needs of people with disabilities and complex needs. There is more that we can do in that space, and I am keen to support housing associations and local authorities to get that right for folk.

“Housing to 2040” laid out a longer-term vision to ensure that standards are continually improving, and that more and more homes are barrier free and more flexible as people’s mobility changes over the years. There is more that we can do in that space to support people with particular complex needs, and we are looking at that at the moment.

I do not think that the approach is targeted enough and, essentially, people will have to pay the loans back over time. The crisis will impact on a far wider range of people than those who are currently within the official poverty statistics. More people who have just about been keeping their heads above water will suddenly not be able to do so, and they will be caught within the cost-of-living crisis.

Our response has to be as targeted as it can be in order to help those who are most impacted. I really fear for people’s ability to keep their heating on and put food on the table. Although we will look to do more, we have already been focusing support to make sure that we help those who need it most. There are on-going discussions about what more we can do in that space and, as I said, there will be further information about that through the budget.

I do not think that we can mitigate every part of the cost-of-living impact on a fixed budget, but we can make sure that our support is targeted at those who are most in need.

I will come back to Gillian Mackay and the committee specifically on the discussions with retailers, but we have been engaging with the business sector generally about what it can do on costs.

We have engaged with the energy sector, for example. I was in a meeting with Michael Matheson and representatives of the big energy companies in which they were asked what they were going to do by way of support to consumers. We have been calling on the UK Government to take urgent and tangible action against increasing energy bills.

On food costs, we have been supporting a number of initiatives on food poverty. We have been trying to take a cash-first approach in supporting people. The food banks have done an amazing job, and those who run them have been supporting our strategy towards a cash-first approach, which has become very important in the current climate.

You are right that retailers have a responsibility, too. The profits of the supermarkets increased substantially during the pandemic, whereas that was not the case for other sectors. I would certainly call on them to do what they can to recognise that people are going to struggle to afford the increased prices of their food products. They have an important role to play. I am happy to follow up on the detail of that with the committee.

I would first point out that a good chunk of the £41 million winter support package that I announced before Christmas will help to deal with fuel poverty through third sector organisations, so there is money going out the door to help people in the here and now. The new low-income winter heating assistance will, as Carol Mochan has said, replace cold weather payments with a guaranteed annual winter payment of £50 to around 400,000 low-income households, which will be an investment of £21 million in 2022-23.

Of course, the UK Government could make a payment right now to all those eligible for the cold weather payment. We are moving to the new benefit as quickly as possible, but Covid had an impact on our ability and the ability of the Department for Work and Pensions to expedite some of the new benefits as we would have wanted. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, a lot of the work was paused on both sides so that there could be a focus on providing life-and-limb support to people.

We think that the UK Government can go further. I have already mentioned the cut in VAT on energy bills, and we have also urged it to review the obligation costs on energy bills to reduce the premium paid by households that rely on electric heating and to help unlock the deployment of low and zero-emissions heating. We do not have the power to set or change energy tariff levels, but we are continuing to engage with the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets and to urge the UK Government and energy suppliers to go further with the support that they can provide in a way that helps the most vulnerable.

As for the medium to longer term, I am sure that the committee will be aware of the significant investment of more than £1 billion in energy efficiency programmes to make homes warmer and cheaper to heat. That will be quite important as people face the rising energy costs.

We will continue to do what we can on energy, food and all the other costs. It is also perhaps worth mentioning the Scottish welfare fund, which was allocated additional moneys as part of the winter support package. It is a flexible fund that local authorities administer and which people can access if they are struggling to pay for things. We have tried to put out information on the fund through support structures such as welfare advice and the national helpline to ensure that people can access what they need in order to find the right source of support for them.

First of all, I will say a bit about the commitment to the new £500 million whole-family wellbeing fund, which is being prioritised within what was a tough budgetary envelope. We have talked a lot about this already, but the impetus for the fund was the need for early intervention and prevention rather than crisis intervention, and it will help with making what needs to be a transformational shift towards those types of services. In 2022-23, £50 million will be deployed, with a focus on building capacity for more significant investment from 2023-24 onwards.

It is a cross-portfolio budget. It looks at how we provide early support, and the six priority family types are obviously key to that. It is not about supporting business as usual and doing the same thing; it is about enabling a shift in the way that we deliver family support services. It relates very much to keeping the Promise and other key strategies. If we get that right, I think that it will have a huge impact on our ability to do things differently.

As I said earlier, we are looking at how we can support families through all the budgets that I have outlined to help them through what will be a really tough time. Again, if the committee would find it helpful, I can provide a more detailed breakdown of all the elements of the budget across portfolios that I think will have an impact on the money in people’s pockets. I have given a flavour of that, but I am happy to give a more comprehensive list, if it would be helpful.

There are clear links between the experience of child poverty and poorer health outcomes across a range of measures over the course of a child’s life, including healthy life expectancy. As I have said, our approach is to ensure that we are working on this right across Government, including in the health portfolio and what it can bring to the table. Earlier, Clare Haughey talked about early intervention and some of the work that is being undertaken to get that right and to ensure that the right interventions are put in place. The target that was set in the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 allows us to take a holistic look at a wide range of action to tackle child poverty.

We need only look at some of the work done by, for example, Harry Burns, who set poverty and child poverty in a public health context. The challenge for us all is to see poverty and child poverty not as inevitable but as products of society and its structures; we need to understand that if we are to move the barriers and address the structural issues that set children on a path to poverty as soon as they are born.

We have some levers for addressing that, but it is frustrating that we do not have them all. Sometimes in the work that we do and the decisions that we take, we feel like there is a pushback in decisions that are made elsewhere; indeed, I have already mentioned the £20 cut to universal credit. That can be difficult, but we have to use every lever that we have as a Government to make progress on child poverty. Viewing it as a public health issue is certainly the right thing to do.

We started from the point of view that, although we have some ideas, we do not have all the answers. That is why we have been consulting with a wide range of stakeholders, seeking to build on the robust evidence base that was established during the life of the first delivery plan.

We have also sought views directly from the Social Justice and Social Security Committee, as the principal committee with the remit in, expertise on and oversight of the work; however, we very much welcome the views of other committees, third sector organisations, local government and people with lived experience. We have been working with the Poverty and Inequality Commission, which has also been working with those who have lived experience, to co-develop and test some policy proposals, in advance of publishing the plan next month.

In that way, we have looked at how we support the six priority family types. Those account for around 90 per cent of all children in poverty in Scotland so, if we can do better by those families and come up with solutions that are going to work for them, we can dig deep into child poverty.

For example, on the employability side, we have been looking at how we create more bespoke solutions for families. If they had already found it easy to navigate and get into employment from the position that they are in, they would have done so. We need to understand the barriers. Some of those barriers are financial, but some are about childcare or transport costs. We need to understand that and put in place wraparound solutions that will make the difference and open doors that have previously been closed.

We also need to look at the costs that families face and at how we can reduce those, in the current climate of increasing living costs, and, what is important, make sure that people get the support that they are entitled to, through Social Security Scotland.

That is the approach that we are taking, and I am hopeful that it will give us the best possible chance of meeting the interim targets.

As I have set out, we have focused our doubling of the Scottish child payment in April on children under the age of six. We know that that will affect 60 per cent of households who are living in poverty, so it will have the biggest impact.

We are determined to meet the timeframe for doubling the Scottish child payment to everyone by the end of the year. The bridging payment is just that—it is a payment to help families in the meantime. The resources that we have put into social security go well beyond the block grant. However, we have a fixed budget and we have had to make difficult choices in order to put money where it will be most effective. I have laid out why that is and the choices that we have made.

The Labour Party’s contributions and ideas for the budget will all be considered in the round by me, Kate Forbes and other cabinet secretaries. We are always looking for good ideas, but we have to make sure that they are affordable within a fixed budget, with all of the pressures that come with the reduction in the settlement from the UK Government. When we look at the Covid moneys that have been removed, we can see that it is a tough settlement. Within that, as the Scottish Fiscal Commission has said, we are putting a huge amount of money, which is projected to increase, into social security and support for low-income families that is well beyond the money that is contained in the block grant.

Pam Duncan-Glancy talked about parental employability support. In March, we will bring forward the tackling child poverty delivery plan, which will look across government. As organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have said, although social security needs to do the heavy lifting, poverty and child poverty cannot be tackled through social security alone; other mechanisms must be looked at, and we have been doing that across government.

We have committed £15 million of further investment for the parental employability support fund across 2022 to 2024. This year, £5.8 million is available, ahead of the wider investment in employability and skills and including continued investment in both the no one left behind approach and the fair start Scotland programme.

We are aware that, due to the impact of the pandemic on local authority operations, including parental engagement and employability support, there have been some delays in the roll-out of the parental employability support fund. We have been supporting parental employability. In addition, we are also committing the first £50 million of the £500 million whole family wellbeing fund that is to be invested across this parliamentary session. The priority for that will be holistic whole-family support.

You have to look at the investment that will be made in the round. When we bring forward the tackling child poverty delivery plan, you will be able to see those investments across government. That is before we include things such early learning and childcare and support for families. All of that will help to make an impact and get us towards the child poverty targets.

Rapid rehousing transition plans are a critical part of the affordable housing budget. It is really important that we tackle temporary accommodation, which is an issue that the member has raised previously. Rapid rehousing transition plans are critical to making sure that people are moved out of temporary accommodation as quickly as possible. Temporary accommodation provides an important safety net for people, so it is there for a reason, but people should not be in temporary accommodation for any longer than they need to be there. They should be moved into settled accommodation as quickly as they can be.

We have committed £53.5 million for rapid rehousing. Within that, the housing first approach is also funded to ensure that those with more complex needs are supported to move into their own tenancies. As we have discussed many times, it is not just about bricks and mortar. It is about wraparound support to ensure that people are able to maintain a successful tenancy.

We need to look at supporting particular local authorities that have had more challenges. The City of Edinburgh Council clearly has pressures on housing, and perhaps more so than other local authorities. We recognise that and we are trying to work with local authorities that are under particular pressure to come up with the solutions that they need. Local authorities have been allocated an annual share of £23.5 million for homelessness prevention and response measures, and Edinburgh’s allocation of that funding is £4.4 million. We will work with individual local authorities to try to help them to overcome some of the difficulties that they are facing.

As I said earlier, we have the current five-year £50 million ending homelessness together fund. I am happy to bring in Shirley Laing to answer on the detail, but you can be assured that the funding that we are putting into homelessness prevention will all be allocated and used, as you would expect, to make sure that we do not just tackle homelessness with rapid rehousing and housing first, but prevent homelessness.

A new part of the work this year is the homelessness prevention duty. We will be expanding the duty and the requirements on local authorities, but also extending that to other parts of the public sector. The best way of preventing homelessness is early prevention, and that legislative provision and change will require all parts of the public sector to highlight where they think that someone could become homeless and then to do something about it.

I will bring in Shirley Laing on the £16 million.