 nhw yw hwnnw'nllaw nhw'n ddwyledd bod yn cymdeithasol iawn ar gyfer gwaethecyn ac mae'n sonol ei ddyn nhw. Felly, nid yw'r gwaith yn rhaid i gyd yn ei gwasanaeth ar gyfer gwaethecyn Gyfnopeth. Felly, fel I modd, mae'r gwahanol iawn i'n ei gwasanaethu midstulau oes peidi. Ond, hefyd, mae'n i'n i'n mynd i ymddiwch i chi fyddeyddai'n gwaelach i'r gwahanol. the committee. We also have two changes from the Labour membership. Pam Duncan Clancy and Foizael Chowsey have now left us, and we are joined by Paul O'Cain and Katie Clarke. I wish Pam and Foizael all the best and welcome Paul and Katie to the committee. Before we return to the, I as the oldest member of the committee, my apologies, We will share today's meeting for item 1, the declaration of interest and item 2, choice of convener. Before we turn to the appointment of our new convener, I would first like to welcome Gordon MacDonald, Mary McNair, Blett Stevenson, Paula Cain and Katie Clark, new members of this committee and to invite them to declare any relevant interests. Start with Gordon. I have no relevant interest to declare. I have no relevant interest to declare. I have no relevant interest to declare. I am, but I do not appear to be on screen. The Member for the world has introduced the committee's decision to declare that every Lost和ussed erythmysg is calling on protection. Felly, ifstalk, I'm sure to listen to my santé care from 1972 and making나, I'm sure it's going to be yst时. I ask members of the Scottish National Party are eligible to be chosen as convener and deputy convener of this committee. I ask members for nominations for our new convener. Nominate Collette Stevenson is chair. Thank you very much. Do we have any other nominations? In that case, I welcome Collette Stevenson to be nominated to be our new convener. I welcome her to her new position. I congratulate her on it. I now hand over to her to chair the rest of the committee. Thank you very much, James. I very warm welcome to each and all of you and to the new members as well on the committee. I appreciate that this is the fourth convener in this session on this committee. I appreciate that there has been a lot of changes for the clerks. I thank you for your forbearance on this. We will now move on. The next task within the committee is to choose a deputy convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as deputy convener of this committee. I would like to nominate Gordon MacDonald for the show. Are we all agreed? Therefore, I would like to welcome Gordon as deputy convener. The agenda item 4 is the decision on taking business in private. Our next item of business for today is a decision to take agenda item 7 in private. Are we all agreed? The agenda item 5 is the cost of living at disabled people and unpaid carers. Our next item of business is an evidence session in a round table format about the cost of living crisis and its impact on disabled people and unpaid carers. I would like to welcome everyone here. We have in the room Becky Duff, director for Scotland, carers trust, Richard Mead, director, carers Scotland and Northern Ireland, Stephanie Miller, policy manager for Citizens Advice Scotland, Mornas Imkins, Scotland director for MS society Scotland, Adam Stature, head of policy and communications for Age Scotland, Ellie Wagstaff, senior policy manager for the Marie Curie Scotland, Ruth Boyle, policy and campaigns manager for the Poverty Alliance, Allen Ford, policy and information officer, health and social care alliance Scotland, The Alliance, Heather Fiskin, head of policy and research, Inclusion Scotland, Stephen McEvoy, senior welfare rights adviser, Enable Scotland, Fraser Scott, chief executive officer, Energy Action Scotland. We have received apologies from Susan Webster, head of policy and campaigns from MND Scotland. I believe we have Susan Mundy, Gypsy Traveller Service, lead on me cup. Thank you very much for your attendance today. You are all very welcome and again bear with me because this is my first committee as convener here. We have basically chosen a round table format to facilitate a free flowing conversation and the committee is very much in listening mode. Please feel free to indicate to me when you want to come in. If you are attending online please pop an R in the chat box and I will bring you in. We have three themes today. I will kick off with theme 1 and then invite Jeremy Balfour to introduce the second theme and Paul O'Kane for theme 3. We have approximately 30 minutes for each discussion and unfortunately, due to changes in membership and the lead business from previous meetings, we have slightly less time than anticipated this morning. With that in mind, let us move swiftly on to theme 1 which focuses on how high inflation has affected disabled people and unpaid carers. We are really interested to hear more about how the extra costs of disability have been exacerbated by the cost of living crisis for disabled people and unpaid carers. If you can point to particular groups of people that have been most affected and perhaps share how people have coped, that would be really helpful. Also, if you can pick up where there are any gaps at all in our knowledge and aware of any research being undertaken on the impacts, that would be very useful too. Can we just kick off there then? I am sure that if you would like to come in. I do not mind talking a bit about unpaid carers. There are about 700,000 to 800,000 unpaid carers in Scotland at the moment. Every year, carers Scotland, we do a survey called state of caring. It is across the UK and last year had 14,000 carers respond to that, of which 2,000 were in Scotland. The Scottish data showed that about a quarter of carers are now struggling to make ends meet. As a result of that, they are struggling to pay for the cost of food and heating and have significant problems with other essential items and are taking on debt as a result of those costs. I think that what I would say that is really alarming about that is that that sample was carried out during the summer last year. Before the real inflation really started to climb and we saw significant increases in energy costs and food costs. I am really worried that that survey result showed that those terrible figures will be much worse when we come round to do it this year. Carers are one of the most vulnerable groups to financial disturbance. Without real action to support and stabilise that income and support carers, then the impact of the cost of living crisis is going to be devastating. I am going to bring in Alan Foulds now. Sorry, I can see you online. I will bring Alan in. Good morning, everyone. I think that I will be hopeful to be to my wear with the report that the Alliance wrote about that in October, which is partly why we are here today. I will pick up on some of the points from that. On how disabled people and people living with long-term conditions in particular would be affected, we already know that they already have higher costs of living. For example, people who need to use more electricity or assistive technologies, such as motorised wheelchairs. We know from our member, Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland, that for example, people who are using life-sustaining equipment such as sleep apnea machines, of course the costs of using those are going up. People also struggling even in cases of, for example, lighting. We had a member attend our event saying that the costs were so high that, if they had not been at that event, they would not have even had the lights on that day. Of course, a lot of people have more difficulty than others in regulating their body temperatures, so they need to be kept at a constant temperature and have their heating on to keep themselves at a safe and warm temperature, or else their health deteriorates. Of course, that has been prices go up significantly. As has been exacerbated by the fact that, especially during the pandemic, a lot of social care packages had been cut or withdrawn entirely. In many cases, those haven't been returned to the full situation that they were before the pandemic, and that has caused a lot of difficulty for people. As well, there has also been the inability of any carers to earn any additional money without losing their carers' allowance. Again, that has put them in quite difficult circumstances. For example, people choosing, for example, not to feed themselves and instead to feed like to prioritise feeding at care for a person. Obviously, that is having significant impact on their health, as well as the fact that the third sector has also been stretched to the limit. A lot of our member organisations are reporting significant increases in demand for services and finding that they are either not able to meet that demand or are having to reduce what they are able to offer in terms of support to people because demand is so high. That is just a few of the ways in which people have been more impacted than average by this cause-of-living crisis. It is worth pointing out that, of course, that follows on from the pandemic and the decade of austerity, where the impacts of those were also not felt even across society but fell on those who were already most at risk and were at least well off. Thanks, Alan. That is really helpful. The comments that you have made highlight some of the issues there. I am going to pass over to Ellie now. Thank you, convener. Good morning, everybody. I can talk about a little bit of the impact on people who are terminally ill and their families and carers as well as the cost of living. We call it almost a double burden of income loss and increased costs associated with terminal illness. Those are things such as higher energy bills and housing adaptions. They can really leave people struggling to make ends meet and they can force people who are already on the threshold below the poverty line. Marie Curie did some research with Loughborough University last year into poverty at the end of life. It found that over 8,200 people in Scotland were dying in poverty every year at the end of life. That equates to about 1 in 4 working-age people and about 1 in 8 pensioners. Being terminally ill can really increase that risk of being in poverty at the end of life, not just for the person who is ill but also for their carers and families. The research also found that working-age children with dependent children were more likely to experience poverty at the end of life. Those situations have always been the case and have definitely been exacerbated throughout the pandemic. We have an information and support line at Marie Curie. Between April and September last year, about 1 in 5 people who were calling us were calling to speak to us because they were concerned about their finances. That was up by almost 40 per cent in the same period last year. This crisis has deepened already very troubling concerns. We did a survey of our Marie Curie community nursing team quite recently just before Christmas. The results of that have found that about over 60 per cent of our community nursing team are really concerned about how people are affording to heat their homes, how they are affording to live, if they are having to choose between heating and eating. That should not be the case. I think that a lot of those issues that were already outstanding have considerably deepened over the past three years. I want to talk a little bit about the cost of living people with MS. Most people with MS their symptoms start during the peak of their working lives and around 80 per cent of them give up work within 15 years. Someone with MS has a reduced earning capacity anyway due to the progression of their condition. It costs somebody on average with extra £337 per month for heating, therapies and access to physio because they are not getting that from NHS at the moment. We are already in a place where the crisis has just deepened that effect. There are quite stark statistics. One in three people with MS cannot afford to eat balanced meals and three in ten people with MS have reduced or stopped their spending on therapies unessential. I will come back to the 20-metre rule and PIP and how that has affected people as well. There is also the stark fact that one in six people who care for someone with MS give unpaid care of about 90 hours per week and 41 per cent of that same group give more than 35 hours a week. It is a crisis that is deepening and is hitting people with MS and their carers very hard. I notice that there is quite a few folk online. I could bring in Ruth Boyle. Thank you for inviting the poverty alliance along today. We are delighted to be here. I think that I am mostly going to be echoing points that have already been made, but the thing that we need to have at the front of our minds when we are thinking about this inquiry today is that what we are seeing is that the crisis has brought the pre-existing inequalities in our society into sharp focus. The Covid crisis or the cost-of-living crisis are not the root causes of the inequality that we see for disabled people who are unpaid carers. There are structural root causes to that and we see that there has been a disproportionate impact for disabled people and their carers because they are already more likely to be experiencing poverty or more likely to be living on low incomes. We know that people who are living on low incomes cannot budget themselves out of the crisis. What we have also seen is that the crisis has illuminated the inadequacies in our social security safety net. Too often, that social security system is failing the people that it is intended to help. We did some research with the Scottish Women's Budget Group into the experiences of the cost-of-living crisis. We saw some of the ways that women were adjusting their daily lives in order to make ends meet. That was things such as rationing heat, going without food in order to feed their children, selling family heirlooms like wedding rings in order to make ends meet. We heard from a disabled woman as part of that research who said that she was unable to get to the shops during the cost-of-living crisis and that she was almost wholly reliant on people in her communities in order to access food. One of her neighbours was going to the shop for her and calling her from the yellow sticker aisle in order to tell her what food she would be able to afford. That is totally unjust in a wealthy country like Scotland that we have people living in that way. Similar to Richard's point, a great concern to us is the fact that women told us that they ran out of ways to adjust their daily lives in order to manage additional costs before we entered those winter months. We were really concerned about what that means for families over the course of the crisis. I think that the other thing to highlight is that the evidence that you will hear today and the evidence that we have already heard so far highlights the disproportionate impact on disabled people. However, when we look at the support that has been given, of course it has been very welcome and it has been a vital lifeline for people on low incomes, but we have seen a lack of tailoring and targeting in that support. While we know that there is this disproportionate impact, that is not necessarily being reflected in the support that has been given. By looking at the recent payment for disabled people of £150, when you hear about the additional costs that we have already heard this morning that disabled people incur in their daily lives, that £150 has easily been swamped by those increasing costs. Okay, thanks very much Ruth. It is really interesting to hear the added impact that it has on women and the work that has been undertaken there. Thank you for that. I am now going to bring in Susanne Mundi, who is online. Thank you very much, convener, for inviting us. I would like to maybe develop what Ruth has said a little bit more. Within the overall impact, there are particular groups that have been disproportionately impacted. I want to highlight the experience of minority ethnic carers and then, within that, gypsy traveller carers. We know that, for minority ethnic carers, one of the particular impacts has been the rising cost of food. Obviously, to do with a particular diet and dietary requirements of different communities, often reliant on specialist food providers and imported food, we have seen a significant increase in the cost of food shopping for those communities. Secondly, for the gypsy traveller community, this is in relation to fuel poverty. The £400 financial support that was available to everybody to assist with increased fuel costs was welcome, although not sufficient. There were a group of people in the community that were overlooked in that. Those were families living on local authority sites, where the local authority is the account holder and individual household hosts had no direct relationship with a utility provider. It was not until the beginning of March that Westminster made it available to be able to access that £400. During the really cold winter months, they were having to meet the increased cost of fuel from really quite static and often reduced household incomes. Link to that, again, there is a reliance on LPG. The cost of Calagas went through the roof for communities. This is all linked to the overall poorest state of accommodation. We know from research that the gypsy traveller community has a higher level of living in fuel poverty overall. All of those costs have already exacerbated really significant financial demands on the community. One of the structural issues that Ruth referred to is that, for all of the communities that we work with, digital exclusion is a huge issue because so much of the welfare benefit system is now online. Again, we know that there are issues to do with poverty in terms of being able to afford devices, connectivity, contracts, etc. I think that all of those things have come together to almost create a perfect storm for communities. I was extremely interested in hearing the aspect of it, particularly for our marginalised groups. I will bring in Stephanie Miller now. The way that Citizens Advice Scotland gathers its data means that we can track across groups and see what advice they are seeking. If I can give you an example with adult disability payment, we see that 9 per cent of adult disability claimants also seek advice on food banks. 8 per cent of those also seek advice on other charitable payments, so that would include things such as fuel vouchers. We are seeing some quite deep-rooted issues around disabled people seeking help with poverty-related issues. For instance, 16 per cent of our adult disability payment clients also received advice on gas and electricity, and that is 206 clients a month. Those issues are absolutely connected. I would like to reflect on what other people have said. We are all going to say broadly similar things. That was exacerbated by the cost of living crisis, but it was in existence well before the cost of living crisis. We all know in this room that disabled people are more likely to be in poverty, they are more likely to be in fuel poverty, they are more likely to have higher living costs and they are more likely to have higher energy costs. That all existed before the cost of living crisis came into being. I would also quite like to reflect on the fact that £150, which was the only targeted support that was given specifically to somebody on the grounds that they are having an impairment on additional needs. If you look at the data that I have just given, we are seeing people coming in with some deep-rooted poverty issues. That £150 is not going to touch the sides on people's additional energy costs. I will give you a couple of examples of clients that we have to give you a picture of that. We are seeing a single parent caring for two children, one with a child with 24-hour complex care needs, nurses coming in due to complex care needs, high-level fuel is being used for medical equipment, clients' bills have more than doubled and they just cannot pay them any more. A single parent with two children, one with a sensory disorder who requires special lighting and special facilities, can no longer put the energy on for those special facilities, which means that the child is no longer going to school. There are knock-on impacts on some of this. It is bleeding into other areas that will have long-term impacts on health, equality going forward and so on. My final point that I would really like to stress is that this is a cross-cutting issue. The cost of living payments were welcome and useful. They were not enough, but the bigger issues around this relate to housing, energy, efficiency and welfare benefits. It will require cross-cutting and cross-government solutions to address the underlying causes of that. The work that citizens advice do in terms of the data and stats that come out are invaluable at this moment in time. Thank you for that. I am now going to bring in Fraser Scott, who is online. Good morning. Thank you, convener, and good morning committee members and colleagues who are in the session. The cost of living has impacted on everyone. High energy costs have simply seen fuel poverty rise in Scotland from one in four in 2019 somewhere in the region of 40 per cent of all households, almost one million households in Scotland meeting our legal definition of fuel poverty. That increased more recently because of the £100 removal on that universal support at the same time as a high energy crisis is enduring in the economy. Vulnerable people, low-income household people with a disability, essential medical needs, have all been impacted disproportionately. You will hear that from colleagues on the call, you will see that and the evidence that they have provided. Indeed, in the autumn, polling that we undertook with national energy action showed that 81 per cent of people were already rationing their energy use and 13 per cent. It could be worrying that 13 per cent were reducing the use of their medical equipment. The Scottish Parliament introduced the Fuel Poverty Act in Scotland in 2019 progressive. It recognises that some people will have a need for an enhanced heating regime. That means that their homes will stay warmer or longer. If they were able to meet that enhanced heating regime, it could mean that they spend over 60 per cent more than people who have a standard heating regime. We know that it is important for people to stay warmer for longer, but I would say that there have been no supports provided that recognise the scale of that increase, yet we have the legislation that determines that it is important. It is for Scottish ministers to define who would fit into that category of person needing that enhanced heating. We recognise it, but we have not acted. We have heard that the UK Government did not provide a significant financial support that could in any way address that enhanced heating requirement. However, what we do not have is any recognition of an enhanced power requirement. It is very much focused on heat and lighting rather than on the additional needs of people who have certain kinds of conditions, whether that is mobility scooters, oxygen equipment or kidney dialysis. I think that the evidence that I have submitted suggests from the UK that it costs £2,000 a year almost now to run a kidney dialysis machine for a person at home. We are simply not stepping up collectively to provide the right level of support for people to maintain their health and wellbeing. We are simply not doing this. We do not have an enhanced power requirement in our fuel poverty act and I would recommend that we consider introducing such a thing. Energy costs are two and a half times what they were in 2019-20, and the costs are therefore ramped for everyone who has additional needs. Those are all-time highs, but they are further impacted by people living in inefficient homes, and half of us do. Half of us live in an inefficient home and by geography. If you live in a home with, say, electric storage heaters, that can add a further 50 to 100 per cent of your heating costs over the winter versus a household who may have gas. Whilst financial support has not recognised any of the inequalities that existed within just the energy system itself and the impacts that that can have on vulnerable people, we are beginning to at least talk about changing the way things are—a social tariff to ease the burden with a lower energy cost base. However, I would point out that, even if it were 50 per cent cheaper than today, it would still be more expensive than in 2019-20. What we also need to do is prioritise people with vulnerabilities with disability essential medical needs in the poorest quality homes and prioritise them. However, we are in a hiatus for the Warmer Home Scotland programme, which is the Scottish Government's flagship fuel poverty programme, to help those very same people. It is currently closed until October, at a time when this is the best time to act, it is the summer months. Some, as I said before, proper consideration of what enhanced heating means in Scotland and what enhanced power could look like. We need to deliver a far fairer system than the one that we have. We need to achieve equity, not just simply universality of support, because, as I said there, if you reduce energy costs with a social tariff, that is for all those who qualify. However, we have already recognised in Scotland that some people need to live in warmer homes for considerably longer, considerably warmer, and they do indeed have, in some cases, eye-watering additional costs to maintain and run essential equipment in their home. Thank you, Fraser, for some of the recommendations that you put forward. It is much appreciated. We are now going to move on to Heather Fiskin. Good morning. Can you hear me? Good morning. Thank you very much for having me in Scotland today. One of the first things that I would like to say is that it is important to remember that many unpaid carers are themselves disabled people. They are not necessarily two separate communities that we are talking about here, especially because they are very likely to live in the same households with the same household income. At goings, I think that the point has been well made already about the historical legacy of welfare reform, austerity, benefits and adequateness, and the impact of the actions taken to mitigate against a pandemic, and the effect that this has had on disabled people in their households. Disabled people have come into this common cause of living crisis far behind so many other people. They simply do not have the resilience that other people have to cope with these emergencies. There has been very little involvement or engagement in how to deal with these emergencies directly with disabled people and, quite positively, unpaid carers as well, without wanting to repeat the points that have been made before. I think that one of the things that we have noticed most often from our research, service and speaking to our members is the impact that this is all having on people's physical and mental health, whether that is an impairment that they already had or not, and also on their relationships. There are occurring more and more unaffordable debt as time moves forward. People are increasingly being pushed into poverty, people who were not already in poverty before this crisis are now in poverty, and it is going to be hard to get out of that. We have already touched on the elements of income and the inadequacy of benefits that is showing you can be entitled to benefits, and we still have the 20-meter rule and the 50-percent rule in terms of added disability payment. I think that one of the biggest costs that most of our members face is still having to pay for social care charges. One of the things that we have been told about and somebody who approached us was around them or their daughter being approached by sheriff's officers to pay charges for services that were not delivered during the pandemic. People are not just paying social care charges, they are paying for services that were not delivered, they are being fined for it, and they are being chased for it. We also know that several people who are in our membership are worried sick about the facts on their household, about not being able to pay for heat and food for their worsening conditions, and not being able to use the equipment that they require at home, and being forced against the will to end up in an institution or not being able to get out of hospital. One of the smaller things that we have been touched on is that we have been particularly interested in people telling us that they had cancelled payments for their falls buttons, that is around the neck equipment that you wear at home, that you press and somebody will come in an emergency if you fall or you have an accident in your picture, but truly that is preventative. We have tried to find out how much those falls buttons cost. Some people in some local authorities are free of charge and other local authorities have a payment. The costs that we have found so far range from about £5 to £20 per week or per month, and it is really difficult to pin it down, but people are having to go without paying for these very basic things, a very small cost, or it may appear to be, but for somebody who is living in hardship that is not a small cost. The other thing that we have reported to us is around food banks. Nobody ever wants to see the continuation of food banks. We want to live in a society that does not need food banks. However, they are there and they are helpful. However, they are not necessarily accessible for disabled people, particularly those living in rural areas who do not have the benefit of transport to go to a food bank, which may be however many miles away, but also we just hear from somebody who said that, during the pandemic, the food bank did deliveries, which was really helpful, because those deliveries meant that, where they could not import supermarket food, the food bank was delivering, but it is not something that is applied across the country in all food banks. Also, they are not providing for special diets that people may have as a result of their impairment and quite often they are delivering things like tins of vegetables that need to be prepared, which people who do not have the menu dictarily to do so cannot therefore lose their food. Heather, thank you very much for your contribution this morning. I am aware of time or slightly running out, so I am actually going to bring in John, if you want to... Sorry, Adam. Sorry, my apologies. That is the second time I have got your name wrong. Sorry. Don't worry, I won't hold it against you, many thanks. There are very two quick points on that basis. One is of a particular concern of age Scotland over the last 18 months or two years has been that older people of retirement age, state pension age, who are on very, very low income, but actually won't either identify as a carer who are undertaking care responsibilities, partially because they are not entitled to things like carers allowance, because if you received state pension you wouldn't get that, so some kind of other incentive, if you will, to be part of that system, to get that recognition to be in a system where there can be support isn't there, but 42 per cent of people receiving the state pension today in Scotland earn or take home less than £12,500 a year so they don't actually eligible to pay income tax, so it's very low income. There's 40 per cent of those and the lowest incomes who are eligible for something called pension credit, which would top up their state pension to what the Government reckons is the minimum that you should be able to live on and don't claim that, so that's about 120,000 older households in Scotland aren't getting what they're entitled to, so in terms of these people are really struggling where the essentials of actually paying for food or heating and powering their homes, when, as Fraser Scott said, the energy costs have gone up to two and a half times, so when you're in that kind of very low income paying for these things, food price has gone up 30 per cent on many items, if not more, up to 70 per cent on certain essentials as well, so the folks that are undertaking unpaid caring role and who may be living as a disabled person themselves aren't actually able to meet that kind of need there, so there's a lot of people who actually will struggle because they're not in a system to get support or even get payments, for instance, that might help them financially. The last point quickly is just to back up really what Heather said about social care charging. I think one of the things that we'd be really delighted to see is a date upon which, from the Scottish Government, that they will end that as per their sort of announcements in the past that this is going to end social care charging, so trying to find a date for that, so those who are requiring this don't have to particularly those on the very lowest incomes are spending a lot of money on paying for things so they can kind of live a decent life, so having some kind of firm date on that can end would be very welcome, I'm sure, from everyone around the table. Okay, thank you, Adam. Thanks for that. It's much appreciated. I'm now going to bring in Stephen McEvoy, who's online, I believe. Hi, it's just one quick point. I agree with everything that's been covered, pretty much, so far. Enable Scotland's welfare rights service supports a significant amount of people with a learning disability, and as well as the cost of fuel increasing, we also often see issues with people understanding the bill. Even myself, with my own bill, I find it significantly difficult to understand what's being charged and why, and to make sure that you're on the correct tariff, and people who have a learning disability really, really struggle with that. We supported a client previously to get them on a vulnerability scheme with a provider, and the only thing that really seemed to mean was that they got their letters in large print, which didn't really solve anything. I think that's an area that we could potentially do better to make sure that people with learning disabilities are on the correct tariff, understanding their bills and also getting proper fuel efficiency advice as well. Thanks, Stephen, for that. Even I don't sometimes understand the bills coming through, I think that they should be a lot user-friendly, so thanks for your comments, Sarah. It's much appreciated. I'm now going to bring in Becky Duff. Before I bring in Becky, I'm just conscious of the fact that there's several people making some really good comments on the chat. However, unfortunately, because it's a chat, it doesn't go on to the official report, so I would appreciate it if you could maybe drop us an email with those comments, and we will definitely take them on board. Without further ado, I'm going to bring in Becky Duff. Thanks, Odie. I just want to talk very briefly about young carers, because I think that this is really key for how we overcome and break some of these poverty cycles, if not, we're going to be stuck in the same conversations five, ten years down the line. A piece of research that we did at the Carers Trust Scotland found that 66 per cent of young carers surveyed found that they were always or usually affected by the cost of living crisis that them or their family, and young carers, faced huge barriers into accessing further education. A lot of that is to do with eligibility criteria around carers allowance. We've got an opportunity to change that. They faced barriers to employment, so actually breaking those poverty cycles is really important that right now they can get that support and they can get that access. Just one thing that I also wanted to highlight, and another piece of research that we did in November 2022, 58 per cent of unpaid carers felt ignored by the Scottish Government. It builds on the feeling of hopelessness, of shouting into the abyss and of nothing changing. Those are people who have lived with huge stresses and pressures financially and across their caring responsibilities. As we've gone through the pandemic, we all know that they've been disproportionately impacted. The cost of living on top of that is having a huge, huge impact. In some recent research that we did around older adult unpaid carers, 87 per cent said that their mental health and wellbeing had been impacted by their unpaid caring role. Those people are providing £12.8 billion of caring a year for in Scotland, so it's really important that they get the support that they can continue to do that for all of us. With that, that comes to the end of our theme 1. I'm going to invite Jeremy Balfour, MSP, who is online with us to commence with theme 2. Good morning to the panel. It's great to have you with us. I want to move us on slightly now and look at the effectiveness of temporary cost of living assistance. What we're looking to see here is what short-term measures had the greatest impact and what short-term measures could be implemented in the future. I wonder if I can start with a general question. Most of the recent living assistance benefits have targeted families with young children best art who aren't Scottish child payment. I must be welcome and right, but are you concerned that carers disabled people, even elderly people, are being left behind and what support do they require? I'm going to bring in Stephanie Jeremy. She's got her hands up here. I can't see community, so maybe I'll turn back to you to tell it. I think that we do need to look at the fact that the cost of living payments haven't actually been adequate. Although disabled people may have received quite a range of payments depending on their circumstances, the very fact that we are still seeing people going to food banks as a result or, for instance, getting their pre-payment measures and self-disconnecting from their pre-payment measures last month are extra help units of 2,500 cases of self-disconnection. That leaves people with no fuel at all to run fridges and hoists or any equipment that they need. It has shown the scale of the problem in June 2017 of extra help units of 26 cases. It's rolling and it's constantly increasing. As I said earlier, there's a range of things that we need to look at. The short-term fixes are useful. The money helps, but the number of self-disconnections in March shows that it doesn't help for very long and that it doesn't help the underlying issue. A short-term, by all means, more payments are targeted specifically. However, specifically for working-age disabled people, the solutions have to come from energy, housing and energy efficiency. I want to go back to what Fraser said earlier, looking at the field poverty strategy and connecting what we are trying to do today up with how the Scottish Government meets its field poverty targets and how it complies with the field poverty strategy. There's a need for a social tariff, but if we don't think about that carefully, we could end up in the same place where everybody who needs it gets the same thing. Any social tariff needs to consider not only low income but higher energy use so that it meets the needs of disabled people's higher energy. Jeremy mentioned some benefits there. There are extra heating support benefits if you have a disabled child under the child disability payment. If you are someone of pension age, there is a winter fuel payment. If you are a working-age disabled person, there is nothing that you can claim that will help you with additional heating payments. You can be a disabled child getting a heating payment, turn into a disabled adult and that's when removed even though your circumstances haven't changed. It is important that we think about the short-term measures. The short-term measures may just be cash first, but the important thing is to start planning so that we don't do the short-term measures as we come out of the energy crisis and go back to what we were saying before the energy crisis and see that as normal. We need to start building now for a longer-term plan for support for the additional cost for disabled people. Thank you, Stephanie. I will now bring in Alan Foulds. Just thinking of the short-term point, I think that what Stephanie was saying there about putting cash first approaches, my notes to myself are literally as simple as putting cash in people's hands. We need to make sure that people have the money right now to address the things that they are facing in the crisis. Certainly when we were doing our research for our report in October, the idea of special tariffs specifically for disabled households did come up. I think that that is something that would help. I just wanted to touch on the point that Jeremy Balfour had raised about potentially some groups being left behind. I don't know if folk have seen some other research. Last week, a briefing out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that was looking at poverty rates just before the pandemic hit. What that had found is that over the years, families and couples with children were making up a smaller proportion of those in poverty than families without children or single-parent households. Earlier in the years, a report by Aberdeen financial management specifically about the current cost of living crisis found that, whereas people in Scotland tend to be in deeper poverty or more difficult financial situation than folk across the UK as a whole, families with children because of the support of being targeted at child poverty were roughly on a par and it was important to point out that it is really, really good that there has been a lot of investment in tackling child poverty and that there needs to be more there. That is not an either-or situation, but it has been where the focus has been and we do need to have an additional focus, not a shifted focus, but an additional focus on disabled people. Thinking beyond what the Scottish Parliament can do, there are things that the UK Government could be doing in terms of renewing windfall taxes on energy firms to reinstate the £20 uplift in universal credit as an absolute minimum. We know that the support that has been offered so far, as people have said, has not been adequate. That was quantified in September as being around about an £800 shortfall for the most released well-off households. The £150 for disabled people has not touched the sides of that. Other things about prioritising and preventative spending, I agree with the point that both Heather and Adam have made about the removal of social care charges. That has obviously been a Government commitment and has been a long-standing alliance call for those to be scrapped. If that is the case, that is effectively putting cash back in people's hands because if they are not spending money on social care charges, they have it available to spend on other things. I want to make one final brief point that I meant to make earlier, which is to bear in mind the human rights implications of those kinds of decisions. If people are not able to keep their homes and keep themselves at a good temperature that potentially is getting respiratory illnesses, they are not achieving their right to the highest attainable standard of health. Similarly, if people are not able to leave their homes because they cannot afford to power wheelchairs, they are not able to realise their right to independent and equal participation in society. In the short term, I would just need to be aware of the human rights implications of not giving people the support that they need. Thank you, Zalyn. I have some interesting points that you have made there. I am going to move on to Heather. Do you believe that Heather is online? I cannot. I am conscious that we have made points already about income maximisation, whether from benefits or perhaps from resolving issues around disability employment and pay gaps, which are of course a longer term. As well as income maximisation, I think that we have to look at not taking cash out of people's pockets, particularly where it relates to their impairment. I made the point earlier on about aim scrapping outstanding rears for social care barges and scrapping the social care tax altogether. In the short term, there could be a whole group on a rear collection. We have also touched on the reimbursment of extra energy costs for medical equipment used at home. That should be doable in the short term. That medical equipment is associated with a health board somewhere in such a festival. You can find out who is using that. I would add that some health boards already reimburs for oxygen equipment, but not every health board, and that should be the case. It should be promoted. It seems that it is not widely promoted. When we are having a conversation about short term solutions, it goes without saying that many of the things that we are asking for and have asked for for years now—affordable, accessible housing, being one, scrapping social care charges, etc. Those are not new asks that we are making. We are not making the points for the first time. If those things had been done when the shoot had been done, we might not actually be in the situation that we find ourselves in now. I just wanted to make that point by trying to scrub around in front of the short term solutions, but the solutions have been around for a long time and they have not been enacted. I will now move on to Richard. Thank you. I will try to keep it brief because I know that other people want to come in as well. In relation to unpaid carers, a lot of the support, the cost of living payment, that they did not qualify and did not get because, as carers, they did not qualify. I was slightly infuriated by the spice briefing that suggested that carers would get benefit by association of living in a household with somebody who was getting those benefits. That is not always the case. Carers do not always live with the person that they are caring for, and many of them have got very little or nothing of any extra support, which put them at huge risk of having to find other means in which to pay for essentials. In terms of what things that we can do, carers' allowance is a benefit that is available to some carers, but not all. If we are being honest, it is a pittance. Even with the very welcome carers' allowance supplement in Scotland, it is still about £87 a week, which, if you are caring for 35 hours a week, works out at about £2.50 an hour, which is a rather shocking rate of reimbursement. There are multiple things that we can do. The carers' allowance has obviously been looked at in Scotland around the carers' support payment, which will be linked later this year. We certainly called for, but it did not get answered. A number of additional carers' allowance supplements are doubling of it last year to support the cost of living crisis. That had been done during the pandemic, which had been welcomed, but that has not yet happened. If that was still possible, I think that would certainly help. The fact that, again, this is something that can hopefully be looked at through the carers' support payment when it comes in, but for carers that are trying to earn a living as well as care and are dependent on carers' allowance, then as soon as they earn even a penny more than £139, they lose their carers' allowance entitlement, which is obviously a disincentive to work. Obviously, as rates of wage go up, that now means that it is only 13.5 hours that a carer can work before they lose that carers' allowance entitlement, which is really unfair and puts them their ability to work at risk. That is something that needs to be looked at. I think that two people have at least mentioned this already, but social care charges need to be removed as soon as possible. It is an outrage that they are still there. Our state of caring survey showed that carers are choosing between paying for those services that they have to or essentials, so they are going out with one or the other. That is just not acceptable. I totally agree with the sentiment that cash in hand is really important. How do we do that? For carers, looking at a particular dedicated carer cost of living fund in Scotland would be really helpful to support carers for the same reasons that I have mentioned before in terms of having to be able to afford heating and eating. What would be really interesting is that we know that there is a lot of work going on around minimum income guarantee in Scotland, and we are moving to the idea of a pilot scheme. How about piloting a minimum income for carers? That would certainly be something that we would be interested to see. The other thing that people have touched on, and I think that it is really important to mention, is that those people that have increased energy costs as a result of medical equipment and having to keep the heating on for longer, I think that it is an outrage that they are expected to pay for them in the first place. I think that if we look at it from a point of principle, we would never expect somebody who was staying in hospital to be presented with a bill at the end of their stay for the ICU equipment that they have been using, or the dialysis machine that they have had to use, or even the heating that they have been required to have to keep their hospital bed warm, but we do expect that burden of cost to be shifted to the home once somebody is discharged or is living at home. I think that in terms of when we talk about the general shift from moving care from acute to community, which we all agree is great for the person that is ill and it is great for government because it supports more health efficiencies, but we cannot expect that burden of cost as well to be shifted into the community alongside that, so that has to be looked at, and I think that needs to be looked at urgently because there are families out there now paying thousands of pounds a month to support their energy costs because of the medical equipment, and no family should be forced to choose between keeping on those machines and heating and eating, so those would be absolutely urgent things to be addressed by this Parliament if it can. Okay, thanks Richard. You made some really interesting points there, which will take on board, particularly the burden of costs for operating these machines in the house, so thank you for that. I'm now going to bring in Ellie. Thanks, Ellie. Thanks, convener. There's a couple of things just to build on from comments that have already been made to build on Richard's point as well, the support for people while they're caring, but also support for people after a bereavement as well is really important, and when you've been caring for somebody for a long time, that is a lot of energy and a lot of emotional investment in that as well, and after that person has died, you need to be able to have the time to be able to grieve without feeling pressured by additional financial circumstances or having to feel like you need to rush back into work because you're going to run out of personal finance. Richard touched on the Scottish Careers payment, which is coming in as well, and I know a few other organisations that have called for where it's been suggested in the consultation that that will be extended for up to three months after a person has died. It really should be doubled and extended to six months, because people need to be able to have that time to process their grief, to be able to learn to live with it, to think about how they want to start to rebuild and re-enter their society, and if they want to look at finding work again, they need to be able to have the time, the money and the support to be able to do that, so just to build on Richard's point previously as well. We have in Scotland the batteries forms, which are used for when people have a terminal illness in Scotland and they're applying for fast-track benefits under the special rules of terminal illness. A bazarus form means that a doctor or a nurse can fill out the form and that states that a person has a terminal illness and that provides evidence for that person to be eligible for certain benefits and for them to be fast-tracked under the special rules, and certainly for ADP and CDP certainly a terminal ill person receives the highest rate of disability benefits, which is something that needs to be maintained as well, but I think there's a bit of an implementation gap in how the bazarus forms are being implemented and a bit of a delay in processing as well, so we need a more rapid implementation of those forms to be able to support the disability benefit roll-out and ensure that people are getting those benefits as quickly as they possibly can. If you look at that in a wider context of well, if we could support that implementation, the bazarus forms could also be used to support terminal ill people in other policy areas like housing, so in accessibility in a national context, but on a local government context they could support people, for example, to be fast-tracked for housing adaptations or to be able to be supported, to be fast-tracked through financial or non-financial support through the scheme of assistance, so those are some short-term things and medium-term things which could be considered, but there's also opportunities, I think, to grow existing, adapt and grow existing policy, particularly around child care policy. I think that while the Scottish child payment has been increased and another Government has announced a further £15 million of funding to support free school-aged child care, building on what Alan and others have said before about preventative measures and preventative spending, those are supporting low-income families who are already in that situation, but what if we expanded that to be able to include terminal ill parents, for example, of children to help prevent them from falling into that situation in the first place? If the child payment, for example, could be extended to terminal ill parents who have a child or children under 16, if the free school-aged child care, for example, could be extended to all terminal ill children, terminal ill parents who have a children in school. I think about thinking about the preventative measures in that context as well. There's been a lot of discussion as well around medical equipment and for terminal ill people there is a huge reliance on medical equipment and using multiple forms of equipment as well. Marie Curie and the University of Glasgow have recently undertaken some research called Dying in the Margins and Dying in the Margins looks at the barriers for people who are terminal ill dying at home in socioeconomic circumstances. One of the research participants who took part in the study was a young man with muscular dystrophy. He's reliant on a range of equipment, so a hoist, a respirator, an electric wheelchair, a mobility bed and his energy bill has always been high, but certainly in the cost of living it's skyrocketed even more. He told us that it's difficult because all of his stuff is electrically powered and that uses a lot of electricity. He was offered his own place and he turned it down because he couldn't afford it. He knew that he wasn't going to be able to afford it. Not only is that impacting his financial circumstances but it's also impacting his wider health outcomes and his physical and mental health as well. There needs to be some consideration about the wider impact on people's health outcomes as well as the finances in that situation. Thanks Eileen, thanks for sharing your story about that young man. It kind of contextualises the wider issues that he's experienced in as well, so thank you for that. I'm now going to bring in Morna Simkins. Thank you, convener. Obviously I won't cover points that my colleagues have but the Government must provide a cost of living support package to ensure that disabled people, including people with MS, can cope with the rising costs of living, not just in the short term but in the long term. One thing that I wanted to highlight is the impact of the cost of living and the 20 metre rule that's within the adult disability payment. Around one in three people with MS who had their level of PIP downgraded since introduction of their 20 metre rule and that was brought in 10 years ago. People with MS and other people who have a disability are still finding that their mobility component gets downgraded. That leads to them losing their car, which is a vital source of mobility, getting to and from work, trying to live as normal a life as possible but without that car not able to work, lose their job or have to reduce their job and then that puts an impact on their level of poverty and has an economic impact too. One thing that could be done is remove the 20 metre rule criteria from the ADP and allow people with MS to have their car, their mobility, its fluctuating condition, it's different for everyone and then they're able to hold down their job and contribute to Scotland's economy. I'm now going to bring in Adam and I've got your name right this time. You did very well for that. Just on Mr Balfour's point about the effectiveness of some of the cost of living payments, it's fair to say that for a lot of people who are of state pension age there was a lot more money that went to them than we might have anticipated or expected from UK government actually. For those who are in pension credit and receipt of that, there was a decent amount of money actually and probably more so than any other group. Balance with the fact that these are folks who are already on some of the lowest incomes possible and have been for many, many years. One of the things that I wanted to flag up though is the number of people who just miss out on thresholds. I've spoken to a huge number of older people in particular at cost of living events put on by MSPs and MPs across Scotland who have come up to me and said, my income is just under £10,000. Is there anything for me? The answer, broadly speaking, is no, because you're not eligible for pension credit, you can't receive carers allowance, all those types of things. There's nothing else for you to fall between this gap but I don't think it's fair to say that somebody whose income is of that level is living particularly well and sometimes they get bad advice about where they can get help or they're not eligible for something and that puts them off for many, many years. There's been good money at times but also we've heard of people who have been essentially storing this money up because it's short term. They don't know what's happening in the spring and the summer because while the indications from governments are about payments just now, everything you hear about energy bills and food price and inflation are going up extraordinary levels in the long term. What do I do in April? What do I do in May? I won't have been using that cash injection at that moment, maybe spreading it out or holding it back for when it's a really, really rainy day, so to speak. They think that they're just coping but by any measure, folks just aren't coping. The last part is about the process of getting support to people. There are huge numbers of folks who should be receiving prepayment meter vouchers who haven't been able to use them, haven't either received them, don't know where they are or haven't, in a sense, cashed them in. There's a process issue there somewhere but going back to the beginning of 2022, the first cost of living payment that came via UK Government to Scottish Government is £150 that we're going to every household and council tax band A to D. Local authorities then distributed that but there was an incredible range of how they did so. It wasn't £150 to you, convener. It might have been, we'll spread that out over the whole year. We'll deduct that from your council tax bill and we'll take it by £10 or £15 every single month. What impact does that have when your energy bills have gone through the roof or indeed just not trusting people to use that money? We've asked all local authorities at the time how they're going to do that and they just didn't know. They didn't have a process. They didn't have any kind of process and if they were going to give people £150 upfront it would say they'd take them nine months to do that. Structurally, we have a challenge in Scotland but we'll be able to get support to people who really need it and even then council tax band A to D is so restrictive. There are lots of people who need that help or beyond that at those levels and bigger, older homes that are terribly hard to heat. As Fraser Scott said earlier on, half the country lives in energy inefficient homes and half of older people live in homes that are energy efficient level D and below. Every pound that you're putting into paying for energy is getting soaked up into those walls and out through the cracks in the windows but they aren't able to access effectively the financial support or practical support for energy efficiency measures in Scotland as they should and there's certainly something that we've been asked by the Scottish Government to do regularly which is to use the data that they have through Social Security Scotland at the very least starter. The low-hanging fruit, if you will, for people who are on the lowest incomes, income-related benefits, Social Security Scotland and start targeting them and those households for home efficiency energy efficiency checks to see if they are actually living in homes that are suitable and they would undoubtedly be eligible for schemes but Fraser Scott said that a lot of those schemes are now shut to the autumn but to fix your roof when the sun is shining so to speak before we get into crisis next autumn and winter. Thank you very much Adam. I'm now going to move on to Fraser Scott. Thanks, convener. Just to add to what Adam said there about people with pre-payment meters, we know already in the statistics that have been published that around 20 to 25 per cent of all the issued vouchers for pre-payment meters households with the lowest incomes have gone unredeemed and this is moneys that are meant to help people over the winter period which is the period that has passed and for many other households they received that £400 universal payment through the energy bill support scheme automatically and yet some of our most vulnerable people in society have to work the hardest to receive the kind of support which they so desperately need. But I think that this is all about choices, you know, the effectiveness and the options available. It's all about choices. We are choosing to create this complex system of financial support, this patchwork quilt, if you like, of support for people, rather than come up with something that is far more effective, far more elegant. If you ask me what was good, yeah, of course, child winter heating assistance in Scotland is a very, very positive thing, very positive that it's also been upgraded in the year that we're in. The child payment also, great. I mean, I look at the child winter heating assistance though, it was upgraded in line with inflation but not against the commodity against which it's hypothecated, which was energy. Energy costs were 250 per cent, not 10 per cent. For those households, for what it can achieve in the year that we have now against the year that it began, it achieves a lot less in terms of the amount of comfort that it can provide to a household. As do many of the other financial supports that are available, whether that's the £150 wormhole discount that is available from your energy supplier, that's a £134 net benefit because all households pay towards it, including the most vulnerable, pay about a £16 payment in their energy bills to receive, at a later date, a £150 payment, a discount on their energy costs. However, it buys considerably less than the £140 that it once was in 2019 when energy costs were two and a half times less. The amount of those comforts that things provide have diminished, and they have diminished dramatically. However, it's all about choices. There were up ratings of universal payments, whether that was people on universal credit or whether it was the disability payment of £150 or whether it was the £300 payment for older people. We've created this whole raft of things, and some of it was choices. I will say the universal payment, the energy bill support scheme £400, that was a choice. The UK Government could have decided to reduce energy costs directly further than the energy price guarantee, which has held things at that notional, fictional £2,500 that is very often referred to. It could have pulled down our unit costs more, but it chose to do a £400 payment. For me, it's choices, and what we need to make are better choices. Choices that actually reach people and create the impacts that they want. I'd recommend that the NHS considers expanding its remit from aids and adaptations to consider its role in supporting enhanced heating and enhanced power requirements for people with essential medical needs. If we do things like that, we will be creating a far fairer, far more open, far more automatic auto-enrolling system than the one that we have now. Without a doubt, I believe that we can do it. We have the powers to do much more than we have done by way of better targeting. We should learn from the evidence that we have and just do this better. Thanks very much for that contribution phrase. I'm conscious of the time. I'm hoping that, going forward in the next theme, if the contributions could be more shorter and succinct to allow everybody to come in. We've still got Stephen McEvoy, and I'm going to bring in Ruth Boyle, and that will bring the theme to an end. My comments on the grant system tend to be hooked to a qualifying benefit at a very specific point in time. Do you then have situations where, if a claimant loses entitlement to that benefit or they are waiting for something to be processed, that can lead to problems accessing the grants? That is a particular problem of universal credit, as it is based on a fixed calendar month period. If you have somebody who does more hours than work or they start a job, that one specific month could mean that they potentially lose a couple of hundred pounds in a one-off payment. In Scotland, I think that we have the opportunity to perhaps use council tax reduction more as a qualifying benefit, as it is a means-tested benefit and it is fully devolved. Even if we use that as a back-up option in certain cases, it would maybe give us more leeway to avoid situations where somebody who is on a low-income maybe has a particular rise just for that one period and it then potentially leads to them losing hundreds of pounds. I have seen examples of that where somebody is considered to be taking up employment and it would actually be more financially beneficial for them to delay that, get on some and then take up the job. Obviously, we would want to avoid situations like that where possible. Okay, thanks very much for those comments. Stephen Cynabryng and Ruth Neill, and that is our final speaker and team 2. Thank you, convener. Yes, just to pick up on Mr Balfour's second question around the focus that has been given to child poverty, of course we welcome the efforts that have been made in terms of meeting those child poverty targets. In the latest poverty and inequality data release, we see that that has paid off in terms of child poverty rates remaining stable. We do not think that that is something to celebrate, we should be doing better than that, but by contrast we see that the relative poverty rate for disabled people actually increased in that data release and that shows why it is really important that we are broadening our focus on poverty to make sure that, as we try to build a more equal society, we are not leaving anyone behind. We are pleased that the First Minister's anti-poverty summit next week is going to look at poverty in the round and we hope that that is the beginning of increased focus for other groups. I think that I would just agree with everything that has been said in terms of the cash first approach in the short term. We see some of the support that has been mentioned around council tax reduction or that universal £400 deduction to energy bills that has ultimately benefited better off households the most and we needed to focus on getting cash into the pockets of those who have the least resources. One of the fundamental things to think about is the way that we make policy in Scotland. We are not yet achieving the ambition of mainstream equality considerations into all the policymaking that we do and that is a really critical first starting point here. It is also about embedding lived experience in the policymaking that we do. We know when people who are experiencing poverty or when disabled people are involved in the decision making that impacts their lives but ultimately make better decisions and make better policy. In terms of the actions, I will not go into everything that we would want to see because I know we are short on time but it is about making sure that we have a structural solution to a structural problem and that involves thinking about fair work for disabled people, thinking about that employer ability point in terms of what changes can employers make to their employment practice to make it more suitable for disabled people. It is about improving energy efficiency to reduce vulnerability to fuel poverty in the longer term and strengthening our social security system. We would support the points made by Richard in terms of that concentrated support for carers as people who live on some of the lowest incomes in our society. We would also support the introduction of the Scottish Government's commitment to a minimum income guarantee that is both disability and carer sensitive to make sure that it meets everybody's needs. Thank you, Ruth. That brings us to the end of theme 2 and thank you for all your contributions. I am now going to invite Paul O'Kane to come in and introduce theme 3. I am aware that there were two of our witnesses here today who were not able to contribute so if you want to come in on theme 3, I am happy for you to do that. I am going to pass over to Paul O'Kane now. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning to the panel and thank you for a really interesting discussion so far, I suppose. In theme 3, we are going to try and pull together a lot of what we have been discussing and indeed you have been touching on many of the themes that we are interested in. Indeed, Ruth there, I think that you were talking about long-term structural solutions. We would like to focus on those longer-term approaches. We know that we have lived through national emergencies of recent times, such as the Covid pandemic, and we are living through the cost of living crisis. We are interested in how we can restructure and look across the board at policy interventions that could make a long-term difference to protect people, protect disabled people, people who are living with long-term conditions and unpaid carers to absorb those shocks when they come. The committee is also interested to know your views on any sort of implications for the design of Scottish social security benefits for carers and disabled people in that space. Obviously, we expect inflation to increase, prices are still high, so what do you think the implications are for how Governments should support people with a cost of living crisis that is not abating and is not going anywhere anytime soon? I do not know for anybody. I believe that Becky wants to come in. Thank you. I think that we have got a real opportunity when it comes to unpaid carers and looking at the new carer support payment and the eligibility around that. We have heard from Adam about how this is impacting older people, it impacts younger carers as well. The eligibility criteria and the tightness of it at the moment has a huge impact for unpaid carers across their entire lifetime and their entire caring journey, which feeds into the poverty cycle again and again. We have an opportunity to look at the income thresholds and make that realistic. We have an opportunity to remove the full-time study rule, to support young carers into study, and to make caring not the only thing that young people can do for their entire lives as they move into adulthood. I think that we have a real opportunity there. I would like to add our support of a minimum income guarantee for all unpaid carers. I think that that would be an absolute game changer. We are hearing it all around the table. It is really important that it is heard. I do not disagree at all. I agree wholeheartedly with everything that has been said, but my plea is to look at everything through an equality lens, because it is not about a one-size-fits-all approach. Very often, you have to dig much deeper to understand the implication of the cost of living crisis and all of the associated financial pressures on different groups and communities. That would be my plea. Alongside that, nobody has yet talked about remote, rural and island communities and the impact of the cost of living rise on carers and disabled people in those communities. For example, we have done some recent research on our Gail and Bute Council, and carers there spoke about, although it can often be really nice to live in a small village, and there are lots of positives that come alongside that, their ability to make more economical food choices perhaps are limited because of the availability of where they can buy food from. That often entails a round-trip of 100 plus miles to the nearest big city to go to a supermarket to see if there is cheaper food available there, but then you have to factor in the availability of transport, the time and petrol costs. Very often, any saving that you might make is eradicated by additional associated costs. I think that it is really, really important not to forget those communities as well. I appreciate that comment. I am going to move swiftly on to Alan Fault. I am going to try to make quite a few points as quickly as possible. In terms of those longer-term solutions, I think that quite a few people have pointed out issues of energy efficiency and housing affordability, and those are absolutely key. Those are things that we identified as issues in the long-term solutions part of our report, and perhaps others might have a bit more to say on those. I want to focus a little bit perhaps on the social security side of things, and to say that some of the changes that the Scottish Government has made are very welcome. The fact that it is viewing it very explicitly and publicly as a human right is a very positive development. The fact that there is going to be £1.4 billion of additional expenditure over and above what would have been expected based on UK Government allocations is positive, but is that necessarily going to mean that social security is still adequate? I am not convinced that it would be. There still needs to be a review of that adequacy, and building on perhaps the point that Fraser made about linking it to the specific things that it is meant to cover, we know that food price inflation has been significantly higher than the rate of inflation itself. People are spending a lot more of their money on food than they are on things such as utility, not the energy budget, but broadband bills, for example. We need to be aware of that when assessing adequacy. Are we considering things such as specific higher rates of inflation for food, which is the most fundamental thing? Also, as part of that, we need to embed equalities and human rights throughout the entire process of how we are approaching things. I think that a few people have made that point already. A final quick point is that a discussion on how we raise revenues needs to be part of that. I know that the Scottish Government is open to that discussion, sort of the new Government that has just taken office, but it is essential to the funding of public services and to the funding of social security that we have, a progressive system of taxation. I think that my colleagues might be like, here goes Alan again on council tax, but there is a specific point on what Adam mentioned, some of the stuff around council tax and where funding has gone through that. Council tax is a tax that just desperately needs to be reformed so that local services, which disabled people, unpaid carers with long-term conditions, are much more likely to be reliant on. That is a significant barrier to those services being funded. We need to make sure that revenue is longer-term reforms and how we raise the money to fund those services is very much in the mix for what we are thinking about. I will now bring in Heather Fiskin. I will try not to repeat any points, but I will go back to the introduction to the question where it was suggested that some people who have been through the pandemic, some people are still very much living with the pandemic, they are still self-shielding. That should be forgotten. It is impacting their income in all kinds of ways. There is isolation and so on and so forth. I will address the question as well. In terms of actions that need to be taken, we need to build what Alan has just been saying about human rights-based approaches that we need to be building on. First, people need to be able to make their own choices about how to use money. That money itself should track inflation. If inflation goes above a certain point, then updates to benefits or extra awards that are made should track that. I think that the statistics have to take account of the extra cost of disability. There are some national statistics that are still coming out that have not taken account of that. It is a very important part of people's lives. Another thing that has to be done just tomorrow is that services have to be disability-competent. At the moment, they are under so much demand, but the other thing is that disabled people's lives and what we have heard about today are incredibly complicated. The benefits system, what passports should get to the blue badge, etc. If you do not get that, what the impact is, is very multiple-dimensional. It is a hard thing to ask perhaps of all into an advice centre to have all that information empathy. They may have them bucket loads, but the information that people need and the support and the signposting might not have that capacity. Finally, we have been doing some work on climate change, aim and emergency planning. We have co-participation status in the UK COVID-19 inquiry. One of the things that we are flagging there is that there has been a complete lack of involvement in emergency planning. That is a human right under the CRPD convention on the rights of disabled people. Disabled people had not been involved in the swan of sickness exercises, which I think were around 2011. Yet, general comment 7 of the UNCRPD says that disabled people and their organisations must be involved by states in things that concern them, and that includes emergency planning. Thank you very much, Heather. I am now going to move on to Ruth Oyl. Thank you. It will be easy to be brief because a lot of the comments that I was going to make have not been made, so I will just echo what Heather and Alan have said. One thing that we have not discussed today that I think is important to raise is the impact of poverty-related stigma. In the Alliance report, they mentioned the importance of de-stigmatising social security. The Poverty Alliance is the Secretary for the Cross-Party Group on Poverty in the Scottish Parliament. One of the committee's previous members, Pam Duncan Glancy, is the convener for that group. Earlier this year, we published a report on poverty-related stigma in Scotland. What we found was that it is extensive and deep-rooted, and it has far-reaching implications for people's mental health. It erects barriers to accessing support, and it also influences the design of policy that is intended to support people to escape poverty. What we concluded is that tackling poverty becomes significantly harder, if not impossible, if we do not tackle poverty-related stigma. We got submissions in that inquiry from Inclusion Scotland, from Alliance and from Glasgow Disability Alliance, and we saw that there were particular impacts on stigma for disabled people, particularly in terms of applying for benefits because of the burden of proof that often exists and the sense that you are not being believed as you apply for those benefits. That was particularly true for people who perhaps had a hidden impairment and felt that the system was not conducive to them being able to access benefits. The narratives that we have seen from the media and from certain politicians around grounding and undeserving recipients of social security have had an impact on disabled people in terms of their sense of self and shame that they might feel about their situation. We made a number of recommendations that I would directly commit to in tackling poverty-related stigma, but that was things such as automating benefits, investing in a programme of benefit take-up, poverty awareness training for people in public-facing roles, and just to pick up on Polygian's question about social security Scotland, I would say that within the context of that inquiry, the submissions that we received were positive about social security Scotland's emphasis on human rights and dignity in the work that they are doing, and we would urge that to be extended across all of the work that we are at public-facing roles in terms of the Scottish Government. Thank you very much. The comments on stigma are absolutely huge in terms of poverty, so thank you for bringing that up. I will now move on to Stephen McAvoy. My particular comments would again refer back to social security. At the minute, when we were assisting claimants with a claim for the child disability payment or the adult disability payment, we are currently waiting around 46 months for an outcome decision. While we would rather have a good decision that takes a bit of time than a bad decision quickly, those delays are causing a couple of issues. First of all, you get the fact that the claimant who is potentially entitled does not have that income, but it is also not allowing us to see how well the system is actually performing. When the benefits were devolved, we were largely copying, pasting the qualifying criteria, and I think that there were good reasons for that. The assumption would be that Social Security Scotland could just make better decisions, and I actually think that that is possible. A lot of the bad decisions that we have seen that were not actually in relation to the criteria. It was more about the application of the criteria, but we are still starting to get a significant period of time into the benefits that have been devolved. Because of the lack of outcome decisions, it is really difficult for welfare rights advisers, such as myself, to feedback on how that is actually going. It means that we then cannot feedback on how we could potentially improve the system, going forward. It is not until we actually see outcome decisions that we get to test them at appeal that we will actually get a full picture of how the system looks without maybe the face-to-face medicals and improve the evidence gathering. That is one of the biggest issues for us at the MENA, is to get that improved so that we can actually start to see outcome decisions, and then we can make better informed decisions about how we can improve things going forward. Thanks very much, Stephen. Thanks for pointing that out in terms of the decision time and the delays that are in place, so that is something that we as a committee can pick up on. Thank you for that. I am now going to bring in Adam. I will just have three very quick things that rattle the things that Scotland can do. Number one is addressing digital exclusion, so ensuring that public services are open to you, whoever you are, not necessarily making sure that everyone can be online, they will not necessarily be able to do so, particularly disabled people. Public services, local authorities, making sure that they have in-person, face-to-face and telephone options that folks do not miss out on their information rights and services. That has got to be a bigger priority. It is an absolute need for a national social security update campaign that looks at all benefits across the whole UK, in respect of who it ministers on. The Scottish Government should lead through social security, Scotland and others, but that is a big one—making sure that you are picking up things that should help the increase of entitlements to everyone. Quite frankly, I am not following back on saying that it will have an impact on the fiscal framework, which it does not. Officials from DWP have been at this committee in the past, so that would not be the case. It is absolutely necessary to look at pension credit and other things, in respect of who it ministers on. I think that looking at age-inclusive workplace and fair work should very much include carers' positive policies as part of that, so that carers can be in work and fulfil all the responsibilities that they have with flexibility and without impact on their employment. I thank you for those comments, Adam. I will now bring in Fraser Scott. Thank you, convener, and I hope that I can do this quickly. Echoing things that Ruth and Alan just said about all the positive comments that they made on rights and having a much broader rights-based society, that is what we believe that we should have a right to affordable energy and, ideally, affordable clean energy. We should have a right to live in a good-quality energy-efficient home, and we should have a right to a level of income that meets our basic requirements, but we have none of those things at this point in time. We should have those things. We should have therefore aligned policy and practice, and we should be able to hold responsible bodies to account against those rights. Unfortunately, the circumstances that we have seen in terms of the cost of living, high energy costs and the choices that have been made in terms of Government interventions and supports will still, sadly and very tragically, have resulted in increases in child mortality and high numbers of avoidable deaths of people living in cold-damp homes that are unable to heat their homes to the right level over this last winter and, potentially next winter, as high energy costs endure. We simply have to make better choices than the ones that we have made so far. Thank you very much for your comments, Sarah Fraser. I think that the final speaker that we have, unless anyone else wants to come in, is Richard. Again, I will have to be brief on a couple of things that have been said. From a social security perspective, one of the routes out of poverty is, of course, the ability to work. For many unpaid carers, they do want to work, but they are facing multiple barriers in terms of getting into work. One of them is that threshold around carers allowance. If we can look at that as part of that process of reviewing the carers allowance as it merges into the carer support payment and increase that £139 threshold and perhaps maybe not even have it as a cliff edge and look at a tapering system so that people can work more hours to increase their income. Work as well has been a route out of poverty for many carers. It is also part of their life, it is part of their quality of life, it is part of their identity and they do not get the option to necessarily do that because of having to care. That is a hugely important aspect of sorting out the social security system to support carers into work. I think that there is an employability agenda around carers as well. Adam just briefly mentioned carer positive. Carer Scotland runs the carer positive accreditation scheme, which supports organisations to create carer friendly workplaces. I think that we have 250 organisations covering nearly half a million employees across Scotland, but we still do not have all of the big public bodies, all of the NHS boards, all of the local authorities. I think that all organisations should strive to be carer positive to ensure that their workplaces support carers who are working. For those carers who are not currently working who might like to work, because their circumstances have changed or their caring role has come to an end, it can be incredibly difficult to get back into the labour market. They may have been caring for many, many years and that gap between being able to get back into work and getting a job is quite a large gap. Although we have some great employability services out there, some of them are not always adapt to the specific needs of what carers have. I think that we need to look at our employability offering and how we can support carers back into work as well, which goes hand in hand with looking at what the social security system can do to support carers back into work. Thank you. Thanks very much, Richard. I think that Stephanie wants to come in. I think that that will be our final speaker for theme 3. I will keep it brief. I am not going to echo what anybody else said. I want to flag that, although I said earlier about long-term solutions being crucial, we need short-term solutions. It is just to flag that we are nearly into May and winter comes around quickly in Scotland. When we are talking about short-term solutions, those need to be an urgent consideration. Thank you. That is a good point. Thank you, Stephanie. Can I just say thank you very much for all your evidence here today? What is such a stood out for me? I probably could comment on behalf of the whole of the committee here is the use of came round here and it is heartening to hear that it is the voices of the people who are most in need and need to be heard. Thank you for all your contributions and we will take them all on board. Unless there are any other points that you have not had a chance to raise with us today, you are more than welcome to follow up and write to us as a committee as well. Thank you very much for all your contributions. They have been completely invaluable. I suppose that our committee today concludes our public business for today and we will now move into private session.