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The cabinet secretary said last week that she did not know what the new benefit would look like. If the cabinet secretary herself does not know what the new benefit will look like, I would say that the Government needs expert advice, which is what the council will provide.

The bill would put the council in place in advance of devolution of the benefit. Through its expertise and lived experience, the council will be best placed to tell the Government what the new benefit should look like. We are not simply devolving industrial injuries disablement benefit and introducing it like for like. The Government is changing the name and, I expect—

This bill, in and of itself, would not deliver a reformed benefit; it would be up to the Government to do that. However, if the Scottish Government were to consider the devolution of an inherently unfair and discriminatory system, in creating a new benefit, which you would hope would be in line with the Parliament’s progressive ambitions on devolution, it would surely want the people who were sitting round the table advising it on the new benefit to have lived experience—that is, people who have been left behind and discriminated against by the current system. That is where many of the stakeholders who are desperate for change are putting their argument. The best thing to do would be to set up the council, have it exist independently of the Government and get those people round the table to advise the Government on the set-up of the new benefit.

As I said, we are running out of time. There is less than a year and a half for the Government to put in place its plans for the new entitlement. To my mind, the best approach would be to have the experts and the people with lived experience design the new benefit from the get-go. Last week, the cabinet secretary said that she felt that an advisory council was a part of the jigsaw of EIA. To me, that is completely wrong. The advisory council would design the jigsaw, set it up and ensure that it best meets the needs of the people of Scotland who are becoming ill or injured in the course of their work.

I am a bit frustrated. It feels like I have been waiting for the consultation since 2019. The Parliament and the committee have been told almost on an annual basis that the consultation will come this year. I think that the Government told the committee that it would come this year, and the cabinet secretary said last week that it would potentially come next year. We have been waiting and waiting, and that is frustrating.

Introducing the bill in the absence of a developed policy of what employment injury assistance looks like is crucial, because we would want to have the expertise of the council. We would want to have the medical expertise, the trade union expertise and, more important, the lived experience of those who have been injured or have become ill because of their work and are not being supported by the current system. We want the council to be in place to advise on the development of the policy and the new entitlement in advance of the Government taking over full responsibility for the benefit.

On the timescale, the Government has its agency agreement with the DWP, and the DWP has said that there will be no extension to that. It has been fairly firm and robust with the Government that the Government must take over responsibility for the benefit by the end of March 2026.

The Government needs to have a business plan in place, as per the agency agreement, by the end of March 2025. That is less than a year and a half away. By that time, the Government will need to have set out its plans in full, including its business plan for how it will transfer the existing case load over to the new benefit and what the new benefit will look like in terms of levels of payment, entitlement and everything else.

It is important that, before that happens, we get the expertise in place to advise on how all of that is done. We are less than a year and a half away from that point, so we are running out of time.

Again, that relates to how the bill was drafted. The closest comparator that we had when we were drafting it was the creation of SCOSS. We mirrored a lot of its provisions, but I appreciate that, since the bill was introduced, legislation has been proposed to change SCOSS’s status and it has given evidence that the current system is overly burdensome. I am open to amendments at stage 2—if we get that far—to change reporting requirements, given the new body of evidence that we have received from SCOSS.

We did, but, given the nature of the entitlement that we are looking at, which is about giving workers who have been injured or have become ill at their work support through the social security system, it is important for workers with lived experience that the body is given permanence and has a statutory underpinning. As a sub-committee of SCOSS, the body could simply be disbanded whenever SCOSS felt the need for that to happen.

The committee will see that a lot of the legislation has been drafted as a mirror image of the legislation that created SCOSS. A lot of the membership criteria are the same—off the top of my head, I think that those are in section 97 of the bill that set up SCOSS. There is a mirror image of a lot of the membership requirements. Given the strength of SCOSS and its expertise and experience, I hope that the Government will appreciate that a lot of similar expertise and experience will be recruited into the SEIAC membership.

The bill also mirrors the current situation whereby, at the UK level, IIAC scrutinises regulations on industrial injuries and disability benefit and the Social Security Advisory Committee does so for all other social security regulations.

It is a mirror of what is in place at the UK level.

The estimates in the financial memorandum are just that: financial estimates. They are based on bodies of a similar size and nature that have been created. Indeed, the detailed work that we have done on the IT costs is based on similar set-up costs for the patient safety commissioner for Scotland.

I think that the figures stand up. There has been an element of confusion—if I can call it that—about the IT set-up costs in the previous evidence sessions; we are not talking about the IT set-up costs for the benefit itself or for the costs for transferring paper and microfiche from huge warehouses down south to up here. Instead, we are purely talking about the IT set-up costs for a very small body, with, as I have set out, three or four members of staff. Therefore, when it comes to the IT set-up costs, I think that, when we look at comparators such as other bodies of a similar size, we will see that the estimates are absolutely robust. I would stand by them.

Research is a different area, but, again, we have provided three separate examples of the costs of research done by other similar bodies. Having just checked the financial memorandum, I would point out that it says specifically:

“The nature and length of research commissioned would be a matter for the Council, so it could vary significantly.”

I appreciate that we have given three examples—and the figure of £30,000 is closely related to the three examples that we have given—but, as the council is set up and sets its own work plan, that figure “could vary significantly”, as the financial memorandum says.

It was good to hear the cabinet secretary say last week that the £30,000 figure is perhaps too low, because it seems as though the Government is open to the negotiation that would inevitably take place. The council would independently set its work and research plans and then negotiate its budget with Government. It is likely that that is where we would end up, but, as I have said, it was good to hear that the Government seems to be open to having that discussion about what it would view as an adequate and realistic research budget. We have sourced and referenced the costs of similar bodies, but we have also clearly caveated that by saying that the costs “could vary significantly”.

As I said, under the bill, the council would have a membership of between six and 12 people. The current UK advisory council has 17 members, so the proposed council would potentially be two thirds the size of the UK advisory council. However, we would not expect every single category in the membership conditions to be met by a single individual—there would be crossover, and there would be people with a range of skills and multiple areas of expertise.

A council of 12 could comfortably meet the membership conditions. Going beyond that number would potentially be overcostly, given the proportion of benefit spend that the council would be scrutinising. With a bigger membership, the costs could potentially run a bit higher than we would want.

What you describe is possible but not preferable, because it would not be independent of Government. Some of the advisers that could potentially be recruited to such an advisory group would be employed by the public sector and not directly, but indirectly, by the Government.

It is much more preferable to have an independent body set up by statute that has no fear or favour and that can make recommendations on that basis, and that cannot be disbanded at the whims of Government if the Government does not like the answers that it gets.

It is also the case that there has been nothing preventing the Government from having that in place for the past four years. It seems a bit strange that the Government is only now coming forward with a proposal for a potential working group at the point of the introduction of a member’s bill in a similar area.

I heard the cabinet secretary’s comments about the Scottish child payment. However, since the introduction of the Scottish child payment—from the very first announcement—the consultation on employment injury assistance has been promised almost on an annual basis.

The work on the Scottish child payment has not come out of the blue. The Government has known about it and the work on it has been on-going, but the Government has still continued to promise, almost annually, to start the consultation. It is not as though the Government promised that the consultation would arrive before the Scottish child payment and then had to push everything back; it has still promised the consultation almost annually while the Scottish child payment has been being developed and put in place.