 I would like to welcome everyone to the eighth meeting of the Social Security Committee 2017, if everyone could turn off their mobile phones as usual. I have received apologies from Sandra White and Mark Griffin. The first item on the agenda is to ask the committee if we can agree to take several items in private, just for the record item 4 to consider response to the budget process item 5 to consider our report to the annual report and item 6 to consider nominations for expert support for our work. Is that agreed? Thank you very much. So moving on to the main item for business, that's a child poverty Scotland bill. Today is our second of the committee's formal evidence sessions on the bill and we have two panels of witnesses. So first of all, I'd like to thank all the witnesses for their attendance and for their written submissions, which have been very helpful. I'd like to formally welcome the panel, so we have Peter Allen, community planning manager for Dundee City Council, Professor Andrew Russell, medical director and deputy chief executive of NHS Teaside. We also have Robert McGregor, who is the policy manager for Fife Council and Dr Margaret Hanna, director of public health NHS Fife. So, a powerful panel. Thank you all for coming along. I'd like to begin by asking the panel why you think child poverty legislation is needed or perhaps you don't think it's needed. So any one of you, if you'd like to kick off? Well, I think it is welcome partly because it focuses minds. It focuses minds on a very difficult issue, but we know it has ramifications throughout society. And with the dropping of that target from the UK Government's agenda, it feels appropriate that we should do something in Scotland that addresses this, because we as a nation want to do something. We feel very committed towards addressing child poverty in the round. So I am supportive of the idea. Thank you. Anyone else want to add to that? If I was to come in, before I took on my current role, I was a GP for nearly 20 years in some of the poorest parts of Dundee, so I understand the importance and significance and recognise that in the absence of putting the type of structure that you're describing with this bill around it, we've had years of aspiration but limited evidence of delivery. So the opportunity to see the targets and the way that you describe gets us into a different territory around delivery, and certainly I'm from a personal perspective very supportive of that, convener. Peter Robert wants to add anything to that. I think that if we're genuinely committed to reducing inequalities in the country, then child poverty is a fundamental question of social justice, especially since some people may misguidedly believe that people choose poverty or that poverty is their fault, but no one ever questions that children who are born into poverty made a choice to live in poverty. So I think that it gives us a platform that everyone will support. I think that the other reason is that it gives us a chance to have a sustainable commitment, because often policy priorities come and go, but I don't think that child poverty is one that anyone would ever be willing to accept. I think that the bill helps us to make a positive and sustainable commitment. Can you hear me? Yes. I think finally it's an area that most local authorities and their partners have been working on for a number of years, but perhaps not all to the same extent. I think anything that raises the profile of child poverty is a must-do rather than a good-to-do is a good thing. That's very helpful in setting the scene, so I'm going to call on members to ask some questions. If you feel that you don't all have to answer every question, just indicate to me if you do, to make sure that it's all covered. I'd like to begin by calling Ruth Maguire. Good morning, panel. Thanks for being here and thanks for your written evidence. It was particularly helpful to see a number of the things that your partnerships are doing to tackle poverty. I want to explore a little bit how the bill will help with that and won't just add extra reporting or extra work that's not actually going to deliver results for the people that we're trying to help. If there's going to be specific questions about the shape of the reports and the contents or the value of them, would that be a reasonable place to start? The reports are interesting in the sense that everybody's going to have a story to tell about what they're doing about child poverty and you would really hope that in developing local outcome improvement plans all of the country would be explicitly making a commitment to that and saying what they're going to do, but I'm not absolutely confident that that would be the case, so when a lucky bill would reinforce the need for that. In terms of reporting though, I think that there's a few interesting questions to ask, which is about this kind of so-what thing. So-what there's an annual report on child poverty from the Scottish Government or from Dundee City Council or its local partners, do we know what good enough looks like in terms of a local delivery on child poverty? Who's going to tell us what the report should include? Who's going to tell us if that's good enough? We could have a report where all the long-term targets are going down but we've done incredible things and vice versa we could have targets going up and we've done nothing very much about it. I think that the issue is so complex and the factors that contribute to change are so complex that properly reporting on reasonable progress will be really hard, but I think that it's absolutely crucial that organisations are held to account to demonstrate the specific action that they are taking to reduce child poverty. I think that there probably needs to be more of a discussion about what targets would look like, how you would frame local short-term action that would be positive, if we wanted. We could talk a bit more about that later. Anyone else want to add? Targets are always a challenge from a health perspective because there is always a fine line between something that is a reasonable aspiration and something that's unachievable. We need to ensure that we frame targets within the context of the things that people should be doing anyway and are measures of things that people are and systems are doing anyway. The opportunity to produce integrated children's service plans, which is emerging across Scotland, you could see some of the outcome measures that may be described within this bill as being a legitimate outcome and are quite useful measures within the context of improvement to fall out of those integrated children's service plans. Just to pick up on Peter's point, it's important that we don't get into a model that reports solely for the purpose of reporting. To pick up on that, I think that one of the risks around what I see written in the bill is that it appears as if we are being asked to simply report activity. If that's the case, there is a risk that we just continue doing what we're doing and have always done around all of this. It isn't absolutely clear to me what we're actually being asked to do over and above what we currently do. However, the bill in the act will eventually provide a great deal of scrutiny and support in sharing and learning, et cetera. The other thing is that in order to make sense of the actions that we are all taking locally, everything's joined up. Our work with council isn't just between the NHS and the council. It's a wider partnership effort to address poverty in the round. Of course, there are specifics around children and families, but if we are only called to account around one specific target, there is a risk that we are not addressing these issues in the most effective way that we could be. Part of the challenge here is conceptual that a target can be something that you aim for and the arrow to the bullseye, but it can also be an attractor to mobilise effort towards a goal. I think that's what this target is about, because we all want to mobilise societal efforts to address poverty for children and families. If we see it in that light, then I think it's going to have more meaning for us at the local level. I suppose that I'd be interested to hear how your measuring outcomes at the moment on the work that you're doing around poverty, specifically around children and families, if that's possible. You've detailed in your submissions quite a lot of work that's on-going, so it would be good to hear. I think that we always find—sorry. I was just going to comment on some of the health stats, of course. Stillbirth, low birth weight, infant mortality, maternal mortality—all of those things have a very strong social gradient. It is something that we are very much keeping a very close eye on and looking to see what mitigating factors we could introduce. I was just going to say that when we are talking, if you view the outcomes in terms of the long-term income in poverty targets, then we have very little to show what marginal incremental change we are achieving on each year. I think what's more important is for us to have some kind of logic modelling approach where we can work back from the long-term outcomes and say reasonably what are the actions that we think we can take now that would have the biggest impact over the longer term and to set really stretching targets around those. So is it the number of kids who are getting their uniform grant, the level of income maximisation? Is it the number of people who are getting supported to do social prescribing? A range of practical measures and put all their efforts into doing as much of that as possible on the basis that you and everyone else would have faced, that those were the right things to achieve the long-term support. The way we are looking at it in Dundee is to focus less on the long-term outcome that's going to be really hard to change and say, well, what could we be doing this year and next year? Demonstrate a logical connection between those and then put all our efforts into making the short-term stuff happen and doing it really well. One of the interesting things for me is that both Dundee and Fife have recently had fairness commissions and one of the challenges that came from the work of those fairness commissions was around outcomes and measures and targets. So what we are looking to do is to refresh our approaches and how we are looking to measure success through the challenges that came through those commissions, suddenly from a Fife perspective. So what we'll see, I think, is the commission's work heavily reflected in local outcome improvement plans going forwards. What we'll also have to do, of course, is anything that comes through in terms of legislation around chill poverty. We'll look to see how that is reflected within LOIBS as well. Good morning, everyone. Our job as a committee here is to focus our scrutiny on this bill as introduced into the Parliament and to think about ways in which it might be improved. I want to ask a range of questions with that task in mind. The centrepiece to my mind of this bill are the four income-related targets. One of the things that is notable about those targets is exactly that they are all income-related. My first question is whether the members of the panel think that it is sufficient. I think that we've probably agreed that it's necessary, but the question is whether it's sufficient to measure child poverty by reference to income alone. My answer to that is that in Dundee, when we discuss this, we always say that it's not all about money but it's definitely about money. So whatever else poverty is about, and one of the phrases that drives me crazy, is that worse than income poverty is poverty of aspiration. I think that poverty of no money and sending your parents to bed cold when they food, that's poverty. So we think that it has to be about the money but we know it's not just about the money. I would tend to agree with that, but there is that element of understanding the way in which the statutory sector then targets its resource as a consequence of that and that element certainly needs to be captured somewhere. Adam. Other members of the panel want to answer that question before we move on or what? Well, I think that there is potentially the use of genie or some other kind of inequality measure across the whole of society rather than it only being targeting around the levels of actual poverty in childhood is a potential addition to this, which would look much more at the distribution of income across all income groups because there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it's the social gradients that are so contributed to towards poor health outcomes, for example. Then there's also the question of wealth and debt and those questions which can leave people very disabled in terms of their income because it's not just that they don't have an adequate income, they feel really, really stuck. Again, that can have huge consequences in terms of people's mental health in particular. Peter Allen. Yeah, mindfad, I'll just make a supplementary point. If we're measuring income, we tend to talk about the lives of the parents really because that's where the income would come from and that's absolutely crucial. If you want to change income, focus on families and parents, but I think that those targets don't really say an awful lot about the experience of the child and what the life of the child is like. We make a lot of presumptions based on there might not be a lot of money in the house, so therefore the life of the child will be like this, but if we were able to have some kind of progress targets that measured positive improvement in the lives of children who are experiencing some poverty, then that would be really positive. Adam. I wanted to—sorry, Robert, did you want to come in? I was just going to say to agree with Peter that I think we need to be clear what kind of outcomes we want for our children, particularly children from low-income families, so we presumably want them to be safe and healthy and to aspire towards their potential. So how do we actually get measures and targets in place that do all of that? I think that income targets very much have to be part of it, absolutely essential part, but it's part of a wider dashboard. So let me give you an example of the sorts of things that some of us have been talking about considering adding to the bill, seeing if we can add to the bill. These are issues that we discussed with the last panel of witnesses that we had in our first stage 1 session just before the Easter recess. John Dickie, for example, of the child poverty action group, was enthusiastically in favour of the proposition that I put to him in that session that the bill should be extended so that there is a requirement to take steps to reduce the attainment gap in education as a measure of child poverty. Given that John Dickie is in favour of that, I wonder what the current panel would think about seeing a measure such as that included in this bill. We know that there is a relationship between educational under-retainment and child poverty. There are relationships between wealth and debt and health and child poverty, as Margaret Hannah just said, but there is also a relationship between educational under-performance and educational attainment gaps and poverty. The question is whether a specific statutory duty on ministers to take steps to close the attainment gap should be added to a bill that is focused on trying to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty in Scotland. It should be added to the bill, but that logic model that I was describing earlier about where you think, what are the biggest contributory factors and how could we take early action to change those, and you would think that attainment would be one of those. I think that strong targets associated with those would be more meaningful than waiting five or ten years to see if the income target had changed. It also helps us to look at how we make policy choices. When John MacKendrick spoke to our fairness commission in Dundee, he said, you know, there may have to be difficult choices to be made in tackling poverty. You may not be able to do everything for everyone, and attainment was one of the ones that we believed was the biggest priority. The way our fairness commission recommended change was to say not that we should improve attainment for everyone in the city of Dundee. We should close the gap by improving the performance of the kids who are getting the poorest results. That takes quite a different kind of strategic approach, and it is difficult to argue across the population that we are going to focus help on people who need a bit more rather than we are going to do everything for everyone. It is a very good point that what I would say is that, of course, to address child poverty, for me it is an indicative target to mobilise us towards something more ambitious as a country around what is an intractable difficult challenge to address. It has many dimensions. Educational attainment will be one, health will be another, and ambition for those children as well will be a third. The availability of opportunity for them in their surroundings, just how much can we achieve around reducing food deserts from improving the green environment and place spaces for children as well. Those elements are all part of that target to my mind. I have a broad view of it. Including additional targets in the bill, I am not sure. The devil is going to be in the guidance and how we report on our progress. Think carefully of the impact, for example, on housing. We have a very big housing programme in Scotland that will make a difference in child poverty because it will maintain or overall peg housing costs, which is an important part of the household income. After housing costs, one of the reasons why Scotland, compared with the rest of the UK, has better child poverty levels is because our housing costs are relatively lower. Those are huge contributions to achieving that target. I feel that that is the motivation and the spirit of the law behind the move, rather than being the specifics. That is very helpful. One more quick follow-up for me on this before other members come in. In the written submission from Fife Partnership, it said that you believe that there is a very good opportunity in this bill to use rich data and evidence, much of it held locally, to consider new approaches, reconsider targeting and how we can do much more on early intervention to prevent child poverty and to break cycles. I thought that that was a very interesting contribution. My question is, what in the bill enables you or us as a country to do that, and if the bill does not do enough to enable us to do that, what should we add to the bill to ensure that that ambition is realised? I am not sure whether it needs to be written in the face of the bill, but I think that it would be very helpful if there is reference to that in the guidance, and quite often the devil is in the guidance rather than the bill itself. What we were referring to there was that, particularly in our administrative data that we hold around so many different things, we understand much more about families and children, and we do not, as yet, make enough of that kind of information and how we join it all up between the various partners. I will give some examples of that. It is maybe leaning too much on the deficits out of things, but we know who accesses things like crisis grants, we know who collects, who applies for discretionary housing benefits, we know who seeks debt crisis support, we know who uses food banks. We actually know a great deal about families in our areas, and I think that we need to do much more to develop that understanding, to develop that understanding of the circumstances and the characteristics that enable us to target the kind of action that is needed to reduce poverty. I could perhaps briefly say that the health service has a long history of using data to reflect on past harm, and it is moving in various parts across internationally, across Scotland and across the UK, into the territory of using those data to anticipate future harm. The opportunity, through the alignment of health and social care, to bring the local authority and other partners into that conversation and into the discipline around the way in which we collectively use data, you could see real opportunities against the background of this agenda. This was one of the recommendations from our fairer five commission was to take that opportunity and use it in a much more coordinated way. There's just a wider comment to make also about this, reflecting partly on what Peter was saying earlier, that Michael Marmot has written widely around this whole agenda and talks about disproportionate universalism. I think that that idea that we have universalism around our public provision, but there's a proportionate element of that, which is necessary to reduce that gradient across society. I think that that might be quite a helpful way of seeing how we address these issues together. Gordon Lindhurst. Yes, thank you convener. Good morning. What I want to ask about, in this area, Jeane Freeman, the minister's response, was talked about a human rights-based approach in this area as well. Looking at the bill as it currently is drafted, the committee said a number of submissions, including from the Law Society of Scotland. I think that what the Law Society said was that laying annual progress reports before Parliament would encourage progress, scrutiny and oversight, but the concern raised is that, to use their words, these measures alone will not secure the success of the bill's aims. It is unclear to us what the consequences, if any, would be if the targets are not met. They question whether the bill in its current form is justiciable and therefore that it could prove largely unenforceable and therefore ineffective. I think that, by justiciable, probably one is looking at the question of an individual's rights to enforce anything before the courts, which is normally what one would understand to be human rights in effective form or in respect of an individual's situation. I am just wondering if members of the panel could comment on that. I am considering it specifically from a human rights perspective. I think that my reading of the bill is that it is a good faith thing, that the Government will be expecting local authorities and their partners and other bodies to be acting in good faith to reduce child poverty, but I haven't looked into it in more detail on that. I think of a similar view that my expectation of the outcome would be something that is perceived to be facilitative and supportive. There is always an anxiety in anything that you put in statute that you get into the territory of sanction. Experience in other areas around that sanction-based model is that we do not get into sustainable solutions. We quite often get into models of temporary improvement that seek to offset the potential of a sanction, but we do not get into the territory of sustainability. For me, the opportunity that the bill presents is one to take us into sustainable solutions. I simply agree with that as a position. I think that there are almost two issues that you might want to separate. One would be the human rights and whether it was justifiable and then the level of scrutiny and who would scrutinise the reports. I think that that is absolutely crucial. I think that previous sessions you have been asking about the role of the ministerial advisory group. That might be a role for a body like that. Who is going to look at all the reports that have produced the delivery plan for the Government or the local plan and say that this is doing enough, going far enough and fast enough to seriously reduce inequality? It would be interesting to know what you are going to base that on. What might be helpful is the notion of a broader outcome framework around child poverty. I know that you are thinking about a range of measures as well as the income target. A good starting point might be that we based some work on NHS Health Scotland's mental health outcome framework and adapted that to look at issues around fairness and poverty. That started to draw a broader picture of the causes and consequences of poverty. We might be able to use that as a basis for better scrutiny. I think that the Law Society's concern was probably about lack of accountability. Scrutiny can be through the courts, particularly when it comes to human rights issues. As you say, a bill may or may not have a particular purpose. From what you are saying, you do not necessarily view the lack of any individual rights-based approach in the bill to be necessarily a difficulty, if I am understanding correctly. Scrutiny can also be through other means, not just through the courts. For example, Inclusion Scotland and I think that the Poverty Alliance have called for the bill to include additional reporting provisions. That would entail that reports are not just laid before the Scottish Parliament but require parliamentary approval. Second, that laid reports before the Parliament should be scrutinised with the Scottish Parliament prior to official publication. If the panel does not think that it is necessary to have provisions that provide the opportunity for scrutiny through the courts in relation to human rights, which would be the normal manner in which human rights are enforced, do the panel think that the other propositions, which are more parliamentary scrutiny-based intended, would that be a good idea, or would that make up for the lack of the other possibility of scrutiny? That goes to the heart of the purpose of this legislation, whether or not it is to take that rights-based approach around individuals and their circumstances and therefore to take the matter through courts and get that address through that process, or is it about our collective ambition as a nation to articulate an aspiration, which we, as a—well, not we—the Government is prepared to accept responsibility for. I see a parallel with the Climate Change Act and the way in which, in many ways, addressing child poverty is as complex as addressing climate change. Those things are there to support a process and an endeavour across society to address something that, otherwise, if we did not have that legislation in place, we would probably put down the list of priorities. I am not convinced that we are talking here about an individual human rights approach for this legislation. I do not think that that is its purpose. That, sorry, was the first aspect, the first question, but the second question is about the other possibility of scrutiny. That is having parliamentary scrutiny, so is that something that you think would be appropriate given, as you say, we are talking possibly about more societal responsibility and how we approach that? I think that we do need to have a reckoning against which we can judge our progress, and that reckoning needs to happen at the level of the Government, so through Parliament scrutinising the Government's collective effort in this regard would be probably the best way forward. Ben Macpherson, could I just add something to that? My understanding from a reading of the bill is that present local authorities and health boards would be required to report actions retrospectively, so that I think is quite interesting in terms of seeking approval or otherwise, because all we are doing is really saying what we have done in the past year, so that does not tally well with an approval approach. I can understand in terms of delivery plans and the responsibility that will sit with ministers that it is a different proposition, but at present it would not be helpful in the local authority and the health board responsibility side of things. Ben Macpherson? We spoke earlier about the attainment gap, and I thought that it was interesting that Bernardo recently stated that it is natural that so much of the debate around the attainment gap focuses on what happens inside our classrooms. However, what happens before and beyond the school gates can be even more important in ensuring that every child has the chance to learn. For that reason, I would like to bring it back particularly to income, though I appreciate the holistic nature of the issue that Dr Margaret Hanna spoke of. In that context, I was really interested in the answer to question 2 from Robert MacGregor. I thought what you said in the last paragraph about it being important to recognise that many of the factors and levers on this issue are at UK or international level, and that income targets set for Scotland have to be caveated as such. I would be interested to hear your thoughts if you wanted to expand on that at all. I also thought that it was very interesting that you said that it should be explicit that it is not only public agencies that have leverage on income and others should be drawn into the wider partnership discussion around that. Initiatives such as the living wage campaign drawing in business are key to that, too. That is a pertinent point about how income is distributed widely within the economy. I would be interested in the panel's thoughts on that issue. On that last point on business and living wage, it is to emphasise that that really needs to be a partnership response rather than just a health board or a cancer response. In Fife, we are keen not just to work with the usual partners but to expand the set of partners that we have at community planning level. It is one of the challenges that came from our commission on fairness, which is around you do partnership work well, but there is plenty of scope there for expanding and doing more and bringing in other players who hold some of those levers. That is part of a new strategic partnership to tackle inequalities and poverty. In that mode of thinking, will the bill create useful leadership initiative direction focus, the things that Dr Margaret Hannah picked up on at the beginning, in order to help to create those wider relationships and help to build those networks in order to tackle that in a holistic way across our economy and our society? I think that it depends on the way that it is finally written. If it does not make specific references to the contributions of that wider partnership, it is limited in doing that. I think that for it to be more explicit about those additional responsibilities and who can play a part would be helpful. Alison Johnstone, thank you very much. Can I ask the panel if you think that the bill could do more around—well, the bill proposes targets and measures but perhaps does not go into detail about how those targets can best be achieved? Do you think that it would be helped by a bit more direction on that front? My earlier comment about the logic model or outcomes framework would be helpful. If we can agree what the major causes of child poverty are and what effective action could be taken to address them and having targets associated with those, it is a short-term and intermediate and long-term range of outcomes and measures, that would help. From a health perspective, we are always thoughtful around the way in which we use measures of improvement and bring that philosophy of improvement into what we do. There is something about a very focused target and guidance that supports the delivery of improvement measures against the background and of an evidence base of what we know we can achieve. I think that the way in which we look to produce the guidance to support the bill may deal with some of the areas that you highlight. There is a good and improving understanding of what programmes and projects and interventions work in Scotland. We need to do much more to share learning on that and to ensure that those that are less active on this agenda are able to pick up very positively on what works. I think that that should be part of the initial focus. Just to echo what Robert is saying, I have found it very interesting to read the background comments from even just Dundee to see what they have been doing in response to their fairer Dundee commission. There are a lot of commonalities across the two areas. I know that we are just across a river, but we do not necessarily get that chance to know much about the detail about what even your neighbouring local authority is doing. I think that if we could find better ways of learning together around what works for us, it would be a way of accelerating the pace in addressing this challenge for ourselves. Can I ask how confident the panel is that the data that we have is robust, accurate and accurate enough? Are we confident that we are measuring child poverty accurately? Who would like to respond? I think that from a public health perspective, and Dr Hannah's better place than I am to offer a view around that, we are measuring the right things. In terms of our ability to understand the impact of some of the interventions that we collectively can offer, I am not sure where we are as sophisticated as we could and should be around that. Again, from a Tayside perspective, we have embraced the integrated children's service plan with our local authority partners, police and voluntary sector in a way that would help us to define a different suite of measures against the background of our children's service provision, a subset of which would be a focus on poverty. I do not think that we are there yet, but I think that the focus that the act will bring will give people an opportunity to describe the problem in a slightly different way. I think that the more information that is available at a local authority or an individual data zone level the better, especially if you want us to be able to chart progress within local areas. I think that there is a real need to improve the Scottish index of multiple deprivation because, as terrific as it is, it is really helpful. I think that some of the factors within it tend to lag, and the information tends to lag quite a bit behind. I think that we use the SID so much that the better it could be, the more influential it would be. My last point would be that I firmly believe that it is not the data that is stopping us from doing something about child poverty now. I think that everybody knows what the issue is, everybody knows what the factors are, everybody knows that we should be doing something about it, and I think that it would be tragic if we were waiting for a better statistic to come along to tell us what we should be doing. I do not think that it is a lack of data, although it would help us to measure progress. In terms of accuracy, I think that there is a pretty good—they have gone through quite an in-depth methodology. We are just using what was previously done with the UK Government's methodology. I think that issue is not really—I can assure the committee around that. You are also dealing with very big numbers, so the likelihood of variation is real rather than apparent. I have quite welcomed addressing this in addition to SIMD, because we have kind of habituated almost to SIMD and our thinking is only looking at that cluster and an area-based approach, whereas this is a slightly different way of representing our challenge. I think that it is giving us a bit more of an ambition to make a difference in those families' lives. The point that Robert was making earlier about how we could use our local data to make an impact on that is also important. It is not just about the target as said, but what we will be doing locally using an intelligence-led approach to address the challenge. George Adam? George Adam? No, George Adam. Thank you, convener. Good morning. I was just quite interested—luckily, my question follows on from Alison Johnstone, since that worked out for us—but, effectively, what I was wanting to ask was that, as a former councillor, I have heard all this talk about we can share more information, we can do things, because I do not doubt for a minute that there is great work happening in 32 authorities on child poverty throughout Scotland, but the problem that we have always had has been sharing the information and getting out of it. Does this bill give us an opportunity to focus? As you were talking earlier about the fact that you are across the water, but you are listening to each other because you are here today, does this give us an opportunity to create that dialogue and focus on that so that we can really—does that targetting help with that? Thank you very much. Having an annual reporting on this agenda, it will keep it alive. We will have events, we will have a lot of learning. I anticipate that that is the way we would want to go forward. I do not know if anybody else wants to comment. I absolutely agree with the statement that you just made, Dennis Stratto. I think that that is the focus. I think that it is developing common understandings of what good looks like, is an important part of this. It is one of the things that keeps coming up with some of the things that I think Peter Allen said about the good faith of local authorities working with everyone else as well. I am Robin McGregor to join the thinking up together. I feel that we do get bogged down in the SIMD figures, but that gives us another opportunity to look at a broader scope. Is that not the point of the bill? That is exactly what we are trying to do. We are trying to all sit here and say, can we actually do something—we already do the work, but can we find a way to get that together and ensure that we can put it through? Is that not the main point of the bill? It is a simple question. I agree with that. I think that in terms of partners in sharing information and working collaboratively, one of the challenges for us is how we bring, for example, the department for work and pensions to the table on this one. They obviously hold rich data as well. We have begun to establish very good positive relationships with DWP at the most local levels, but we still have difficulty accessing some good, strong information from them that would help us with our planning. It is very short, convener. We had three academics at the Glasgow meeting, and in that lovely God bless them academic way, they fell out with each other very politely, but it was on the fact that they did not have the data. In being academics, they wanted to know exactly where everything is and they could not say anything. All were agreeing here as a fact that this will bring that a step closer for them to be able to go back and do some work and actually study that in future points as well. Just finally, I have to confess that what I struggle with sometimes looking at this bill is not to underplay the need for data and you need data to work on and so on, but it is trying to boil that down into what, then, would you expect any Government to do? Peter, you said something about, can we agree what the major causes are? While I am not sure that there is agreement around that, I think that perhaps there needs to be more work done so that we have a broad consensus, because if we are going to spend the next 20 years just looking at the data and recording poverty, then perhaps we are not going to give ourselves the boost that is needed. If you could very briefly just give me one or two measures that you think would make the biggest difference. If there was a duty on the Government in the bill to take specific measures as part of their requirements, what would they be? I am not going to be terribly helpful, but I think that the thing that we need to focus most on is stigma and how we change perceptions and how people are treated. I do not know how you turn that into an indicator, but that is an enormous issue in the lives of people who are poor. I agree that the poverty of opportunity that is associated with that is critical to providing people with different life chances. Mr Tomkins said that it was interesting and very relevant here around educational attainment. I think that a continued push on that would take us some way towards addressing gel poverty in the longer term. I am looking at the graph in annex A and the way in which it is levelled off. Is it getting worse again, our relative poverty? We know that there have been a lot of changes in welfare and tax credit reforms, etc. The extent to which those can be reversed is a political decision. We want to make the living wage region Scotland a living wage country, which I think is aspiring to, but those are things that could be suggested. Child benefit seems to be a fairly obvious measure, but if you could add to the child benefit level, that would already be stated in one of the responses to your consultation, that £5 a week would lift 30,000 children out of poverty a year. There are some simple things that could be done around fiscal measures, benefit measures, but the other thing is not just around that poverty of aspiration about a life worth living in the 21st century. What are our children going to be living in? Can we create the environment whereby children and young people are encouraged to aspire to something better in their lives regardless of their background? We have a good long tradition of that in Scotland. Many of us have come from working-class backgrounds ourselves, but through education and encouragement we are where we are today. I think that that message could still be there for our young people in the future. Thank you very much. That is an excellent note to end on. I thank you for your evidence and also just to acknowledge as you asked us to in the submission about the wonderful work that is done by local authorities in relation to not just poverty, but I note that you use the word fairness, which I think is quite important to you. Thank you very much for your contribution. I am suspended in the meeting very briefly so that we can allow the panel to read and the new panel to join us. I warmly welcome Bill Scott, director of policy, Inclusion Scotland, who has been with us many times before, and Emma Trottier, policy manager of Engender, who we have also had in front of the committee before. Thank you very much for appearing before the committee. As usual, we are under the usual time pressure. We must finish by 11, but that does give us 40 minutes or so. I would like to first of all call with Maguire. Thank you, convener. Good morning. My question is actually for Emma this morning, first of all, and specifically around women and poverty. I just wonder if you could share with the committee. You mentioned a gendered approach on the face of the bill being helpful. Just what is a gendered approach? I think what was important when we were looking at this bill at the office was to make sure that what was being considered had a gendered dimension of poverty. So what that means is that we don't think that you can separate children's well-being from that of their mothers. So we know that in Scotland right now one in four children are living in poverty. We know that with cuts to social security and the wider austerity agenda are going to have significant ramifications on families and children, but especially women. 86% of the cuts to social security are coming from women's incomes, and that's a significant sum. We also know that over the next decade there'll be the biggest rise in inequality in the United Kingdom, and what we wanted to make sure of is that when we talk about children that we're remembering, the people that care for them, the women that are in that household as their mothers, and how difficult their futures are looking right now. In Scotland, nine out of 10 lone parents are women, and 95% of those lone mothers live and support their children through social security programmes. So I think when we talk about the gendered approach to the bill, it's really just saying we have to remember the gender dimension of poverty. Thank you, that was helpful. Can I just ask a follow-up on that very question for me there? In terms of practical consideration of the bill in front of us, what kind of amendments to the bill would you like to see in order for you to be confident that the gendered approach to poverty has been recognised in this bill, or does this bill do it already? I think one of the comments that we made in our submission was that much of the changes are going to hinge on what's in the delivery plans. So when we talk about what actions are going to be taken, we have to make sure that those actions consider gender. So, for example, we know that, and research has been done in evidence shows that if we want to talk about significant change, alleviating poverty and helping women involves looking at childcare reforms, significant and meaningful childcare reforms. So when we talk about delivery plans, are the policy areas that are going to be considered looking at childcare? Are they going to be looking at education and gender stereotyping that happens with boys and girls? Will it be looking at employment strategies that are gendered, so closing that gender pay gap that exists here? On the face of the bill, there should be a statutory requirement that the delivery plans do that. Do they consider gender that they consider all of those policy areas? Either of the above, the options are open. I'm genuinely interested in the extent to which you think this bill already satisfies the very stringent and perfectly reasonable criteria that you've set for it. If it doesn't meet those requirements, what amendments would you like to see this committee urge upon the Government in order to improve the bill? If you want to take it back to the office. I think that it should include a requirement to address known societal inequalities of wealth between various equality groups, specifically women. Disabled women are much more likely to be living in poverty than disabled men, and that's again due to caring responsibilities. It's because of family break-ups, so again there are many more disabled women who are lone parents. A gendered approach would assist disabled women, but an approach that addresses societal inequalities of race, gender, age and disability would be one where we would see everybody being pulled up. As we said in our submission, one of the problems is that you can improve things generally but leave certain groups behind. In fact, inequalities for those groups actually grow because everybody else is doing better. We would like to see something on the face of the bill about addressing inequalities, the ones that are mainly identified through the equality legislation. Just before we close on that, it makes sense. We've heard from your organisations many times, and I think that those are the underlying issues that the Government needs to address in addressing poverty. As I said to the previous panel, what I sometimes struggle with and what I would worry about is that we'll all be happy with that. If we can get that on the face of the bill, then it's a really good statement of where we want to go. I think that it's worth giving consideration to what specific measures would make a difference to tackling. As you said, nine out of 10 are women, but those are the facts. Does that not imply that there needs to be some addressing of lone parents and the needs of lone parents specifically to take them out of poverty? It goes back to looking at it perhaps more broadly. Going back to social security reforms and ensuring that we are maximising people's incomes because we know that lone parents are 95 per cent living on the assistance of social security. Looking at childcare and how we support them through flexible, high-quality, affordable childcare employment strategies, how do we support through childcare but other measures getting lone parents into employment where we can? I'm not sure that it's looking at lone parents exclusively or it's looking at bigger policy areas and how we fit everybody into those policy areas. Since you mentioned that income maximisation is so important, my question on that is whether it would make sense to place a duty on income maximisation in this bill rather than the social security bill. You can come back to us on that. What I'm really interested in is how to return the targets into what might be specific measures, but... I think that that should be in the delivery plan. The delivery plan should say how you're going to achieve it. The problem with putting it on the face of the bill would be that it concentrates minds on those things that are in the bill that become the legislation. That then becomes everything that local authorities, the NHS, the Scottish Government etc will address. The problem is that if it's not on the face of the bill, those other groups who aren't mentioned may find that there's no activity locally or nationally to address the poverty that they experience. You've got the problem with me, how do we make sure that everybody... I think that the delivery plan would be a better way as long as there is proper parliamentary scrutiny of the delivery plan and of its implementation. Alison Johnstone, thank you very much. I know that in gender previously there was a publication of yours that I read that suggested that, since 2010, of £26 billion worth of welfare cuts, £22 billion had impacted on women. I just find it staggeringly discriminatory. I don't know what gender impact assessment has been carried out, but it would seem none. It clearly doesn't matter. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that the projected increase in absolute child poverty is entirely explained by tax and benefit changes, such as the ones that we've already seen. To ask you a couple of questions, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has called for the use of an after essential cost focus rather than just after housing costs. Last night, in here, I sponsored an event that was about learning from abroad and one of the issues that we were looking at was childcare. Two academics were reporting back on a study, £190 for full-time childcare in Norway compared to £920 for full-time childcare in Scotland. One contributor spoke of childcare costs of over £1,400 a month for two children. If we are not including costs that are higher than your average mortgage or rent, we are missing. We really are missing something while we are looking at those costs. Can you touch on that need to include more than just after housing costs? Should there be provision in the bill requiring ministers to conduct annual checks to see how effectively the social security system is contributing to reaching our child poverty targets? We are very aware of the impact on women. Disabled women, especially those who are carers, have been doubly impacted because a lot of the cuts are also falling on disabled people. For example, 100,000 disabled children have seen the amount that families awarded in disabled child tax credits cut by 50 per cent from £54 a week to £27 a week with introduction to universal credit. That does not just impact on that child or that mother. It impacts on everyone in the family when there are less resources available in that family. That is why disabled children and the children of disabled parents are more likely to be living in poverty in many ways. The issue here is that some poverty seems to be invisible and not addressed. To give you an example, the fact is that the higher rate of the disabled child addition has been raised in the current budget, but the lower rate—the ones that have already experienced that cut—has been frozen. There has been no publicity about that whatsoever. It was not announced in advance of the budget. There has been no consultation with disabled people's organisations, yet the impact on those families with disabled children is going to be quite profound, because their benefit is not going to rise in line with living costs. It is going to be frozen. I think that, including social security, it is not all Scottish parliaments, Scottish Government's responsibility, but part of it is. The parts that we have responsibility for should certainly be a focus within that on addressing poverty. What else are the benefits for? If I could just jump in on the first question of after-housing costs, I think what you're getting at with some of the submissions mentioning the fact that we should be looking at maybe essential costs that families have, and I would agree, just given the cost of childcare in Scotland and how difficult that is for families to afford to put their children in childcare and the downstream impacts that that has on women. I think also, though, when I was reading through the submissions, I was looking at how we look at targets and how we look at household income for targets. One thing that we should consider when we're thinking about women is just that access to resources is a fundamental element of gender inequality. When we're looking at household incomes, you're really just looking at the income of that house and you're missing the dynamics that are happening inside the home. Access to resources isn't equal. There's power and balances throughout Scotland, throughout households in Scotland. How do we account for those? It's a tough question, but it's one that we need to be asking. Unfortunately, the introduction of universal credit, because it rolls up so many benefits into one, increases the likelihood that only one person in the household is in control with that income. That is usually the male claimant, rather than the person, the woman, with care and responsibilities in that house, which is why we've been very supportive of splitting the payment within households to ensure that at least some of the money reaches to the person who is most likely to use it for care of the child. Just as you said, the power balance is within households. I think that that's a really important point. Obviously, the bill focuses on income, but having a look at what that actually means within our health is quite an important point. How do you think that the bill could address that point? Before I came here, I was looking at other studies that have been done in the UK that have looked at poverty in women. There was a UK study done by the Joseph Roundtree Foundation and Oxford University. What they came out saying was that it was really hard to look and understand women's poverty because of the way that we collect data, which is done by households. One of their recommendations was to really think about how Governments are collecting data. If we want to start making some big changes within household incomes, we have to think about the women and the men that are in those houses. What they had suggested was that Government should capture and interrogate data that's disaggregated by gender, disaggregated by race at the level of individuals. That would complement the household incomes that are being examined as targets for poverty reduction. Anyone else? Ben Macpherson? Your written submissions, you both commented on interim targets. I just wondered if you wanted to detail your thoughts on them here today and why you think they're important. We think that they're important because they concentrate minds. If a goal is way off in the future and it may be two or three Governments from now that are held to account for the attainment to that goal, then, unfortunately, in the meantime, not a lot might happen. Whereas, if you have delivery plans that you report on regularly and interim targets that you set yourself to measure whether you are making progress towards your ultimate goal, you are much more likely to concentrate the minds of planners, officials, Governments, politicians at a local and national level on what we are doing, how we are going about it and whether we are making progress that is being demanded of us. We think that interim targets are a good idea. Because they set milestones that you can measure progress towards. Thank you, convener. I have a question for Bill Scott. I think that both of our panel members possibly heard my question to the last panel. I will not repeat it, but it is about the question of accountability. I take on board the point that you have made that if you start listing specific groups in an act of Parliament or a bill, then there are other groups that might not be covered, so your point is better to cover the detail of that nature in the delivery plan or the guidance or policy notes, whatever form that takes. The question still arises, how does one then hold the Government to account in terms of the targets in the bill? I think that, as I indicated to the last panel, the comment was both from your own organisation and one other, at least, that there should be reports not just laid before the Scottish Parliament but should require Parliamentary approval and such reports should require to be scrutinised by the Parliament, thus bringing in, as I understand it from one of the previous panel members, the national element of scrutiny of what is actually being done. Will you be able to amplify that and indicate again how the bill could be amended, altered, to take that on board? I think that it could be amended quite easily to require approval of the delivery plans of your reports on progress, et cetera, especially on reports about interim targets, for example. With that, you, at least, again, have scrutinised at a parliamentary level, but also because the media covers what Parliament does, you are more likely to get scrutinised at a public level of what is happening and people being held to account by the electorate for whether targets have been achieved or not. I think that, without that, it lacks teeth a little. I was very interested in what the Law Society was talking about about individual rights. We think that those rights exist at the moment under current legislation, right to an adequate income, et cetera, is guaranteed by human rights and should be justiciable. We are not sure, but I think that we would probably be of the same mind as the last panel that this is really setting a target for society, Scottish society, to achieve over the longer term. The individual rights under it was not something that we were thinking of, although human rights are always part of our approach. However, it is an interesting thought that you would have individual rights, if possible. I wonder whether I could follow that up, perhaps, because, of course, the scrutiny—you can have scrutiny at different levels—you can have scrutiny through the courts, and you will probably be aware, as I am, as a lawyer, that, if you do not have something in an act of Parliament, it is more difficult to enforce before the courts or for individuals to make anything out of it, if I can put it in colloquial terms. I am just wondering, on that basis, if you think that simply having the scrutiny before the Parliament itself will be sufficient if that is added in? I am not sure that it is this bill that would be what we would drape that on. If the Scottish Government does adopt the social and economic duties that it has said it will do under international law, then it may provide the correct vehicle for individuals to assert their rights to inadequate income. If they are going to adopt that, I would imagine that they are going to do so through legislation. Maybe some of the members of the governing party can tell me. Sorry, I just wondered if Emma had any further comment on that, because you may do. No, I think that we support, and gender supports, what Inclusion Scotland has submitted in its response. Back to Ben Macpherson. Thanks, convener. It is just a very quick point for Emma Trotter and gender. You made reference to childcare through some of your previous answers, and I just wondered if you could comment on the provision of free childcare and being advantageous for reducing child poverty. Obviously, there is a commitment from the Scottish Government to significantly increase free childcare, and there are also consultations taking place around flexibility and provision of that. I wondered if you could comment on your thoughts on what impact that might have on child poverty. I think that it would have a significant impact on child poverty. We know that pathways into poverty for men and women are different, and one of the risks for that change over a woman's life, but there are certain moments that women face where they have increased risk of falling into poverty, and one of those is motherhood. I would point the committee to some interesting testimony that have been going on at the, I think it's the economy jobs and fair work right now that's looking at the gender pay gap, and Anna Richie-Allan and Maritza Peird from Close the Gap and Gender spoke about what that risk looks like for women, but when we talk about childcare and investment in childcare, I think that will play a huge role in both helping women and alleviating poverty. I think there's a bigger conversation to be had about what we mean when we say flexible, affordable and high-quality childcare, but I think that might be a different committee meeting. But yes, those are really crucial elements that we need to talk about and that need to be considered in delivery plans. Thank you. It's a holistic issue, so it's good to get that. Last question, Adam Tomkins. Thank you very much. Building directly on what Ben MacPherson was just talking about in the context of what you just said there, Emma, about delivery plans and Bill, you've talked about this too, but it seems to me, the more I look at this Bill, the more critical to its success are going to be these delivery plans. At the moment, again, looking at the Bill, all the Bill says about the delivery plans is that they should be produced at five-yearly intervals, and there is no statutory requirement anywhere, so far as I can see in the Bill unless I've misread it, as to what should be or what must be in those delivery plans. So two questions. One about the frequency of the Bill, sorry, the frequency of the plans, and second about the sorts of things that you would like to see added to the Bill that impose requirements, impose obligations on the people writing those delivery plans as to what they have to include. It's been suggested by a number of our witnesses in terms of the oral evidence that we've received, including children in Scotland and citizens advice Scotland, that delivery plans should be produced at three-yearly intervals rather than five-yearly intervals, as proposed on the Bill. I'd like to ask you first whether you think that's right, and second, do I take it from the evidence that we've had from you this morning, which I think has been very powerful and very effective, if I may say so, that you would like to see a statutory requirement, for example, that the delivery plan must include detail as to the steps that are taken to reduce childcare costs, for example? I think that we would agree with the three years rather than five, because that would make it within the lifetime of a Government, usually. That would be one step forward. We also would like to see statutory duties placed on local authorities and other community planning organisations about the eradication of child poverty at a local level, and specifically to include child poverty within local outcome improvement plans and children's services plans. They're not just reporting on what they're doing, but they're actually developing plans to address the issue. I think that the most important thing that we would argue in terms of delivery plans is to speak to the people who are living in poverty. They know what that is and they know often how to get out of it, if you would only listen to them. Therefore, I need to speak to lone parents, disabled people, parents to disabled children, black and minority ethnic groups, because they're all more likely to be living in poverty and they know the stigma and discrimination that they face, and they know some of the things that need to be done to address that. In bringing together the delivery plan, whether at a national level or a local level, there should be a requirement to speak to those groups and that their ideas are incorporated into the plan wherever possible. Otherwise, you'll have high-level stuff going on that doesn't connect to the people that are most likely to face it. On the attainment issue, I don't think that it necessarily should be on the face of the bill, but I agree strongly that it is a huge issue. Disabled children are twice as likely to leave school with no qualifications as non-disabled children, regardless of the type of impairment they have. There are disabled children with sensory impairments, physical impairments and no intellectual impairment whatsoever, leaving school with no qualifications. That makes their chances in the current job market nil. Unless we change that, we won't change their futures. When they become parents, they'll be parents living in poverty and their children will be living in poverty, so we have to change that cycle. Therefore, addressing the attainment gap is certainly possible to address it without addressing the needs of disabled children, but it makes it much more difficult. Concentrating minds, if we're going to have an attainment challenge, it has to take into account the needs of those that have been most left behind. I have to say that I took part in the workshop with EIS representatives no more than a month ago. I was in one workshop, but there were six workshops going on. Five of them came back and said that the key issue that was facing them as teachers and as union reps was the lack of additional learning support in the classroom and the cuts that had been made to the support that disabled children received in the classroom, because the classrooms were becoming more disruptive and it was harder to deal with the non-disabled children at Sarah if they devoted the time to making sure that disabled children were being kept up to speed at Sarah. Your cuts have consequences. We definitely have to see the attainment gap as one of the key issues that we need to be addressed over the longer term. Thank you very much. It's a good note to end on. I thank you both, Inclusion Scotland and Engender, for your on-going support for the committee and your evidence.