Chamber and committees

Do you want to bring your official in on that as well, Mr Robertson?

However, is that not very high level? When it comes down to individual laws and a choice about whether to align with the EU, where are you in the policy process? It seems that what is happening right now is that you are sitting down with UK counterparts and making a decision about whether you stay aligned on very specific pieces of legislation. I am interested in how you are also talking to the EU Commission about your aspirations around alignment, how you might stay aligned and how you bring those aspirations into those four-nation discussions in the UK about regulations and change.

The committee has looked at that a number of times. There might a desire to stay broadly aligned, but there could be a creeping divergence because you are just not in the room in the European Union so you are not really part of the consensus on how regulatory policy develops further.

I will follow on from that. Scotland’s International Development Alliance was at the committee last month, and it commented:

“We cannot have wellbeing in Scotland at the expense of communities in other countries, so we are keen to see that reflected across the whole of the national outcomes.”—[Official Report, Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee, 16 May 2024; c 30.]

I suppose that there is a question about how you get this out of the silo and ensure that all your colleagues across the Cabinet are taking these important questions about wellbeing and impact on the world—in particular the global south—seriously to the point that they are embedded in their work on economic growth, prosperity and everything else, and there is a question about who leads on that. What does the conversation look like that you and your officials have with other parts of the Government that probably have as much of an impact on the wellbeing of the global south as anything that you can do with your officials in your department with your own quite limited budgets?

I join members in thanking Evelyn Tweed for lodging her motion for debate. I also congratulate her and her team on the very good work that they do in the Stirling area—in particular, the round-table events that have been organised have been very useful.

The Stirling area exemplifies many of the challenges that we face in supporting people across Scotland who are in poverty. Stirling has one of the biggest income-inequality divides in the country. Even in relatively affluent communities, there are people who are desperately in need of help, who are often very difficult to identify and support.

A lot of the issue comes back to stigma. Marie McNair talked about difficulties with stigma, as did Carol Mochan. We must break down the stigma. The language that the Westminster Government has used about the welfare state does not help to remove the stigma that exists in people’s minds.

Recently, I met Stirling District Citizens Advice Bureau, which is an incredible organisation that provides advice to thousands of people across the Stirling area. It told me that it has experienced a 43 per cent increase in demand for its services in recent years. Between 2020 and 2023, it experienced a 16-fold increase in the number of people who sought assistance for mortgage arrears. The number of council tenants who have sought help with rent has quadrupled in the past five years. Recently, there has been a spike in the number of people who face serious housing insecurity. The number of people who came through its doors because they faced homelessness more than tripled in 2022-23.

That is not a situation that is being seen only by the CAB in Stirling. According to the Poverty Alliance, more than two thirds of the children who live in poverty are now in working households.

Those are all deeply worrying statistics. They should be a wake-up call for decision makers here and at Westminster. As we have already heard, the cost of living crisis, with high energy bills and inflation, is really squeezing household budgets, which is making it more difficult than ever for people to make mortgage and rent payments.

Despite that, as we have heard, in 2023, £19 billion-worth of benefits went unclaimed across the UK. Successive Westminster Governments have treated social security as a drain on the public purse, not as an investment in society, which it truly is. The provision of social security is about helping people.

The two-child limit is a perfect example of austerity politics harming our welfare state. Any incoming UK Government must urgently address that wrong, remove the two-child limit from universal credit, dismantle the barriers that have deliberately been put in place to reduce access to social security, which include the injustice of arbitrary sanctions, and accelerate efforts to raise awareness of eligibility.

The policies that we have agreed to in the Scottish Parliament are keeping people out of poverty. This year, they will keep 100,000 children out of relative poverty and 70,000 children out of absolute poverty. However, even though we have made great strides, as we have heard, 25 per cent of young carers do not claim the support that they are entitled to, and it is estimated that the take-up rate of the Scottish child payment for children aged between six and 15 is still languishing at 77 per cent.

I understand that the Scottish Government is delivering a programme of activity to raise awareness of Scottish benefits and to ensure that everyone receives what they are entitled to. I agree with members that the third sector advice organisations are essential partners in ensuring that communities get the level of the support that they need.

Evelyn Tweed has already pointed to some of the great work that is being done in the Raploch in community settings to address the issue of stigma. Christine Grahame mentioned an example from the Borders, and Colette Stevenson mentioned one from her constituency.

I hope that the Scottish Government’s plans to increase benefit uptake include organisations such as the CABs from the outset—rather than just focusing in on the housing teams in councils—because they have a critical role to play; they can reach the parts of our communities that other organisations may not.

Of course we can make progress and increase the Scottish child payment, but we do not have all powers over welfare benefits; we need to focus on the powers that we have, to increase benefit uptake. In particular, offering targeted advice in communities is something that the Government can act on today.

I will give the cabinet secretary another practical example. In 2005, the Parliament’s first inquiry into climate change proposed the introduction of road user charging, with a target date of 2015. We are now 10 years on from that, and there is still no fair way to raise revenue to invest in public transport while at the same time managing down demand for private car usage.

Does the cabinet secretary agree that the year 2022, to which her statement refers, when we were coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic and private car usage was so low, was a missed opportunity for us to start to break our dependency on car usage? We cannot afford any more missed opportunities. All the ideas and policies are there; what is lacking is action from councils and from the Scottish Government to bring in demand management and drive down emissions while driving up investment in public transport.

Will you expand those for the Official Report?

Mr Dunlop, do you have any reflections on that imbalance?

Mr Colquhoun, do you have anything to add?

I see.