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I welcome the latest report from the JRF and Save the Children, and we continue to work with them and other key stakeholders to take forward our work on child poverty.

We have set out significant resources to deliver on the plan. As I said, the RSR allocates up to £300 million for tackling child poverty and social justice. It also commits more than £23 billion through social security payments in the next four years, with almost £1.8 billion for the Scottish child payment.

The report welcomes the plan. It states:

“the Plan is a strong diagnosis of the struggle that many families currently experiencing poverty face. In many respects the Plan also correctly identifies the areas where additional action is needed.”

The report welcomes—as those organisations did when the plan was published—the balance between putting money into people’s pockets, reducing costs and employability. We were advised to balance those three pillars within the plan.

As I said in my opening remarks, the modelling that we have done around the plan would, as I set out to Parliament, deliver a rate of 17 per cent of children living in relative poverty, which would meet the relative poverty target. The JRF and Save the Children have said that they used a different system of modelling to reach their conclusions. I can bring in Julie Humphreys if the committee wants to know more about the differences in the modelling, as that is a different modelling system.

The absolute child poverty target is extremely difficult to meet in times of rising inflation because it is very much linked to inflation. It would be extremely difficult to chase that target by using the Scottish child payment, for example. The modelling that we did showed that, at that point, we would have needed to set a Scottish child payment at around £55 per week per child in order to chase that target, because it is linked so much to inflation. That figure would be even higher now, as the rate of inflation has gone up since the plan was published.

I am afraid that that is not a sustainable position. That is why the other things that we are doing, such as mitigating the benefit cap and providing all the other supports, are an attempt to tackle and target the poorest families. That approach is more likely to produce a shift with regard to the absolute poverty target.

I do not underestimate the challenge here, and we welcome the scrutiny from organisations that are dedicated to this work. We have said on a number of occasions that we will keep the Scottish child payment under review. I know that the organisations concerned had asked for a Scottish child payment of £40 by the end of the current session of Parliament. Of course, we will keep the Scottish child payment under review, but we have to balance it with the other elements such as employability to ensure that we encourage people to take up fair work opportunities where they can and remove the barriers to enable them to do so.

The resource spending review was an opportunity to interrogate areas of spend. The affordable housing supply programme is a key lever in addressing poverty, including child poverty, which is why we are investing £3.6 billion.

We have discussed on a number of occasions the challenges of temporary accommodation. We are working with local government on reducing the need for and use of temporary accommodation. Its funding has been discussed with local government on a number of occasions. I remember that the committee was looking at the cost of temporary accommodation, particularly for those who are in work, and the challenges that that brings. However, that is primarily a local government issue, and there is a reliance on housing benefit revenues in funding that.

In the interests of time, I will be happy to come back with a bit more detail on the work that we are doing on temporary accommodation.

That is really important. I think that I am aware of the case that Paul McLennan has mentioned, which was a powerful testimony.

The key thing is the 200 community link workers located in general practices across Scotland, which we have funded through the primary care improvement fund. They are now a well-established component of multidisciplinary teams in primary care. Someone may present to their GP with stress or other mental health issues, but worries about money and debt may underlie that. The ability to signpost people in the here and now just along the corridor to someone who can help them to look at the money situation, entitlements and options around debt management is very important. That is the value of the community link workers, and you can multiply that testimony many times.

The experiences and insights of the community link workers are crucial in helping us to plan future policy. The Scottish Government has commissioned Voluntary Health Scotland to develop a new national network and community of practice for community link workers so that we can build on that expertise. They do a crucial job.

As the First Minister said recently, we know how much importance the third sector places on multiyear funding settlements, and we will continue to work with the sector on the issue of fair and stable funding and try to move to multiyear funding where possible. That is very much in line with the discussions that we have been having with third sector organisations, which want to move to multiyear funding, of course.

One of the constraints on the Government is that we have not had multiyear funding. However, through the resource spending review, we have had the opportunity to set out our funding priorities, and tackling poverty—child poverty in particular—is clearly one of the key priorities.

The short answer is that that is very much on the table.

I will kick off. Key for me is the balance of spend in the tackling child poverty delivery plan. Pam Duncan-Glancy knows that, when I set out the plan to Parliament, I made it clear that, as well as the support that is provided by putting money in people’s pockets here and now—primarily through the Scottish child payment—it was really important to tackle the root causes of poverty, which we know are many and complex.

Supporting parents into employment is a key aspect of the plan. It is clear that traditional employability supports were missing a whole cohort of parents, for reasons that we could probably spend the whole day talking about. The doors to traditional employability programmes were either not known to parents who were struggling or were not offering attractive enough support.

We set out our ambitions to change that and to look at more bespoke support for parents moving into employment by tackling issues, such as childcare, that are barriers to getting parents into employment. We set out a significant investment in employability programmes that are targeted at parents and that try to move them into employment. We know that that is the best way out of poverty. We have a target of supporting 12,000 parents into employment over the course of the plan. That will make a big change to structural inequalities and to poverty in families.

Kate Forbes might want to speak in more detail about employability.

We can certainly take that away and consider whether some local authorities have best practices that could be supported.

I accept the point that the landscape can be confusing. One of the areas that we are looking at is whether we can have single sources of information and support. It may be that we can pull in some of the support that is delivered by local authorities to ensure that people looking at what they might be entitled to can get a bit more clarity around that from a single source of advice. We can certainly look at whether there is anything more that we need to do around guidance.

There is. That might be through the national work on the provision of benefit take-up information encouraging people to take up their entitlements. A number of platforms can be used to promote that information, but nothing beats human interaction. That might involve support through schools—encouraging every part of the public sector to see its role in promoting information and advice.

I recently visited a school with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy. The headteacher was clear that part of their role was to support families, particularly those on low incomes. They had advice evenings, bringing in advice givers and encouraging and incentivising parents to come along so that they could get that information.

It is about using all such opportunities, such as the GP surgery, the school, and health visitors for interaction and to signpost people because, although take-up rates for the Scottish child payment are pretty good, at beyond 80 per cent, 20 per cent of people who are entitled are not getting that important support. We need to look at all avenues.

You made an important point. I recognise that we need to understand the impact that debt and money worries can have on mental health, and we are working with stakeholders to tackle that issue and ensure that our services have the reach that they need to.

In our mental health transition recovery plan, we committed to further develop a response to those whose mental health has been affected by issues relating to debt, and we are working closely with a range of organisations—including Citizens Advice Scotland—to tackle that. We have worked with Support in Mind Scotland and the Money and Pensions Service on the development of a money and mental health toolkit. The toolkit is designed to help people understand, manage and improve their financial health and mental wellbeing. It will be distributed very soon, mainly through GP practices with some distribution among social prescribing networks and Public Health Scotland. It will also be possible to download it from the Mental Health and Money Advice Scotland website. We understand the links and we are trying to ensure that that is built in to the services provided.

You might be aware of the Scottish Government’s “Welfare reform report: Impact on families with children”, which was published in April. If not, it is definitely worth having a look at that, because it found that reversing key welfare reforms, some of which you mentioned, would bring around 70,000 people out of poverty, including 30,000 children. It looked at the removal of the £20 per week uplift, the two-child limit, the removal of the family element and the benefit freeze, and it also looked at universal credit work allowances and the taper rate, on which there has obviously been a positive move. In essence, if those reforms were reversed, it would help to put £780 million more per year into the pockets of Scottish households.

We have spent a lot of money on mitigation, and I outlined some of that in my opening remarks when I mentioned the mitigation of the bedroom tax and the benefit cap. If we did not have to mitigate those, and decisions on those things were reversed at source, we would be able to spend the money we currently spend on discretionary housing payments and the benefit cap on other supports. We therefore reiterate our call—as I do when I meet my counterparts in the Department for Work and Pensions and the UK Government—that that would be the best way forward for all of us.

That is an important issue, and when I answered the question earlier about the money and mental health toolkit, I said that it is very much on people’s minds. People who work in health understand the relationship between money worries and mental health. The toolkit will be important, and the support that is being rolled out, including link workers providing front-line support, social prescribing and signposting, is critical and will be even more critical in future.