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Again, we raised that issue directly with the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work, I think last week. It is a critical issue, and we need movement on the data from the DWP. In the meantime, we have brought in bridging payments to ensure that families get money for their kids this year and next. However, we need the data in order to be able to move across to the new system.

It is fair to say that there is yet to be an agreement on the method for that. The DWP has suggested one route, but we do not have full confidence that it will deliver that within our timeframes. Our officials have suggested a different way, which has not yet been accepted. Officials are working very closely on it, and I have to put on record that we have a very good working relationship, particularly at official level, and I am confident that a solution will be found. Alison Byrne is very close to these discussions, so I will perhaps let her add a bit of detail.

The issue is constantly under discussion. I have a lot of sympathy with the desire for multiyear funding so that organisations know the lie of the land beyond just one year. Indeed, Kate Forbes has said that local government has that desire, too. However, such funding will be possible only if the Scottish Government itself has certainty. If it gets only a one-year funding settlement from the UK Government, it is very difficult to go beyond that for the organisations that the Scottish Government funds. It therefore all depends on the certainty that we get.

I was able to give an indication of the funds that will be available over five years for affordable housing, but that was only because of the Government’s commitment to meeting the affordable housing targets, which is a key priority for any funding that we get. I was able to do that in that instance, but it is more difficult to do that on a larger scale.

In short, those discussions are on-going. We know that it would be better for the third sector to have that certainty, and we will continue to discuss the opportunities to work towards that.

I will come back to you on the detail of that.

I might bring Alison Byrne in, because she would have been around when that happened. The difference will be around eligibility for passporting benefits. I take your point that there were different approaches to terminal illness, but I do not think that that would have put at risk any of the passporting benefits, whereas the mobility component of PIP and then of adult disability payment is seen by the DWP as a fundamental part of the eligibility for passporting benefits. Therefore, I think that we could say that it is being treated in a different way.

We have to get beyond that. The fact that the UK Government has published its green paper seems to me an opportunity, because it is clearly thinking about making changes. If we are both doing so, we need to come to some agreement that that is okay and that it should not put at risk passporting to benefits that are still reserved.

I am quite optimistic that we can get there and, if we can, it opens up a lot of opportunities for the review of ADP from 2023 and allows us to scope and build something that, were we starting with a blank sheet of paper, we would choose to put in place instead of what we are inheriting. That said, as I said in response to Pam Duncan-Glancy, things will still feel a lot different for clients, given the major changes that will be made. However, we want to go further than that.

I am happy to do that, and it might help if I provided the correspondence from the previous cabinet secretary.

It is complex. We have to bear in mind that Social Security Scotland was first established following the passing of the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018; it did not have any infrastructure, so all that had to be built from scratch. If the UK Government decides to bring in a new benefit through the DWP, it has all the infrastructure there to do that. Social Security Scotland had none of that; in essence, it had to start building from scratch, and every new benefit has to be built from scratch. We have an issue in relation to the winter benefits in that regard—if there is not a process of household matching, Social Security Scotland has to build a new system for that one benefit. The committee can imagine the complexities.

On top of that, we have the issue of case transfer. I do not think that it has been attempted on the scale that we will do it, with such a large number of cases being transferred from a department in one Government to an agency in a different Government. The complexity of that alone is huge. There is no room for error, because people need continuity in their payments. All that is very challenging.

The Scottish child payment was delivered within 18 months, which was a very ambitious timescale. In order to deliver it in that timeframe, we used the top-up powers; in essence, we used the entitlement to universal credit to top up that benefit entitlement with the Scottish child payment. Going forward, it would be good to have a different legislative basis for the Scottish child payment. However, if we had tried to do that in the available timeframe, it would not have been possible to get the payments out.

We have a hybrid system that is not ideal. As I said, if we were starting with a blank sheet of paper, we would not build a hybrid system that involved interaction with the DWP, which can bring its own challenges, while simultaneously trying to build platforms for a system here in Scotland.

Alison Byrne will be able to say a bit more about that, because she is closer to the complexities of the system.

Not only the Scottish Government but numerous organisations have done various bits of analysis on the impact of welfare reform.

At the moment, there is a lot of attention on the removal of the £20 uplift in universal credit, which it is estimated will remove £460 million from Scottish beneficiaries. We are fast approaching D day on that and, as I said in the debate last week, I sincerely hope that there is a change of heart on the issue. Apart from anything else, we are in a bit of a perfect storm at the moment, with rising fuel and food costs. It would be the worst time to compound those financial pressures on households by removing the universal credit uplift. For some families that are just about keeping their heads above water, it will be a very challenging situation that will make this winter extremely difficult. That will have a huge impact.

Alongside that, we have raised concerns over the piece about measures such as the benefit cap and the two-child limit, which put pressure on families that are already struggling. It is also worth bearing in mind that many of the recipients of universal credit are already working. One of the UK Government’s responses has been that people should go out and get additional hours, but that fails to recognise that—as the committee knows well from the previous work that its predecessor did on how many people are in in-work poverty—many of the people who are on universal credit are already working but are working in insecure, low-paid jobs.

The removal of the universal credit uplift is huge and will add to a perfect storm that is brewing. It will also undermine the work that we are doing, not least around the Scottish child payment. We are trying to get that money into people’s hands, and our commitment to doubling that payment is shared around the table. Because of the removal of the universal credit uplift, we will be giving with one hand and taking away with the other. That will not help us to get towards our interim child poverty targets, which is a huge concern to me.

I hope that I have given you a flavour of the work that has been done. We can write to the committee with information on the further analysis that has been done—there is a lot of detail in that. Members will be aware of the headline figures, but we can furnish the committee with more detailed evidence on that, if that would be helpful.

Over the piece, there has been a lot of engagement. First, the Scottish Government made many requests to the UK Government for dialogue around testing out the theory of universal basic income. It would be generous to say that the response was lukewarm. There is no joint commitment or agreement to work towards that, so that is a bit of a problem. We have raised the minimum income guarantee with the UK Government and, although its response is not particularly less lukewarm, we will continue to discuss the opportunities.

Clearly, if we had an integrated tax and benefit system, it would be easier to make a lot of the more ambitious changes but, as Paul Tyrer said, the social renewal advisory board has given us a very ambitious series of recommendations, and it would be remiss of us not to try and do what we can, even within devolved powers, to make progress towards them. I will not put much store in getting any support or help from the UK Government—we need to just get on and do what we can ourselves.

Having half the tools in our box is never as good as having a full toolbox, so we will continue to argue that having full control over benefits here makes more sense. We talked earlier about the challenges of a hybrid system and the complexities of the interaction of those two systems. Without a doubt, that will continue to be a challenge, and that is before we get into the policy divergence issues, which are also a challenge. There is a growing political consensus that having employment powers here makes sense; a lot of the trade unions are in favour of that and it would give us the opportunity to make changes around, for example, the statutory basis for the living wage and the issues around terms and conditions. If those powers are devolved here, this Parliament can make the policy choices that it wants to make, and I am optimistic that that will eventually happen.

As you would expect, individual local authorities and COSLA have raised those issues with us. It is about supporting local authorities that have concerns. Making the changes is the right thing to do, but we understand that some local authorities will have more concerns than others. We need to work with them to overcome those challenges.