Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thanks very much, convener, and a happy new year to everyone. Thank you for inviting me, supported by Shirley Laing and Kevin Stevens, to the committee.

As you will be aware, this is another challenging budget—perhaps the most fiscally challenging to date. We have had to make choices and we are proud that we have chosen to back our national mission to tackle child poverty and strengthen the support that is available for families during the cost of living crisis.

We have committed almost £200 million to support the doubling of the Scottish child payment to £20 from April 2022, immediately supporting 111,000 children under the age of six. We are committed to rolling out the Scottish child payment fully to under-16s by the end of 2022, backed by an investment of £197 million. In the meantime, we will continue to meet the costs of delivering a bridging payment, worth £520 a year per child in 2022, to around 150,000 children of school age. That investment underlines our commitment to delivering on our national mission and, of course, we will publish our next four-year tackling child poverty delivery plan by the end of March. The plan will outline cross-government action to put Scotland on a critical path to meet the targets that have been set.

The Scottish child payment forms part of the £4 billion that we are committing in social security and welfare payments, which will go directly to over one million people in Scotland. The money will help low-income families with their living costs, support older people to heat their homes in winter and enable disabled people to live full and independent lives.

This summer, we will introduce the adult disability payment, which will deliver approximately £1.95 billion of support for working-age disabled people. This brand new benefit will provide disabled people with a fundamentally different experience when applying for and receiving the support that they are entitled to. I am delighted to confirm that the regulations for the adult disability payment have been laid before the Parliament, marking a significant milestone in the devolution of disability benefits.

We are investing £530 million to deliver the devolved social security system in Scotland in 2022-23, ensuring a simplified, compassionate system that will treat everyone with dignity, fairness and respect, and provide people with an improved experience.

This winter, we will launch low-income winter heating assistance. Through an investment of £21 million, around 400,000 low-income households that are currently eligible for cold weather payments will receive a guaranteed annual payment of £50. We are also investing £41 million, including local authority administration, in the Scottish welfare fund to provide essential help to the most vulnerable people in our communities.

The budget also recognises the important role that carers play in supporting those with disabilities or long-term conditions, with a further £315 million of funding for carers allowance and £42 million for carers allowance supplement.

Within the budget, we are making available £831 million for affordable housing, progressing our commitment to deliver 110,000 affordable, energy-efficient homes across the next decade, of which at least 70 per cent will be available for social rent and 10 per cent will be in our remote, rural and island communities.

We are making a further £10 million available for our ending homelessness together fund. This continues our investment of £100 million for transformation funding between 2018-19 and 2025-26. It supports the commitment that we made in the programme for government to continue to invest over £100 million to support front-line services and focus on the prevention of violence against women and girls from school onwards over the next three years. That figure includes the enhanced delivering equally safe fund, which we have increased by £12 million to £38 million, providing over £28 million to support front-line services and £2 million for prevention over the next two years.

In conclusion, this is very much a budget of choices and, indeed, a transitional budget in which we have sought to support our three strategic priorities of child poverty, climate challenge and Covid economic recovery while progressing our resource spending review for the longer term. That will be under way soon.

I thank the committee for its pre-budget scrutiny and I look forward to your questions.

We have agreed to make sure that the best start payments and the best start grants are uprated going forward. The best start grants and the best start payments form an important part of the support that is given to children and are an important part of the overall package. We increased best start foods in August this year from £4.25 to £4.50, a rise exceeding the rate of inflation and providing a level of support more generous than in other parts of the UK. We are also widening eligibility for best start foods later in the parliamentary term. We increased the best start grant in 2021 by 1 per cent, which is technically double the rate of inflation. A two-child family will now receive £1,919 in their children’s early years, which is £1,419 more than the sure start maternity grant equivalent. Of course, as I have said earlier, the families receiving the best start grant and the best start foods will also benefit from the doubling of the Scottish child payment from April.

We talk about big numbers and those numbers do not always mean a lot to people, but when you take them together, the best start grant and the best start foods will provide a financial support package that is worth £8,400 by the time an eligible family’s first child turns six, which is a commitment to the most vulnerable children that is unparalleled across the UK. I think that that brings home what this means for families.

I am happy to share that correspondence. There is nothing to hide: it is what I have just explained. We want to be absolutely transparent about this and keep the committee updated. I am happy to share the correspondence and I am sure that when you have the DWP minister in front of you, you will be able to ask her similar questions.

I think that we are in the same area as I have just described. The Scottish assessment criteria have been widely welcomed because of the different assessment processes. In fact, I think that it was put forward to the Work and Pensions Committee at Westminster that the Scottish assessment criteria are a good model to look at. That shows that it will be a very different experience, which, in turn, is likely to lead to more people claiming those benefits who might have been put off previously. People still need to meet the criteria, but the look and feel of the benefit and the way that Social Security Scotland will operate will inevitably lead to more people applying. I think that that is why the Scottish Fiscal Commission has made that assessment.

Emma Roddick will not get any argument from me on that. Clearly, it would be much easier if social security across all benefits were devolved to Scotland. That would be simple and straightforward compared with the hybrid system that we have, and it would allow us to join the dots across all benefits far better.

For example, one of the issues in negotiation for the future, with the review of the ADP, is the impact on passported benefits. That will require agreement with the UK Government in order to ensure that future changes to the ADP do not impact on passported benefits. How much simpler it would be if we had all the benefits under Scottish Government control. The direction of travel would be that decisions could be made here in Scotland to best meet the needs of the population here.

We have raised that at meetings with the previous and current UK ministers. Ben Macpherson, the Minister for Social Security and Local Government, has also done so. We have also agreed that the mobility element review will start earlier than the wider review of the ADP. We have flagged up with the DWP that it is important that we get agreement that changes that it makes will not impact on passported benefits. We have put that marker down and have said that we want further discussions. I think that the DWP has recognised that. At this stage, we do not have agreement on passported benefits, but we have clearly flagged that as an issue on which we will need more detailed discussions.

I am certainly happy to write to the committee with more detail around this, but the overall direction of travel is to make all homes barrier free, and there are standards for new housing that will help to deliver that. We have been supporting registered social landlords and local authorities on retrofitting and aids and adaptations. On the local needs assessment, it is important that local authorities report back regularly to us about the levels of accessible housing in their areas.

There is more that we need to do, though. The media interview that I did was on the back of a quite challenging case of someone with very complex needs. At the moment, I am not sure that our systems provide for those who have particularly complex needs and who need bespoke solutions. We have systems of aids and adaptations that can be made to existing housing for those whose mobility changes over time. With new stock there are higher standards on accessibility and being barrier free.

However, there are people who have particular complex needs that require a bespoke solution and I am not sure that we have that quite right yet. One of the commitments that I have made—and I have asked officials to do this—is to look at how we can do more to help to resolve those very complex cases and support local authorities and RSLs to do that. I am happy to come back to the committee with more information about that if you would find it helpful.

As I have mentioned on a few occasions, all of these things will be entered into the resource spending review, which provides the opportunity and the platform to discuss them. It is not just the third sector that is wanting to move to multiyear settlements; it is local government as well. Kate Forbes has already agreed with local government that we will start discussions on a multiyear fiscal framework, if you like. Therefore, through the resource spending review, we will want to have a parallel discussion on moving in that direction with the third sector.

Let me try to answer those questions in turn. The Scottish welfare fund provides a vital safety net for people experiencing a financial crisis or needing help. Obviously, it cannot be a regular source of income for someone, but it can help in crisis situations.

In 2022-23, we are investing £41 million in the Scottish welfare fund. Forty-five per cent of crisis grant applications are made by people requiring help due to their benefits or income having already been spent. Local authorities are able to carry forward any underspend from the previous year’s budget, which means that the total available in the current financial year is £45 million. Last year, more than £49 million was paid out from the fund and more than 200,000 individual awards were made to low-income households. Of course, a number of councils add to the fund.

In addition, £25 million of flexible funding, which is part of the £41 million winter support fund, is available to support people experiencing financial insecurity. We recognise that this winter will be tough because of rising costs, and that £25 million of flexible funding should help local authorities to meet people’s needs.

The distribution of funds is based on the number of low-income benefit recipients in each local authority and has been agreed with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, so any changes would need to be agreed with COSLA.

We committed to undertake a full independent review of the welfare fund to ensure that it works as well as possible across the country, and it will look at issues such as funding, administration, promotion, take-up and accessibility. I can tell the committee that, following our competitive tendering exercise, a preferred contractor has been identified to undertake independent research, and we are finalising the contract with the organisation. I am happy to update the committee when that is done and the work begins. I expect the work to start imminently—by the end of the month—and the final report is expected by the end of this year.

A key element is about gathering the views of applicants to the fund to hear what they have to say about whether the fund is successful or not, and a review advisory group has been established to provide oversight of the research process. That will include membership from the key organisations that you would expect.

I hope that all of that helps us to address any issues that need to be addressed in improving the welfare fund.

I reiterate what I said to Miles Briggs at the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, where he asked the same question. First, it is obviously for local authorities to decide their council tax level; it is not for the Government to tell them where they should set their council tax.

Secondly, council tax levels in Scotland are significantly lower than those elsewhere in the UK, so we are starting from a lower baseline. We also have the council tax reduction scheme, which supports huge numbers of people who struggle to pay their council tax. Again, I am happy to furnish the committee with details of that. That scheme is available—to an extent, it is not available elsewhere—and it recognises Miles Briggs’s point that we need to support people who are struggling with their council tax. The £130 pandemic payment was also paid to those in receipt of council tax reduction.

If we take all those measures together as a package, we see that the money that I have talked about throughout the meeting to support low-income households will be important as we face rising living costs, including food and fuel costs. The package of measures and the funding that we are giving to low-income households will help to keep people’s heads above water over the next few months.