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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.

The Scottish Fiscal Commission acknowledged that there is a lot of uncertainty over the longer-term trends, which could impact on the overall fiscal position. Its forecast includes several benefits that have not yet launched and uses assumptions that will be confirmed only when outturn data becomes available.

To answer Jeremy Balfour’s final point, the forthcoming resource spending review will allow us to take spending forecasts into account in determining funding requirements as we target public spending to where it delivers greatest benefits.

We are making a significant investment—it is an investment in people. The money that we are investing in ADP and other benefits is about supporting low-income households; it is about supporting people and helping them to have a better quality of life. We are taking the steps that we need to take through the resource spending review, but we certainly see the investment that we are making as a very important investment in making improvements to the application, review and appeals processes and removing barriers. I would have thought that that would be welcomed across the Parliament. The experience that people will have of the adult disability payment will be very different from their experience of previous benefits.

I might bring in Kevin Stevens on the specifics of the extra Christmas payment, but I will go back to the point about how it will be paid for.

I said to Jeremy Balfour that we will be looking at all the cost pressures within the spending review process, where we will be able to look across the longer period to the pressures that will come into the budget, including for social security. That is where we will be able to project and make adjustments in the budget going forward. That mechanism allows us to ensure that the required funding is there.

Is Kevin Stevens able to answer the question about the extra Christmas payment? If not, we will write back to the committee.

On that last point, we are prepared and we signalled to the DWP back in the summer of 2019 our intention to double the Scottish child payment, so there has been no lack of preparation on behalf of the Scottish Government. We have had a lack of agreement with the DWP about the data transfer. I explained in some detail in my initial answer to the convener why that is, which is that we put forward a proposal that we thought was less risky and more straightforward. The DWP has not agreed that and wants to use its new system, which carries higher risk because it is a new system, and, therefore, that needs to be built in. There has been no lack of preparation.

I also told the committee earlier about the review points to ensure that we are jointly responsible for making sure that that data transfer happens and that we can get the doubling of the Scottish child payment by the end of this year. There is no lack of preparation on the part of the Scottish Government.

As I set out, we have said that the strategic review of the ADP should take place once there is the safe and secure transfer. However, I also said earlier that an earlier part of that review would kick off by looking at the mobility descriptors—the mobility element, if you like—of the criteria. That will start this year, so it will start more quickly in recognition of the concerns.

Not all of this is within our gift, so for any changes that we propose to make we have to have the certainty that they will not impact on passporting benefits. That is why, going forward, the response of the DWP to any changes that are proposed is as important.

On the question of policy, if we were not making major changes to the look, feel and scope of the assessment criteria, I do not think that the Scottish Fiscal Commission would be projecting the big increase on the ADP spend that it is projecting. It is projecting that increase for the very reason that there are likely to be improvements to the application, review and appeal processes, which will mean that more people will keep their benefit and more people will be entitled to it.

We have tried to provide local government with a fair and affordable settlement in a really tough financial environment, given the tough settlement from the UK Government. We have tried to give local authorities a fair and affordable core settlement. Of course, a lot of local government resource comes from other portfolio investments, such as in childcare and education, as Miles Briggs will be aware.

There is no money left over. There is no money down the back of the couch. The money has all been allocated. We have tried to allocate money to local government while, at the same time, providing money for social security in order to double the Scottish child payment. All of these issues have to be weighed up in the round.

If Miles Briggs believes that more money should be given through the local government core grant, for example, he will have to tell us where that money should come from. Should it come from the additional money that we are putting into social security, as the Scottish Fiscal Commission has recognised? If that money was to go to local government instead, it would not be going into the pockets of people in low-income households.

Balanced decisions have to be made, given our fixed budget. There is no magic money tree that can provide money that does not come from elsewhere. In balancing the budget—I am sure that Miles Briggs could be part of the budget discussions with my colleague Kate Forbes—any movement in money has to be compensated for elsewhere. Those are the difficult challenges that we will face over the next few weeks. I am keen to hear what other parties have to say and where they would shift money from.

Quite rightly, it has been a long-term aim and call of the third sector to move to multiyear funding, and we are keen to do that. We will be working with the sector to move towards that, because it will give it more certainty.

Funding for the third sector comes from across the whole of Government, not just my portfolio. My portfolio has the core third sector funding but the bulk of it comes from elsewhere across Government, so moving to a multiyear settlement requires a cross-Government agreement.

Again, I am happy to keep the committee apprised of the progress that we make with those multiyear funding discussions.

As I tried to set out in my initial answer, total funding for the Scottish welfare fund in the current 2021-22 financial year—we are talking about two different financial years—was £45 million, although £49 million was paid out, because councils top up the fund. We need to keep an eye on these things. As I said, we also provided £25 million of flexible funding, as part of the £41 million winter fund, in recognition of the demands on the fund that Pam Duncan-Glancy has alluded to. We will continue to work with COSLA and individual local authorities to monitor demand on the fund.

The review is examining issues such as funding, administration, promotion, take-up and accessibility. It will also address the issue of some local authorities using the fund a bit differently from others—some have an overspend and some have an underspend. The review will look at all those issues.

I reiterate what I have already said about third sector funding. Third sector funding, in the main, comes from across the whole Government. I think that the SCVO estimated that the third sector benefited from about £500 million of investment across the whole Scottish Government. Therefore, the amount within my portfolio is a relatively small part of that.

We do not believe that there will be any immediate impacts on infrastructure bodies that are funded through my portfolio. We believe that, by identifying efficiencies and working across other portfolios, individual organisations will not lose core funding in the short term, and we want to work on the multiyear funding that I talked about earlier over the medium to longer term.

First of all, I absolutely recognise the important role of the third sector. I reiterate that the major funding for the third sector does not come from my portfolio. The £500 million-plus comes from across the whole Government. We believe that, in relation to the £25.8 million for next year, adjustments can be managed through efficiencies and other portfolios that support the third sector. We do not believe that there will be the impact that Pam Duncan-Glancy has alluded to. We will work through these things. We will work with the third sector to ensure that what she has said does not happen.

However, as I said, it is a really tough budget. We need to make sure that we drive efficiencies where we can. We need to avoid duplication and make sure that every pound is spent in the most efficient way. The third sector is very efficient at spending the money that we provide, and we want to work with it to ensure that it continues to deliver what it is delivering. The third sector is a core part of the Covid recovery programme, and I give my commitment to support it to do its work.

It is not just the Scottish Government that needs to play its part. The UK Government needs to play its part as well. We have talked about the mitigation that we have had to spend money on. The example that I used earlier was that, if the UK Government would scrap the bedroom tax, we would not have to spend £80 million on discretionary housing payments. That money could be spent elsewhere.

Councils are really important partners. We have a partnership with local government and a key priority is to tackle child poverty. A lot of the money that we are talking about is routed through local government, such as the money for the attainment challenge and early learning and childcare, which is a crucial element.

With our partners in local government, we will keep a firm focus on tackling child poverty and trying to wrap around families. If we consider the six priority family types, I think that we need to get far closer to supporting and working with families on what they need to make the difference. That will include the support that we provide through social security and the child payment, which is obviously important, but it may also include the employability programmes. Would wraparound childcare for families make the difference, enabling them to secure fair paid work and removing the barriers that prevent them from doing that at the moment? It is about looking at how we support them, and a lot of that will come through the child poverty delivery plan that we will produce in March.

Employers are really important. If we can get more employers paying the living wage, paying fairly and signing up to fair work, that will clearly help to tackle child poverty. We know that decent paid work is still the key way out of child poverty and poverty for families, so employers have a big job in making sure that they pay at least the living wage.

We will explore many of those aspects as we go forward. We have been trying to engage with employers on what more they can do. There are some good examples of employers going the extra mile in supporting their employees and we want to work with them as exemplars of what other employers could do to play their part.

Let me first reiterate what I said in my opening remarks. We have a budget of choices, into which we have put a huge amount of money beyond the block grant moneys received for social security. I can go into that in more detail during this evidence session.

The Scottish Fiscal Commission has recognised that the Scottish Government is putting a huge amount of money beyond that from the block grant into social security. I think that that needs to be recognised. It forms the context for the choices that we have had to make.

As Pam Duncan-Glancy said, we have made the commitment to double the Scottish child payment to £20 from April 2022, immediately benefiting 111,000 children under the age of six. When we announced the introduction of the benefit, we made it clear that it will be extended to under-16s by the end of 2022, subject to the receipt of the necessary data from the DWP, as I outlined in my previous answer. At that point, more than 400,000 children will be eligible for the £20 payment.

As Pam Duncan-Glancy mentioned, in advance of that, we are supporting as many school-age children and young people as possible through our bridging payments, which are worth £520, in 2022. That is an innovative response that makes use of local authority data to deliver immediate support to around 150,000 children.

The Scottish child payment remains the best way to provide the support that low-income families need, and that is why we have acted to double the payment from April and why we will move as quickly as we can to roll it out by the end of the year. It is estimated that 60 per cent of children in poverty live in a household with a child under the age of six, so the measure targets many families who are suffering from poverty, who will benefit from the doubling from April 2022.

The programme for government committed to deliver the increased payment by the end of the parliamentary session; of course, that PFG commitment will now be accelerated by four years. I hope that members will welcome that. We are going as far as we can as fast as we can, within the resources that we have.

On Pam Duncan-Glancy’s second point, I have laid out in some detail some of the data issues that are at play here. I have tried to be as clear and as transparent as I can be. We put forward our preferred data solution, and there was a very protracted negotiation. As I said, the upshot is that we have had to reluctantly agree to using the DWP’s system—its new strategic solution. It is a bit higher risk because the DWP has yet to build and test that new strategic solution. We have not yet received the full design specification, so that means that the Scottish child payment team has started its development work with that risk, basing it on a set of assumptions and accepting that some reworking is likely to be required once the full design specification has been shared with us.

That said, as I said in answer to the convener, there is now a structure around monitoring progress, with some trigger points. If there are concerns, ministerial involvement will happen very quickly.

Again, I am very happy to keep the committee informed. From our side, we are absolutely determined to see our roll-out commitment happen by the end of the year. However, as I also said to the convener, we require the data from the DWP to do that. It is a joint, two-Government responsibility, and it is important that every effort is made to ensure that those timescales are met.