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Despite our best efforts, the universal credit cut will undermine much of the positive effect of the Scottish child payment. That is just not acceptable, so I call on all colleagues across the chamber to make their voices and the voices of their constituents heard in a unified call on the UK Government to do the right thing and reverse its decision to cut universal credit while extending the uplift to legacy benefits. I call on Parliament to support the motion in my name.

I move,

That the Parliament agrees, along with opposition parties in the UK Parliament, that the UK Government’s planned reduction to universal credit should be reversed; recognises the cross-party efforts of opposition parties in the UK Parliament and the social security committees of each of the four nations’ parliaments and assembly in this aim; notes Scottish Government analysis that the reduction of universal credit could reduce welfare expenditure in Scotland by £461 million a year by 2023-24 and push 60,000 people, including 20,000 children, into poverty; agrees that the inadequacy of the payment is just one of many issues with universal credit, alongside the two-child cap and the abhorrent so-called “rape clause”, the five-week wait for a first payment, the benefit sanctions regime and the so-called “bedroom tax”; believes that this reflects the UK Government’s uncompassionate approach to welfare, which has been challenged by opposition parties across the UK, and acknowledges Scotland’s human rights-based approach to social security.

I will be happy to take an intervention if the member can answer why he thinks that a third of universal credit recipients should be in debt after his Government cuts universal credit.

As a Conservative member told me last week, it is about the political choices that are being made. The political choice of the UK Tory Government is not to continue the £20 uplift for the most vulnerable people in our society at a time of rising fuel and food prices. That position is unsustainable.

That is an important question, because tackling child poverty cannot be the responsibility of just my portfolio—it must be the responsibility of the whole of Government. Indeed, it is also the responsibility of the UK Government, local government and the third sector. We need to work together to tackle child poverty, which is why I said in my previous answer that it does not help if another organisation is facing in a different direction.

Just yesterday, I gave a presentation to the public services reform group, which is a group of cabinet secretaries and ministers that is chaired by the Deputy First Minister, to look at how we make the necessary improvements to public services and do things differently. I made a number of asks, including that we have shared responsibility for tackling child poverty—of course, everybody accepts and acknowledges that. I also said that we need game-changing policy ideas from across Government to add to the Scottish child payment, which is described as a game changer by many organisations.

It is fair to say that tackling child poverty needs to be done in three ways. The first is to ensure that people have opportunities to get into work that is secure and that pays at least the living wage, and employability programmes are an important part of that. Secondly, we need to reduce costs, which includes the provision of wraparound childcare. Housing costs, which are already lower here than in the rest of the UK, are important in that respect, too. The third area is social security and other supports.

We need those other bits. Employability is a very important area, and we are looking at how we can make employability services work better for people. Around 90 per cent of children who live in poverty live in one of the six priority groups of families that we have identified. Those key groups face issues that are to do with not just financial poverty but such factors as being lone parents, being from a black and minority ethnic community and all those additional issues. It is not just a case of saying, “There’s a door over there, if you can find it, to get on the employability programme,” because that does not work for folk with all those pressures on them. We need to wrap all the support around those families. It is not a question of providing a job opportunity or training alone; it is a case of helping with childcare and transport costs, removing some of the barriers and relieving some of the pressures. If we can get that right, that will get us a significant way towards meeting the poverty targets, even against the really difficult backdrop that we described earlier.

That is one of the main areas of focus. Cabinet secretaries and ministers will bring other things to the table, but there is a big opportunity there, if we can get it right. Again, I am happy to keep the committee furnished with updates on the detail of that work as we progress.

I think that we can get better at that. There is more work to do; we try to do that as much as we can, but we need to make sure that, for example, we interrogate all our spend. A commitment that was agreed yesterday was that we would interrogate the proposals in the spending review and the budget with regard to the impact of that spend on tackling child poverty. That will be a really important part of getting to the right solutions.

Of course, that might mean making some difficult choices—setting budgets and working through the spending review usually do—but I am keen to keep a laser focus on this. In difficult times, difficult decisions need to be made, because you cannot do everything. For me, though, this issue must be the Government’s overriding priority. I think that that has been accepted, but the issue then is how we make it happen.

The comment that you cited is probably fair-ish comment. There is always room for improvement; we can get better at poverty proofing, and I want to push that.

I am certainly doing everything that I can, as is the Scottish Government, to leave no stone unturned. We will absolutely give it our best shot. If we manage to do all that, we will have played our part in reaching the targets.

Of course, I cannot control the impact on those targets of decisions that are made elsewhere. How frustrating would it be if the analysis suggested that we would have reached the targets had people not lost £20 a week of their universal credit? As the motto says, you can control only what you can control; we can do only what we can do, but we will work alongside the third sector and local government to do everything that we can. I absolutely give that commitment. I am confident that we will do everything that we can, but some things are just outwith our control.

At the moment, I am worried about what I described earlier as a perfect storm. The worry of fuel poverty rates going up this winter because of rising energy bills is fast upon us; last night, I attended a Scottish Government resilience meeting in which we looked at those very issues. Again, many of the issues, such as energy caps, are reserved, and we want the UK Government to do everything it can around energy prices. The big energy companies have a role to play here, too, because we need to keep people safe over winter. As ever, the Scottish Government will step up to do what it can—you would expect nothing less—but it is a worry for people’s household incomes that all these pressures are brewing at the same time.

Let me make it absolutely clear: my answer to your first question is yes, and I say that without hesitation. We will do absolutely everything that we can to meet those targets. You are right to say that there were no caveats when they were set, but I think that it is fair for me to point out when progress is undermined by decisions that are made elsewhere and our task is made all the more difficult.

As for your point that social security will need to do the heavy lifting here, that is true to a degree, but I highlight the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s comment that it is not sustainable to try to meet the child poverty targets through social security alone. Not only is that unsustainable financially, but it does not recognise the other two pillars of reducing costs and providing employment. Those are hugely important, which is why I spent a little bit of time earlier talking about the importance of game-changing interventions around employability and making it easier for parents, in particular, to get to where they want to in their lives. Employment and employment opportunities play a huge part in that.

We have said that we want to make progress on doubling the Scottish child payment as quickly as we can, and we have set that in the context of the forthcoming budget bill. I am confident that we will make progress as quickly as is humanly possible and that that will make a difference, but I also point out that it sits alongside all the other interventions for supporting families. The bridging payments, for example, have put money into the hands of families now, without our having to wait for the DWP data issues to be resolved. The payments have been a way of recognising that the issue is current and that people need the money, and they got that support into people’s hands.

However, that sits alongside the best start grant, which ensures that we help families with the cost of food, and the work that has been going on around free school meals and holiday meals, all of which is support in cash and in kind for families to keep them afloat. You can be assured that we are looking at whether there is more that we can do over the winter, because we want to do everything that we possibly can to keep families safe this winter.

I will get back to the committee on the timeframe in relation to the homelessness prevention duty, but we hope to do that relatively soon. Prevention is key. There is some good work being done around the ambitious rapid rehousing plans that local authorities are taking forward. There has been a sea change and a move away from the previous systems that we had towards a recognition that a housing-first approach is important for those who have additional vulnerabilities. Preventing homelessness involves local authorities and registered social landlords working with tenants who are at risk of becoming homeless.

It is not in a landlord’s interests for a tenant to lose their tenancy and end up back in the system, so a lot of preventive work has gone on, in particular with local authorities and RSLs. The pandemic has been tough and, as you will be well aware, we have worked on a number of ways of strengthening the position—the pre-action protocols, the loan fund and the grant fund—to try to ensure that people do not lose their tenancies and that we make tenancies sustainable. That is the best way of preventing homelessness. For people who have particular challenges, such as addiction issues or mental health challenges, the rapid rehousing and housing first model is definitely the way, because it gets them back into a sustainable tenancy with the wraparound support that they need.

Yes. It is not just about bricks and mortar, is it? It is about all the other support that someone needs. We must recognise that housing is itself an important anti-poverty measure in that it gives a safe and sustainable route for us to provide the support that the person or family needs. Whether that is support to deal with addictions, mental health problems, debt or employability, having a safe and sustainable tenancy is important to someone being able to deal with all the other issues that are in their life.

It is our ambition to supply a big number of affordable homes—110,000—but it is not only about building or acquiring new houses; it is about ensuring that people are successfully supported in those tenancies.

It was revealing that a UK Government adviser said—I might have used the quotation in my speech last week—that the UC cut would drive up homelessness. You can see why. If a tenancy is just—I emphasise “just”—sustainable and the tenant loses £20 a week, that can knock what was a sustainable tenancy into being unsustainable for all the reasons that we understand.

The cut will have a knock-on effect on homelessness. That is why it is absolutely wrong headed and, at this late stage, I hope that sense prevails and that, given all the other pressures, the UK Government thinks again.