 Felly, mae ddifrif i'r Ffawr ddechrau'r Sfodd Fawr Cymru i gynhyrchu'r Cymru i gyrdol gyda'r oedd yn bwysigol, a'r cyfnodau i'r ffawr i'r ddweud o'r ffordd, a'r ddifrif i'r ffawr i'r ffordd ar gyfer y cyfnodau. Rhyw gydag wedi ddifrif i'r Ffawr, Adam Tomkins i ddifrif i'r ffawr. 1. Agened item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Our members can tend to take item 5, the work programme in private. 2. Agened item 3 is on the council tax reduction Scotland amendment regulations 2018. 2. Agened item 2 is a consideration of the following negative instrument, the council tax reduction Scotland amendment regulations 2018, SSI 2018, stroke 6, 9. I would like to welcome to committee this morning Robin Haines, head of council tax at the Scottish Government. If I could open today by inviting Mr Haines just to lay out the purpose of those regulations. Thank you convener, good morning and thank you for inviting me to be here today. The larger part of these regulations provide the annual rating of the various allowances and premiums within the council tax reduction scheme. The Scottish Government has introduced such legislation each year in order to maintain the original policy intention of the council tax reduction scheme or CTR scheme if you forget my shorthand, which was to ensure that nobody would be worse off as a consequence of the abolition of council tax benefit in 2013. Historically, the entitlement criteria for housing benefit and council tax benefit were pretty much identical. By broadly continuing to track the UK Government's changes to the entitlement criteria for housing benefit, even though the legislative underpinnings of the two policies are profoundly different, it helps to ensure that the CTR scheme continues to fulfil that original policy intention. In saying that, the Scottish Government does recognise that there are now a few ways in which things do now diverge, but in the main, the continuing alignment of the two policies also has the additional advantage of keeping things a bit easier for those who have to navigate the council tax reduction and housing benefit policies, but I mean people who have to apply for either or both and those who administer them. Indeed, there is, in fact, one such divergence within the regulations in front of the committee this morning. Regulation 7, page 3, will allow an application by someone of working age for a council tax reduction to be backdated with good cause by up to six months, whereas the equivalent provision for housing benefit remains at one month. The Scottish Government is introducing this change to address circumstances that seem to be arising as a consequence of the Department for Work and Pensions' roll-out of universal credit. In essence, there seems to be difficulties arising when ensuring those who make a claim for universal credit are made aware that they need to make a separate claim for council tax reduction and how that individual might set about making that application. As a consequence, in some areas, and most especially where universal credit full service is being rolled out, there is some evidence that the number of council tax reduction applications is lower than might be expected. In other words, there is evidence of people who have little or no means of paying their council tax not applying for the reduction that they would otherwise be entitled to, and consequently their council tax accounts fall into arrears. That is in nobody's best interests, and Regulation 7 is intended to help such individuals and councils prevent this situation arising. Committee will also note that Regulation 3 introduces a new provision for applicants in receipt of universal credit. That allows local authorities to, in effect, estimate a person's council tax reduction over a period of time if that person's income is subject to frequent change. That is intended to allow a local authority just to be pragmatic when a person earns different amounts each week, each month. There is, in fact, a very similar provision in the principal scheme regulations for other categories of applicants. At present, as the law stands, any change to earnings and the universal credit award requires a council tax reduction and consequent residual council tax liability to be recalculated. A universal credit linked to HMRC's real-time information system means that local authorities now know far more of changes to such circumstances than they ever did before. That can result in an individual's council tax bill being re-issued and recalculated every month, and sometimes corrections are put into the system more than every month. The result is simply unclear to that person how much they are expected to pay. If I was in that situation, I would not be content to allow a direct debit for my council tax if I had no idea how much it would be each month more acutely so if my monthly finances were a bit more precarious. From the local authority perspective, this means that they have a council tax account that falls into arrears because the person does not know how much they owe, but because the account is subject to incessant rebelling, the local authority cannot initiate any recovery proceedings. However, if it were possible for a representative figure to be identified for that person's earnings, and therefore that allows a universal credit award to be estimated, and thus, most importantly, their net council tax liability to be calculated over a period of time, then both the applicant and the local authority could avoid the uncertainties from relentless re-billing and recalculation that seems to be happening at present. I think that that is all that I have to say, but I will be very pleased to try to answer any questions as best I can. Do members have any questions, Mr Griffin? Thank you, Gwmira. Morning, Mr Haynes. I have a couple of questions about backdating. From what I understand, backdating for working-age applicants goes back to six months, and they have to provide continuous good cause to show why that should be backdated, but for older people they can only apply for backdating of one month, but they do not have to show continuous good cause. Can I ask why there is the discrepancy between working-age and older people, and whether there was any consideration to equalise that to make things simpler for all applicants? Sure. First of all—if you forgive me, can I just correct one thing you said? For applicants for council tax reduction who have reached pension credit age, backdating is three months, not one month. There is no requirement for good cause to be demonstrated there, whereas for persons of working age, when the scheme was originally created in 2013, it was six months with good cause and pension age was three months without good cause, and that was a straight lift from the council tax benefit regulations entitlement criteria that I referred to earlier. For working-age applicants it was in 2016 in the change that was intended to reflect the housing benefit changes, and amending regulations moved it from six months to one month for people of working age. Pension age was unaffected, and as I described in my opening remarks, that is proving to be a bit of a problem. In effect, we have left pension age backdating provisions unchanged from the original 2013 scheme. For persons of working age, effectively, we are talking about a measure to fix a known problem, and that is the Scottish Government acting to fix a known problem. We have had no evidence that the differing criteria for persons of pension credit age causes a problem at all, but, by no evidence, we engage with the welfare advice and rights groups. We also engage with practitioners at Cozzler and both the IRRV. Indeed, a lot of circumstances come to light from ministerial correspondence when people come to your constituency surgeries, and we have had no evidence that the provisions for individuals of the three months backdating provisions for individuals of pension credit age is a problem, whereas we have brought to our notice that, for people of working age, there was a problem emerging. I would emphasise that it is not the same. There is good cause provision in the working age provision, and there is quite a lot of case law that determines what is and isn't good cause. Big extreme couldn't be bothered isn't good cause, but having material difficulties navigating the system might be, whereas for individuals of pension age, if they were entitled three months ago, it is automatic that their CTR claim application author is backdated. How are the changes to the rules that are then backdating for working age applicants being communicated to? Are people being made aware of that? The easy bits are the practitioner community. We have good communications both through COSLA and directly with local authorities and through their professional organisation, the IRRV, that has a very active and well-read forum. That is the easy bit. Communicating it to individuals, I suppose, takes us straight into the terrain that I described, where somebody has made a universal credit application and things seem to be falling through the cracks. Job centres, for example, in universal credit journal, that people just don't know that they have to make a separate council tax reduction application to a local authority. At present, that is a problem, and we are trying to identify the means of addressing that. Some local authorities have different approaches, and there seems to be different approaches within different job centres, even. However, I suppose that you could say that moving it to six months just gives a safety net for where that has fallen in the cracks. Good morning. First, I think that the regulations are extremely welcome. You can see that applied to make a deal of difference. I wanted to ask you about the complicated aspect, which is regulation 3, estimating the income of universal credit claimants. New regulations allow a local authority to make its own estimate of an applicant's household income if it is subject to frequent change during a period of entitlement. The first question is obvious. Is there guidance to be issued about how local authorities have to interpret what is meant by frequency? No. In fact, there is no guidance to local authorities about how they should or shouldn't apply a council tax reduction. In saying that, it sounds quite blunt, but it is very much a contrast to council tax benefit, which was based on local authorities managing DWP's money. It is the same case for housing benefit, and that persists that DWP gives local authorities any amount of guidance and instruction, and there is a real sense of control about what local authorities do. Council tax reduction is intentionally very different. The law is the law, but how local authorities interpret that law is a matter for them. Obviously, there is the ultimate legal test around that. However, to give some comfort, we expect and we know that local authorities have some experience in applying the equivalent provision, which I think is regulation 29.3, for other applicants. The sort of cohort that we are talking about is usually people who are on tax credits. The regulation that allows a local authority to estimate a council tax reduction by averaging income over a period of time is very much a measure to give local authorities scope to fix a known problem. It is about allowing local authorities to administer such cases more sensibly than the current law requires them to do, as I explained at the beginning. Presently, whenever there is a change of circumstance communicated to that local authority, it has to crank the handle and rebuild, and it is to give local authorities just a means of managing the council tax reduction scheme in a pragmatic way. That could result in local authorities applying it slightly differently then. Absolutely. The law is the law, and it is open to interpretation. It may well be that local authorities apply other elements of the CTR scheme slightly differently. There are 32 local authorities, and there are four IT platforms that local authorities can choose to help them to operate the council tax reduction scheme. I surmise that there are already granular differences, but the prevailing policy is one that should apply across Scotland. It is the interpretation of the law that may indeed differ, but it is about local authorities using that law to manage their own tax base and ensure that no one is disadvantaged within their communities. You said that local authorities already apply regulation 29.3, which is the similar principle. Yes, and that has been in from 2013. You would expect most local authorities to follow that, though they do not have to. I think that you put it well there. It is to give scope for a pragmatic approach, as I tried to explain. It is in no one's interest if no one knows how much council tax they do. However, if a local authority is able to apply the law and reach some accommodation with the applicant that seems sensible to both parties, then everyone wins. At present, a letter of the law requires that council tax account to be recalculated for every single change in earnings. I am interested in what information gathering will take place. Will there be additional burdens on applicants or on local authority staff in order to deal with the question of frequency of income? The council tax reduction principle regulations are absolutely not prescriptive about the evidence and information that a local authority can say that it requires. However, paradoxically, one of the reasons that the problem seems to have manifested itself is that the information flows from the universal credit system to local authorities. There is almost too much of it, if you like. It is on that same section in terms of estimating income, and I totally get that it is pragmatic and fixes something. I am just thinking about constituents who might need that. What happens if the estimate is wrong and they receive too much? You mentioned tax credits, and there were quite a lot of examples of people being put in quite difficult financial situations having to repay back money. I would be interested to hear your comments on that. The best response that I can give is that local authorities at present seem to be managing the present council tax reduction scheme in a pragmatic way. I would be just wrong if I said that everything is rosy in the garden and I am sure that there are plenty of cases that all of you will find in your constituency where things have not gone quite right. However, if I were to take one performance metric, which would be the number of appeals that the council tax reduction review panel sees, their caseload is something like one-fifth of what it had been for council tax benefit before. That would suggest to me that, although the circumstances that you described would be undesirable, I am sure that there are plenty of cases where things are not going quite right. The generality is that local authorities seem to be able to take a pragmatic approach. I suppose that, though, if what we are doing with that is increasing the number of people that are getting it and that some people that we spoke about with their own universal credit are falling through the cracks, if the numbers are going to increase, there is more chance of that happening. I suppose—or maybe that is unfair, there is not more chance of that happening, but we are increasing the numbers—will it be down to individual local authorities to decide how they deal with recouping those overpayments, or is there anything in the legislation? Yes, it is up to local authorities. We are not prescriptive about that. However, as I said, I would hope that pragmatism can prevail. The point of those measures is to give scope for that pragmatism and allow sensible conversations to happen, as they must already happen for legacy benefit cases. I would have to say that I am not aware of that being a widespread problem. I am sure that there are instances of it, but there is no evidence to suggest that it is a widespread problem for legacy benefit cases. Thank you. Thank you, Mr Gareth. I wanted to have a brief supplementary. Thanks, convener. It is still in the area of estimating incoming frequent change. One of those situations is whether it is likely to be frequent changes for someone who is self-employed. I just wonder if you are able to clarify whether, with the new regulations that local authorities will be able to disregard what I feel is an unfair minimum income floor for self-employed people, where it is assumed that they earn a certain level of income and their income may well fall below that. Will local authorities be able to disregard that rule and look at their actual earnings when it comes to estimating income? That is a good question. I suppose that, in part, the circumstances that you describe have not been a problem that we have been made aware of yet. It is a reflection on the roll-out of universal credit in Scotland to date, which has largely been about new applications with fairly simple, not complex circumstances such as self-employment with varying income. The council tax reduction scheme calculations of entitlement are very much benefited from the fact that the caseload today has been those less complicated cases. What you have described around the interactions of universal credit and self-employment nevertheless looks like it could well be a complex problem. The regulations at present do not seek to address that, but I and colleagues and people who are expert are already giving some thought as to how we might be able to deal with those sorts of circumstances. Throughout the process of the social security bill, we have been focusing on a shared desire to ensure that people access the entitlements to which they are entitled. There is a welcome focus on making sure that we increase the uptake and running benefit uptake campaigns to make sure that that is the case. I suppose that making sure that people have their council tax reduced where that is appropriate is an important part of that as well. It would seem remiss not to focus on that at the same time. We have been informed by SPICE that uptake statistics are not collected for the reduction scheme. I would be interested in your views on whether there is enough information there about why that might not be the case and why the scheme cost £20 million less than was allocated in 2016-17. Taking the first part of that question first on scheme uptake, there is no data on the proportion of people who might be entitled who are or aren't in receipt of a council tax reduction. I could share some of our pain that we know an awful lot about the CTR caseload, but we do not know a huge amount about the people who are not within the CTR scheme. We can do some modelling based on various surveys that that will always have limitations. It comes to one of promotion. For example, I think that in January 2017, when there were some changes to council tax, we agreed with COSLA a text that would be inserted in that councils would insert into every council tax bill promoting the council tax reduction scheme. There was also work in autumn last year that was marshaled under the banner of you'd earned it, which had some TV campaign behind it, which was about promoting benefits take-up, and the CTR scheme was part of that. That pointed towards a financial health check that citizens of Visepura were running. That was last autumn. We are giving some thought as to what we might do and how we might build upon that. You mentioned that the total income for gone from the council tax reduction scheme is at present less than the amount that is in local authorities general revenue grant in recognition of their operation of the scheme. That is a reflection of the fact that because council tax reduction is not a benefit, there is no one-on-one match between individual reduction and money that gets added to the general revenue grant. The point is that local authorities bear the revenue risk. When the scheme was first established in April 2013, for that year, the revenue risk went the other way. Local authorities were not fully compensated. In subsequent years, the caseload has gone down, and the CTR scheme very much tracks the wider labour force. Claimant counter-employment is going down, and the CTR caseload has gone down. Therefore, the revenue risk at present is in local authorities favour, which is the £20 million that you referred to. Thank you, convener. Thank you, convener, and good morning. Just go back to the estimate of the applicant's income. Has any research been done across the 32 local authorities to see if there are differences, or has any evidence been given to Scottish Government by the third sector, to show that there are any major discrepancies between certain local authorities? There is no formal piece of research—I cannot point to any particular document that exists in our filing system. However, there is a lot of informal intelligence gathering, if you like, in that my colleagues and I work closely with the practitioner community within local authorities, and there is a more formal engagement with COSLA, who also introduces more senior practitioners to those forums. We find that each person speaks to recognises that there is some degree of interpretation required, and they have to be instructed by the case law that exists around that. I am also aware that the IRV can sell everyone a very good course on how to approach those circumstances. It is not being brought to our attention that there are extremes. Surely there will be variation across the 32, and indeed individuals within the 32, as they manage individual cases. However, nothing has been brought to our attention to suggest that there are disparities that would be worrying. With regard to new income disregards, I was wondering whether the carers allowance supplement will be taken into account as income for working-age CTR applicants. That does not feature amending regulations, if you like, for two reasons. Reason number one is that ministers have yet to reach review, and it is our job as civil servants to produce a suitable analysis to make sure that any decision that is made is not informed on. I suppose that the second one was that if ministers had made that choice, the carers allowance supplement does not exist in law yet. Therefore, making reference to something in regulations now, to something that does not exist yet, is not quite possible. Any further questions? I mean, just go back to that question, because within my next year carers allowance supplement may welcome it. What happens in that period between any new regulations happening, or will new regulations have to be brought forward once the carers allowance supplement is in and ministers have come to a view on that? If ministers take the view that they would wish the carers allowance supplement and, indeed, any other future devolved benefit to be treated in a particular way, then we would have to come forward with further amending regulations. Will you be included? Council tax reduction for persons of working age treats everything as income unless it is specifically disregarded. To disregard the carers allowance supplement, we would have to introduce regulations that specifically excluded it from the calculation of income. No further questions? No, I have got no further questions. Thank you. Can I ask members if they are content to note the instrument, or if they wish to make recommendations and report on the instrument? I thank Mr Haynes for his attendance at committee this morning, and I will suspend briefly while we change. We now move to agenda item 4, which will be an evidence session on benefit automation. Submissions from Nihid Hanif and Richard Gass were circulated separately on Monday. I would like to welcome Richard Gass, Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, and Chair of Rights Advice Scotland, to Nihid Hanif from West Lothian Council and to John Campbell from North Lanarkshire Council. Very warm welcome to you this morning. I would like to give you the opportunity to briefly outline some of the work that you are doing in your councils in the area of benefit automation. I will miss a gas. Good morning, and thank you for inviting me along today. In Glasgow, there is limited automation of benefits. It is restricted primarily to school clothing grants and to free school meals. Those two entitlements are managed by a single application form. What has been introduced is that, in subsequent years, a perspiry awarded on a prior application without the need to fill in a new form. Indeed, for the school clothing grant, there were 22,000 recipients of the school clothing grant who had their entitlement continued. However, a number of folk who were entitled to school clothing grants were not receiving the grant. By looking at the housing benefit and council tax records, the council was able to identify a further 5,400 folk who ought to have a school clothing grant. An automated process was put into place whereby a letter explaining what was happening and a voucher to pay them by pay point was issued. That was recently well received. 87 per cent of the recipients cashed their vouchers. When we add those 5,400, 87 per cent of them into the overall 22,000, Glasgow now is of the view that 97 per cent take up for school clothing grants. There is an intention in the future to expand to look at free school meals but you cannot send somebody a free school meal. You can only give them an entitlement to the school meal and then the onus is on the parent and child to take that up. We have in Glasgow cashless payments and they are cashless at the till, not necessarily elsewhere. Those who would have to pay for their school meals would bring the money into the school and have it loaded onto their cashless cart. For free school meals, the money could put onto their cashless cart behind the scenes but it would still be visible in the classroom as to who was physically handing over cash and who was not. There is perhaps a better scheme, parent pay, and that has been piloted in Glasgow. I know that other local authorities are currently using it. Parent pay is a product where all school costs can be paid online, so that could be school trips, after-hours activities and school meals. That would avoid the need for children to bring cash into the classroom and that might then remove the visible difference between those who are getting school meals and those who do not. The pilot in Glasgow has over four schools, one secondary, two primaries and one nursery, and in one of the primaries there is already a 92 per cent take-up where parents are currently loading the card online. That is something for the future. Another area in which we have semi-automation is in relation to bedroom tax, if you will allow to call that. In Glasgow, through DHP, as do other councils, we do not require folk to make an annual re-application where there is an initial application and that will be continued year after year for as long as the funding is available. In relation to the application, we take a view that the claimant or the registered social landlord can make the application to try to avoid people missing out. Perhaps the biggest barrier to greater automation is data sharing. We have information that we are allowed to use for specific purposes, but to use it for purposes beyond that needs to be compliant with data sharing of protocols and the forthcoming GDPR. From some of the councils that are uphold prior to coming here today, there is a degree of concern that with the roll-out of universal credit, with housing benefit transferring over to universal credit, some of the data that they would otherwise hold will be lost and will be held within DWP systems, albeit some information will still be held within council tax. There will be an element that is lost. We need to be mindful that whatever changes come about, adequate data sharing protocols and legal frameworks are put in place to enable automation to continue or expand. Thank you very much. My tariff can invite you to tell us about West Lothian. Thanks again for inviting me along this morning. Really just to reiterate what Richard has been saying as well in West Lothian, we are also working with education in terms of the clothing grants to make it easier for people to put in those applications and get those payments. We have been working with our revenues, our housing benefit team, identifying those within those income thresholds and sending out a completed forum for them to sign and send back so that that payment is then made to them. This academic year, we sent out 2,000 applications forums with a return rate of 1,358. There was agreement that it was quite low and we should try to boost that. We then did a second batch of the same forum and got an additional 110. There is some work being undertaken to try to contact the people who sent those forums out and did not return them. That is undergoing at the moment. I fully understand what the barriers are and why people are not returning the money that we are giving them. That work is being undertaken. Again, similar to what Glasgow is piloting, we have the cards in West Lothian for education for the schools, so that children are not taking money to two schools. They are doing the payments online as well. Again, the take-up of that is not as high as what we would have liked it to be, but our understanding or anecdotal evidence is barriers to online parents not being quite confident using online services to be able to upload money and feel that it has been done securely. We are working with our adult basic education teams to be able to look at identifying how we help those who may need some assistance with online support. That is the big automation that we are doing in West Lothian. In some semi-automation that we are doing in terms of the period poverty that I have put in the paper that I issued, the council executive approved an allocation of £18,000 to pilot a period poverty payment to women who applied for a crisis grant. The Scottish welfare fund member of staff would be trained to ask those sensitive questions. If there was a need for an extra payment, an extra £5 payment would be made automatically on top of the Scottish welfare fund. That started this year to help women with purchasing sanitary products. The other thing that we have done quite successfully is the benefit campaign. Again, that is about semi-automation. It is a joint initiative involving a range of council services and partnership community planning partners in the area to engage with families who are affected by the benefit cap and to support them to manage their reduction in their housing benefit. Again, using the housing benefit systems, we were able to identify the people who would be affected by the benefit cap. We phoned them and had the conversation about how they would manage. If there was an indication that they would have financial hardship because of the cap, they were automatically given the discretionary housing payment for the full financial year to help them with their finances. The people that we could not get were then lettered out to and that 83 householder received the DHP out of a possibility six, I believe, for the cap. Going forward, we are looking at how we can automate. Other things make it easier for people to get their maximum entitlements. One of the things that we are considering just now against is that our housing benefit and Scottish welfare teams are under universal credit. The 18 to 21-year-olds who are exempt or will get their housing costs paid because they fall into a certain criteria will get them paid through the Scottish welfare fund. We are looking at how we can identify those people and get that payment made automatically rather than having to make wait for applications coming in and what have you. That is something that we are working towards. I would like to second what Richard MacDonald has already said about data sharing. I do believe that more could be done, but because of the data sharing protocols, it is difficult to share all the information that you need. I thank you for inviting me along. I do not have much to say. Richard MacDonald has covered it all. You see it in my paper in the censor. When I was seeing the question, I was going to ask you talking about automation or self-management. I think that you have to do one will go with the other. In Northland, the rule only automation that we would have would be around school meals. Other than that, we do a similar type of work that is to work in West Lobby and the Inglasgow City Council. We are talking about it in regards to the school clothing grant with take-up through council services, advice on information and citizens advice bureaus in the independent sector and working closely with the education service. We are the council that is about to launch a whole digitalisation council services over the next three to five years. Welfare is one of the areas that is being looked at to be digitalised. For me, you are looking at housing benefit council tax reduction scheme, school meals, school clothing grants, blue badges, educational maintenance grants, any sort of welfare or benefit that the council administers on behalf of the UK, Scottish Government or itself would all be considered to be an element of self-management, then there would need to be automation at the end of that. I think that that would be the main aim for the council looking at that. It does not need to consider the introduction of universal credit full service that is rolled out in North Lanarkshire and April in particular in relation to housing costs. We know through the live service of universal credit that came in North Lanarkshire in March 2015 that we have seen at the beginning quite a drop in people claiming council tax reduction scheme just for some of the things that was the earlier witness was talking about, that people are not making that connection or not being advised. We would always look to do something around that to make sure that it was easier and seamless for folk to claim it. The other part would be around the data sharing too, that would be an issue. I always have the council has embarked from my health and social care looking at a making life easier self-management system about the life curve where people go through and then it ultimately directs them to different places where they can get information or assistance or advice, but you are relying on people doing that themselves. We certainly have seen from a social work perspective that where it is left to claimants or their families to make claims for benefits at times that you might find that they are not, either the claims are not made or they may be not made in the correct sort of manner. If there were going to be, my view, automation that would need to be as easy as possible for me, then what that means is that at the very first point of contact all of the relevant and correct information has to be collated and then obviously it has to be then shared by the different folk who would then allow that automation to sort of kind of take place. I don't really have anything else to add because I think that Richard and I have covered quite other areas that North Lanarkshire I do too. Thank you. In fact, I could just build on a little bit on the evidence that you've given us obviously. The whole intention of this from your perspective is to maximise people's income and ensure that people are in receipt of everything that they're entitled to. Your evidence said that lettering people got some response and then a follow-up response. Is it your feeling that the people who are most in need and hardest to get to are the ones that are still not engaging? Absolutely, because the most vulnerable from experience from the advice service don't open letters, don't read letters because that's where they are at that point in their life. So lettering you don't get a huge response. The telephone calls with the benefit caps that I was talking about had more impact than letters hence why we're doing a little bit of information gathering about the clothing grant to find out why people hadn't responded. Would that be the experience across the other two pages? Yeah, certainly. When we were doing work around the under officer role, the bedroom tax and the benefit cap, we found that telephoneing or texting people was got a bigger response as to writing to people. We, particularly in the censored introduction of the bedroom tax, we had done a lot of door knocking too as well to try and encourage people to claim their discretionary housing payments. In relation to the benefit cap, we had a working group involved in the register social landlords and we divvied up the work that the RS cells would look after their own tenants and my team would attempt to address the benefit cap for the private sector tenants. We took the view that there were approximately 200 private sector tenants that we would just write to them, advising them about what were coming on, a particular date to visit, and that if they wished to cancel or to make a rearrangement to do so, but rather than leave the owners with them to come forward for advice, advice was going to arrive on their doorstep. We found that more successful than we had done with other campaigns. Good morning. Thank you very much for your evidence. It is clear that local authorities are doing incredible work to ensure that more people get their benefits. However, the committee is really interested in the whole concept, or deeper automation or semi-automation, so I want to first of all ask you what more could be done if the Scottish Government, which I believe have already stated the same interest, were able to take any further action to encourage local authorities to do more further automation. What do you think needs to be done in relation to particular the barriers that you talk about, which is data sharing? Can anything be done? Any legislation that the Scottish Government introduces needs to address the legality of sharing information. Obviously, we still have the GDPR, so we perhaps need to ensure that the declaration on any application form is sufficiently clear that information will be used, which is ultimately for a person's own benefit, so certainly making sure that we draft the regulations with our eyes open. There are some areas where we are going to have two parts of the equation to make the whole sum. When we get the disability benefits devolved, the receipt of the correct component of what would be the Scottish DLA—I do not know what the proper title will be, but it is called that for now—and the receipt of the Scottish carers allowance will then be entitled to the severe disability premium and or the carers premium within the council tax reduction scheme. We need to ensure that we have the two benefits that the connections are there, that a person should not then have to come forward and say, oh, by the way, I have now received the DLA. What does that mean for council tax? We should be able to do that, or we should put mechanisms in place to ensure that that is done seamlessly and internally. I will ask you further to that. Depending on your circumstances, you will qualify for different benefits, which make it further complicated and match those benefits. I was interested in the update of free school meals. Richard, you talked about that, and I think that you also did, John. I thought that that was one of the more difficult benefits, but it is one that I was quite interested to know more about. I know in Glasgow, for example, there are something like five and a half thousand families that have not taken up their free school meals, and I wondered if they could give the committee any advice or information about how that could be taken forward. We have got the answer to your question there, but perhaps a potential barrier is that people do not want to eat the school meal, and if you have a free entitlement but your friends are going to take their dinner money instead of going to the school and taking it down the street, you might not want to go for your free school meal because you are then separating yourself from your peers. Perhaps it is to make the school meal attractive to those who are buying their school meals, and perhaps a change in thinking about how catering is delivered in schools might be a good step forward. Just as a supplement to that, I heard you loud and clear when you said that, and I recognise that that is a big issue for free school meals. Can free school meals be matched up with another benefit, or is it too difficult? Do you qualify for housing benefit? Do you qualify for the school closing grant? That is an easy one, so you can match the data. Are there other benefits that you can match the data for free school meals, or is it just so different? If you are claiming housing benefit, that housing benefit application should capture sufficient information to determine a school meal entitlement, so a family could have a system of automation whereby the person advised of their right to a free school meal. If the onus is then on them to go forward and take it up, we might have a barrier. If there was a scheme allowed like the parent pay wither advice that your child's parent pay card has been automatically credited with the value for free school meals, then without them having to do anything other than to turn up at the school and take the meal, that might help. To qualify for free school meals, do they not assess your income and what you have in working families' tax credits? You need to be on means-tested benefits or have a tax credit figure below a certain figure. However, the housing benefit application form should capture that information. Obviously, you have highlighted that in order for automation to go further as access to data is the most important thing. The frustration that I have is that I am on three committees in here now and I do not want you to feel sorry for me with that. Over that period in this week alone, I have the justice, education skills and now today social security. We have discussed probably the very same people that we are trying to target in various different aspects of their life. Every once come to we cannot get access to the data. The data is there, but we have difficulty accessing it, and almost, John, it seems, if you try to reinvent the wheel with your life card to try to recollect the data that you need to try to get it. What I want to ask you is the actual data that you need available, but it is elsewhere in someone else's system, and how do we find a way to access that so that we do not end up using resource trying to do something that we already have sitting in some other server somewhere, because it appears the more we protect people's data, the more difficult we make it to actually help them. I was just wondering what your thoughts would be and how we actually solve that problem. Two ways. One would be to have the software developed so that it could identify automatically certain entitlements and issue a letter to the households to say, you have claimed housing benefit, we have identified from your housing benefit claim that you also qualify for free school meals, your card for your child has been loaded. If you can update the software then that's great, but there will be a cost to adapting the software. The other way would then be for local authorities to try and run reports on data that they already hold and then have officers go through and process that data to try and then drop a list of households to whom they either want to write or visit. I have heard this week that a lot of DWP have the data and that's the difficulty trying to get access to it. It's already there but it's difficult for councils or MDLs to get that data. You can get some access to that data but you're restricted in what you can use it for. So suppose that again it's going back to Richard's point about changing the legislation that would allow the information to be shared more easily, obviously a bit for the right reasons, but you can get some access but it's restricted in what you can use it for. I think that one of the barriers is also declaration when claimants are signing benefits or signing a declaration to say that the information will be used for a specific purpose. So there may be scope to go back and look at declarations to help and use that data widely. There are data sharing regulations that give local authorities the legal right to access information and then we enter in a memorandum of understanding with DWP. We're then given permission to access their CIS, the client index system, to obtain that information but for the specific purposes and they are for administration of housing benefit, council tax. I think that school meals are in there, Scottish welfare fund and charging for residential and non-residential care, so those areas are there. If there are other identified areas then it maybe needs to be negotiation between the Scottish Government and the Westminster Government to have the data sharing regulations expanded. If there is a duty on us to do something, then that perhaps would be the leverage for a change. It's the same answer that I've had on you as well. Everyone has basically said to the Scottish Government that Westminster needs to sit down and find a way to make it work. I was particularly interested in the example that you provided around the closing grant. I think that that's a massive step forward to some areas where it's basically kids are told at assembly if you think you might qualify for this, then pick up the forms from the school office and see how you're on. A letter sent to those who you know qualify with a populated application form is a massive step forward. What we're talking about here is benefit automation, where benefits are paid to someone who is eligible regardless of whether they have applied or not. So what is stopping taking the next step and not just sending a completed application to be signed but just sending them their entitlement and their school closing grant automatically? I think that for West Lothian it was again the declaration that the information that they provided to housing benefit was used specifically to calculate their entitlement to housing benefit. Now, to use it for another purpose, for our legal team, they felt they needed another signature and therefore that's why they chose to do it that way. You're saying that they've signed that declaration to use it for that purpose but you said that you'd used that information to identify their eligibility and to populate an application form, so if you've been able to do that then why not just give them— But we also need bank details to be able to put in payments and paid into bank accounts as well, so we didn't have all that information. So it was a no-thought to sending a check to those who qualified automatically? This is the first time that we've done this, so there is quite a lot of learning that we've taken from this. As we move forward, we're hoping to be able to streamline it a bit further. Like I said, it's a massive step forward so far. I'm just wondering about taking that to the logical conclusion of what we're talking about in benefits automation, but thanks very much for that. Come back in. In Glasgow, we did that very thing. We looked at our information and we sent out to 5,400 households a paypoint voucher and 87 per cent were cashed. I appreciate that there are maybe issues over whether or not you've got the authority to do that, but I'm fairly sure that Glasgow City Council's declaration on the application form is that the information will be used for other council entitlements. We managed to overcome that barrier. Although we didn't have the bank details, we used paypoint, which is what we use for Scotch welfare fund and for other functions as well. That's very helpful, thank you. I want to come back to two points and get a wee bit more information. IT phobia must be quite a big issue for certain people, certainly for me. In Edinburgh, we do have a situation where you pay for primary school, you pay your meals, you pay all your trips online, but there must be a fairly reasonable percentage of society who do not have that access and are going to be held back by that. What do you do to mitigate that and how do you mitigate that? I think that you need to make facilities still available for folk to bring cash into the schools. Although it's not maybe desirable, it can't be the case that if the parents are not able to access online facilities or it doesn't feel confident to do so that they then don't make the payment and end up getting a bill or a red reminder from the council, I still think that you would need to have a provision within the schools to allow cash payments. You wouldn't want that as the long-term solution. You want to then provide support and training to the families and that would be something that schools could do that some of the parent evenings demonstrate the parent pay mechanism so that parents who aren't confident using it can see how it works and feel greater confidence to go home and try it themselves. Have you ever been tried having a laptop at the school and a teacher helping a parent through a process just for their men and helping them to do that? Has that ever happened in any of your local authorities? The other issue is just in regard to going back to Mr Adam's comment about data and sharing of data and holding data. Are local authorities going to be affected by the new regulations that come in in regard to what you already hold of people? MSPs will be told that we need to get the permission to hold that information beyond what we have now. Are you going to lose information in the spring time because of that? Secondly, how much can you share already between education and health and social care? Is that a stimulus thing or do you need people's permission to do that? We feel that we are able to share information from the authorisation that is on the housing benefit council tax application, whether after GDPRs that declaration is sufficient. I cannot comment on it, but I would like to think that it is. If it is, it will need to be revised to make sure that it is. The information that you hold at the moment on somebody, can that be still held after the new regulations come in? The information that can still be held within council tax, whether it is on housing benefit, whether there is still permission to share that with education, might be the barrier. If education already has information that we have shared, are they allowed to continue to hold that? If it is no longer compliant with the GDPR, then probably not. GDPRs will be a headache for us, but hopefully not one that is insurmountable. I do not feel that there are two who want to comment on that. We are not that far away now. What provisions are you making for beyond the spring and summer? I cannot comment on that. There is a working group for GDPR in West Lothian, but it is not something that I am involved in, so I do not join in. Certainly from a manager's perspective, we have all been given training on the new GDPR in a way that is coming in, but we will probably have to wait for instructions or guidance from the council. I think that it will cause some concern. I think that it will cause a lot of issues, particularly for advice and information services, as well as getting consent and knowing what it is that it can use and what it cannot use for. There is an element of that today anyway, but, from my council perspective, there will be major concerns about what it holds, how long it can hold it for and who it can share it with. Mr Campbell's evidence suggests that automation could potentially eliminate stigma and, more important, value judgments. That has been discussed already this morning. I do not know if I have picked up Mr Gassing correctly, but were you suggesting that it is still possible for those who are in receipt of free school meals to be identified by their peers? I would believe so, because children are very intelligent. If you have a process at the front of the class where folk are handing over cash for their school meals and folk are not being invited to do so or are getting school meals, it is probably pretty easy to join the dots. If, however, you have a mechanism whereby some parents are paying online and only a small number are paying cash at the front of the class, it might be less easy to identify the reason for why folk are not handing cash over. I certainly—obviously, it has been a while since I was at school, but I remember that double line in the dining room. I understood that more had been done to make sure that that difference was being disguised better. Stigma is a huge part of—we all understand why people are reluctant to take up benefits that clearly describe them as being from a low-income background. You obviously feel then that, with progress, automation could help to get rid of some of the stigma, if we are really serious about it. It is all in the background. Nobody certainly knows that it is happening. People would just know whether it is free school meals or at the school clothing grant. The money is sent automatically to the parents who are spending it the same way as other parents who are not eligible for it. There is no line there to show where the money has come from to pay, so it would look like everybody else would rent about the community. It is a huge concern, because we are hearing about a lot of free school meals that are not being taken up, probably by some of our pupils who most need to take them up. We have recently passed the Child Poverty Scotland act, and it requires the Scottish Government to set out what, if any, measures the Scottish ministers propose to take in relation to supporting local authorities to consider the automatic payment of benefits and support. I wonder whether you could elaborate on what support might be helpful, what support might local authorities look for that would make this process easier? Automation is going to require IT systems that are fit for purpose. The systems that are there presently perhaps are not sufficiently fit for purpose, so the resourcing of the software upgrade would probably be something that local authorities would be very welcome to have support with. I am from North Lanarkshire. You mentioned the ambitions of the council to redo all their computing systems and make it all automated. Have you been feeding into that process to ensure that whatever comes out at the end of that is going to be fit for purpose for the ambitions of automation and paying benefits? We have been, and we will continue to be involved in that process, particularly around welfare, because that is where our interest lies, is to ensure that people get the benefits that they are entitled to. I think that the idea would be that there would be maybe just one system, with one unique reference number, with all the details held that would allow not just the welfare but other council activity to happen automatically. However, it is tied up with the self-management side of it. For me, it is not a semi-automation because someone, i.e. the individual, the residents, will have to do something first before anything else falls into place, but we will continue to feed in it. I think that my concern is maybe just a bit old-fashioned in the sense that it is experience, certainly the fin and off-lanage are seeing claims not being taken up and will we do a lot of great work in health and social care and housing services to as well as the third sector. We know that there are large elements in the area who still aren't claiming the benefits that they are entitled to. At times it could have been when you do eventually reach people, you find out that there has been involvement from services in the past, but I said, I will claim it myself and ultimately they don't go on to claim it themselves or they find the situation complex. My issue with automation is that if the information isn't right at the very beginning, people can still miss out. There are complexities that are having two—even just the one—benefit system, where there are things that are like grey areas. In Richard's point about the severe disability premium and the carers element for a council tax reduction scheme, would a system be able to pick that up? Those grey areas that, if you do a circling of, you have that underlying type one to a benefit that is supposed to be a natural payment of a benefit, will it pick all that type up? I can say that there are 18 years in computing, and I've never met a pragmatic computer in my life. Ms McQuire will bring you in. It's kind of following on from Jeremy Balfour, and I know that the ins and outs of GDPR will be for your information officers, so it's not really a technical question as such. I was interested in talking about declarations and the different points that were gathering permission for folk that live in our areas. I wonder if GDPR and your new systems provide an opportunity to have a look at what's needed in that, to allow automation or your phrase of it to go ahead. I ask this knowing that automation is very easy for politicians to set and go, here's a good idea. Why aren't you doing it? Recognising all the complexities that you've described in your evidence, I wonder if there's an opportunity with that change, because things are going to have to be done differently, I think that we all recognise. I'll bear in mind that I'll get a day's training on GZR and just try to recall it. I mean, I think that there will be opportunities, but there will also be that. You've tried to be proactive, but there will also be that, but I've been passive because of what the consequences may be if you don't get it right and what it could be for you as an individual, or the data controller, or ultimately the council. I think that it's certainly worth exploring if things could be done differently, but sometimes I mean that our point of view from a DWP is that we could make our consent forms as wide as we would maybe like, but then other organisations maybe such a degree may say, no, you can only use it for this specific reason, for this specific time, and then once that's done, it may be rightly so, because you can go back a year later and say, well, I've still got a mandate for Richard, so that allows me to ask for information. So I think that it is complicated and I think it's just trying to get it right, but I think that if you are going to do automation, then there has to be movement in that area. If you go to the other extreme whereby what you're asking someone to sign is just so covering, I'm applying for council tax benefit, housing benefit, this benefit, that benefit, something that's yet to be invented, you maybe get to the point where someone goes, well, I've watched all the stuff about Facebook in the media, I'm really weary now of giving you that permission and as a consequence maybe then don't make their claim or put their claim down before they get advice, so we may have to watch, we don't go the other way, but if there was some way that legislation could make it legal for that data to be transferred in specified circumstances, as currently is for some other areas, that's maybe the answer. You may not be able to answer this, but I'll put it to you anyway. You're picking up any concerns, so the more successful you are, the bigger the budget needs to be, so if those five and a half thousand children in Glasgow families were to have automatic entitlement, that would obviously increase the expenditure for the local authority. Are you picking up any concerns within your local authorities about the implications of deeper automation? I'm not privy to what's worrying folk in different quarters. If it's money that can be reclaimed from either Scottish Government or Central Government, then I suppose that doesn't cause concern, but if it's going to be money that puts pressure on existing stretched local authority budgets, then ultimately that would be a concern. Thank you very much. Finally, is there anything that you want to put on the record that we haven't already covered today, any final thoughts? Well, I suppose the only thing that I would like to say is obviously that for me, automation could only be for some benefits where it's straightforward to know if you can satisfy a list, then you'd automatically get it, but my favourite would be that if you tried to be developed in the sense of where benefits had discretion. Although I talk about the judgment value, but that's for the straightforward benefits, but if you're looking at a benefit that requires a decision-making process, a thought process, a consideration stuff, then obviously that could be, to me, quite complex because we come across people who may have been told by certain folk that they can't claim benefits and say, well, why not? They were told me, I didn't meet the rules and say, well, the people who decide the rules are applications, are DWP, so we would complete the form and send it in and it would be up to DWP to decide where they get it or not, but it is straightforward that that could be right. So my concern would just be to say that we have to bear in mind that there will be some benefits, particularly disability benefits, TLA, PIP, attendance allowance, do you know about where it could be quite difficult to get automation? Any final thoughts? I thank you all for your attendance this morning and we will now move into private session.