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The important point is that last point. The review of reviews, if you like, was a test against the principles in the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018, which, I remind the committee, everyone in the Parliament signed up to. It is very important that the principles in the 2018 act are adhered to. That does, of course, include ensuring that the system is efficient and is delivering value for money, which are also important principles.

The work that has been undertaken wraps up the Edel Harris recommendations with the work that we committed to do as part of fiscal sustainability, to ensure that we look at reviews in the round and test them against the principles that we set out in the 2018 act, which everyone voted for, and to ensure that the system is delivering value for money and efficiency.

I am in the final stages of signing off the response to the Edel Harris review, which will wrap up the thoughts on the review of reviews as well. We are running a number of pieces of work concurrently, and I thought that it made little sense to respond on each one individually; I would rather respond to all of the points together.

That is very kind, Mr Balfour.

At the joint meeting between the Cabinet and disabled people’s organisations yesterday, a conversation took place around why PIP was initially brought in. I was not involved at that time, but it was pointed out to me and to the First Minister that the discussions in the House of Commons at the time were around the additional costs of having a disability or a long-term condition.

It is important that we continue to remind people that ADP is available whether they are in work or out of work. Indeed, I heard directly from people yesterday that ADP had helped them to get work or sustain employment. I am keen that nothing should suggest that if you are in work you can get ADP and if you are not in work you cannot get it, or vice versa. That would be unhelpful. This is about recognising additional costs and the fact that ADP might help people to sustain or get into employment.

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There are important linkages. It is an ambition of the Government to reduce health inequalities and support people to live longer and healthier lives. There are a number of reasons why health inequalities are present in our communities. There is a challenge around the number of low-income households and those who are finding life particularly challenging financially, where health inequalities are brought to the fore. Poverty is often a driver of ill health. It is important that we tackle poverty, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is part of the way in which we can tackle health inequalities.

The population health framework, which was published in 2025, has a focus on prevention. The framework is an important part of our work to galvanise action throughout the system. It talks about

“enabling access to income maximisation for families … achieving consistent delivery pathways, including in universal services”

and

“strengthening the NHS’s contribution to maximising the incomes of service users, with a focus on families at greatest risk of poverty”.

Those are some of the ways in which those aspects are tied together across Government.

He answered a question about those transitional arrangements, which I hope gave some detail.

The Government recognises that it is important to communicate with organisations as much as possible when we are looking at budget decisions. The timing of the budget made that exceptionally challenging, and this is one example of the need to have a solution to present to organisations. I hope that Mr Balfour will be satisfied with a further answer in writing, either from me or from one of the other cabinet secretaries with responsibility for the transitional arrangements that are in place.

As is to be expected with any Scottish Government budget, there are myriad opinions about how the money could be spent. I appreciate and understand the views of those who feel that we should have spent all that money on further increasing the Scottish child payment. We are, of course, increasing that payment to £40 a week for children under one, so there will be a Scottish child payment premium coming in.

The Government must look at what else we can do, not only in social security but in other areas, to tackle poverty and to assist families. That is why, for example, money is going into whole family support and the tackling child poverty fund to ensure that we are looking at some of the other drivers of poverty reduction in addition to income from social security. There are different policy proposals in the budget, further details of which will be given in the tackling child poverty delivery plan that we will launch in March.

Whole family support is an exceptionally important way of assisting families and providing support not only with income or income maximisation but in whatever way a family needs and at the time and in the place that they need it. That is coming across strongly from a lot of work that we are already doing in the fairer futures partnerships and we are seeing a real difference in the changes that we can make. That is also an important way of tackling poverty, in addition to the work that we are already doing on social security.

There will be an impact on the Scottish Government’s budget, because we will continue to mitigate, as far as we possibly can, the benefit cap in full. It is welcome that the UK Government finally said that it would scrap the two-child limit. That is an important policy that needed to be put in place, but, because it has kept the benefit cap in place, that means that there will be children out there who will not benefit from the lifting of the two-child limit.

That is not a situation that we want to be in in Scotland. As a result, we will have to increase the amount that we spend on mitigating the benefit cap, to ensure that everyone benefits from the lifting of the two-child limit.

It is something that we are very keen to look at, to see how it can be further expanded when we are looking at new funding. I would point out that the funding that the First Minister announced for the third sector as part of the whole family support package is a multiyear commitment, and we will look at what more we can do to expand multiyear funding.

Clearly, the fairer funding approach covers a number of areas, one of which is multiyear funding. It is very important; indeed, the feedback that we had from the pilot that we undertook showed that, as we would have expected, it made a difference to the third sector organisations involved by giving them greater certainty.

This financial year, it has been more challenging to look at expanding multiyear funding or other aspects of the fairer funding principles because the UK Government budget was so late, which has, in turn, made the Scottish Government budget late. As a result, it has been exceptionally difficult for the Government to be able to provide certainty to the third sector.

Therefore, a lot of the work that I and officials—not just in my area but across Government—have been doing has been on the timely notification of grants and on ensuring that letters of comfort go out to organisations as soon as possible. Indeed, we did that immediately after the budget was published. It is an on-going process—obviously, it could not be done for every organisation on the day of budget publication—but we are endeavouring to do all that we can to assist with the timely notification of grants. That is, of course, another important aspect, alongside the multiyear funding asks that we have from the third sector.

As we laid out in the budget, when we looked at how the two-child limit mitigation money will be spent, it includes money for the new Scottish child payment premium for under-ones, as well as additional spend on devolved benefits in mitigating the benefit cap, which Marie McNair talked about, and the increase in spending on the Scottish child payment with the inflation in case load.

There are clearly areas where we could have done joint work, and that was demonstrated as we went through the process. There was a UK Government task force on child poverty, and there were a number of areas where we could have worked together. There is an entire list of areas where we asked for the UK Government to take action and to work with Scottish ministers. It is unfortunate that that is not how the set-up works at the current time.

However, our door always remains open, because it is clear that the systems need to work better together to get people out of poverty. We are very willing to work on this, whether with the UK Government, other parts of the public sector or the private sector. There are possibilities, and I hope that the UK Government will take up those opportunities as it moves to implement its child poverty strategy.