Thank you for the invitation to come before the committee.
Our petition is a response to immediate and severe need. Put simply, the question is this: if our Parliament cannot protect Scotland’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, what use is it? Although we are representing the Scottish Unemployed Workers Network and Black Triangle today, we have discussed the petition with WestGAP in Glasgow, the Edinburgh coalition against poverty and Inclusion Scotland.
We are all only too aware from the people whom we work with and help of the devastation that so-called welfare reform is causing. As a nation, we have become accustomed to newspaper stories of benefit decisions that have left families in fear and destitution. They are not the result of glitches or bad apples, but examples—and not always the worst—of what happens when a system that was established to provide a measure of social security is transformed into a form of social control. Some indication of the scale of suffering that is being caused is the rising demand for food banks, which are a form of charity that should have died out with the establishment of the welfare state.
What the UK Government has called welfare reform can often be described simply as welfare cuts—and those cuts are huge. Indeed, that is primarily what we are here to talk about. However, we are also seeing a very deliberate qualitative change, with a return to the Victorian belief that individuals are to blame for their own misfortune. Therefore, we have been pleased by the Scottish Government’s public rejection of that approach.
There has been a lot of talk about dignity, but that is of no help if folk are being left to struggle for survival. Last week, the European Committee of Social Rights produced yet another report that pulled the UK Government up for the meanness of its benefits system. In the post-war years, benefit rates rose in line with earnings or prices, whichever was greater, but in 1980, they were tied to prices, which meant that while incomes and living standards rose benefits were left far behind. We have now had almost two decades of cuts and freezes, and people on benefits are being excluded from more and more activities that others take for granted such as school trips, everyday socialising with friends, a good varied diet, decent heating and a home computer—and that is when the system is working smoothly.
As has been noted in the papers that have been prepared for this meeting, research commissioned by the Social Security Committee sets out figures for the benefits that have been lost to people in Scotland since 2010 as a result of welfare cuts. By 2020-21, those losses will add up to over £2 billion a year. Moreover, the documents show the losses resulting from different benefit cuts both to individuals and all together. Some are very large, and some households are suffering from several of those cuts simultaneously. In addition, vast amounts of distress and on-going complications are resulting from what can only be described as a criminal level of negligence in the workings of the various Department for Work and Pensions bureaucracies. Benefit delays are the cause of many requests for extra help from the Scottish welfare fund or food banks.
People are astonishingly resilient. Generally, that is a good thing, but it is frightening to see how people’s expectations adjust to surviving in a world where options are always constricting. That has its own consequences, feeding into an epidemic of mental and physical health problems and isolation.
The petition is deliberately not prescriptive about how best to mitigate that misery. We are calling for an acknowledgment of the need to put more money into the system to help those who are affected and for that to be done in a holistic way. Every cut translates into personal and social disasters, and each has generated calls for the Scottish Government to mitigate it. They need to be looked at together, or it will be too easy for all those different and desperate needs to be set in competition with one another.
We are happy to answer questions and to send information afterwards on some of the areas where more spending would make a real difference. We have a lot of evidence on the need for more help with discretionary housing payments, extra money for child benefits, more for the Scottish welfare fund, more for advice, and more help for sick and disabled people and people who have been sanctioned.
It is a pity that this session is taking place so far into the debates on the Scottish budget, because the other side of the coin is the need to raise more money. Now that the budget has opened the door to more progressive taxation and people have got used to that idea, let us make it really progressive and raise enough money to make a significant difference.
We have also noted in our petition the potential for replacing council tax with a land value tax. Discussion of that might need a session of its own, but we refer you to the work that Andy Wightman has already done on it for the Scottish Greens. His report was written in 2010. It anticipated that the system could be up and running in five years.
We appreciate that there is an understandable reluctance by the Scottish Government to spend money on things that should be looked after by Westminster. It is galling when there is so much more to do, but when it comes to welfare, it is very necessary—even a matter of life and death. What more important role does Parliament have than to protect a country’s most vulnerable citizens and help create and preserve sustainable communities?
For those who believe that Scotland’s future lies in devolution, the devolved Parliament must be put to full use. For those who believe that devolution is not enough, it is important to use all the powers that we have, in order to demonstrate the need for more. For those who cannot see beyond the bottom line, when it comes to benefits, the phrase “a stitch in time” could not be more true. Help now can prevent family and social breakdown, which brings much greater financial costs, as well as personal tragedies. It also puts money into deprived areas, where it can have the greatest positive impact on the economy.
The approach that the Scottish Government is currently following may seem cautious and pragmatic but, unless it does more to help those at the sharp end of welfare reform, we will be left with poor people and poor economics.