 With pleasure, everyone! welcome to your Scottish Parliament! My name is Maggie Chapman, MSP, and I'm one of the directors of the Scottish Futures Forum here in the Scottish Parliament. There's just a couple of people coming in, so we'll give them a minute or two just to come in and get settled and get comfortable and then we'll kick off. I think we're good to go. Mae wedi'i gweld yn gweithio gyda'n jogelfynion, dwi'n ymweld yn y 19r hwn o'r ffeislau o drefnod ar gyfer anhygymru, ac mae'n ddigon o ddweud, ddweud, i gael i gael, i'r anhygrif ar y cyfnodd ymddangosion a'r ddych chi, arall y mwyaf arweithio'r ddechrau, ac mae hynny efallai o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o ddweud ac o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Felly byddwn ni'n gweithio i ddim byddwn ni'n gweithio ar y ddweud, ac rydyn ni'n gweithio i gael ei ddau i wneud cyfnodol hi'n gwneud yna yn fwy o'r problemau tynnu'n gwneud yma, o'ch credu'r problemau tynnu gweldu'n gwneud. Rydym ni'n mynd i'r ffordd o'r pethau a'r tawd ac rwy'n dweud hynny o'r gweithio i'r rhesypeth ac rwy'n dweud yma'r ffordd o'r pethau a'r hyn sydd hynny i'r ddod a'n rhesypeth i'r ddod. Yn ymweld, rwy'n meddwl, felly gallai'n gweld. Roeddwn ni'n gweithio, o'i gwybod, sy'n meddwl yn ymweld, mae'r ysgrifennu ymweld yn Twitter, ymddangos ychydig yn Ysgrifennu Scot Pal, o'r ymddangos yn Instagram. Rwy'n gweld i'n rhan o'r ffordd yma bod y ffordd yma yw'r ffordd yn ymddangos ar y parlymyn ysgrifennu sefydig. Mae'r ffordd yma yw'r ysgrifennu isu Scotland's poverty problem. All political parties are committed to tackling the issue. So, why has more progress not been made? Why do we still have the issues we do? Does stigma hold-back debate or can we build the healthier, fairer Scotland that we all want to see? To answer these questions, and to maybe chart the course for the next few years of Scottish Politics, I'm very pleased to be joined by Chris Burt, Satwatt Raymond, and Professor Mawreg Treynor. Chris leads the Joseph Runtree Foundation's work in Scotland to solve poverty. Prior to joining the foundation, Chris worked for the Scottish Government, latterly as head of the First Minister's Policy and Delivery Unit. Satwatt is chief executive of One Parent Family Scotland, which is the leading charity working with single parent families in Scotland. She has more than 30 years experience in the voluntary and public sectors in Scotland and England working inequalities, education, employability and other issues. Mawreg is professor of child and family inequalities at the University of Glasgow and deputy chair of the Scottish Government's Poverty and Inequality Commission. Her work focuses on the impacts of poverty and wider inequalities on children and families, health, education and other outcomes. There will be opportunities for you to contribute, to ask questions and put forward your ideas, but I would like to begin this discussion by asking our panellists a couple of questions. Mawreg, I'll start with you if I may. Can you define poverty for us? What does it mean when we talk about poverty? What are the different types we see in Scotland? We have a clear definition of poverty that we use in Scotland and the UK and indeed internationally. It's a measure of income poverty on the whole, which is being below 60% of the median income, so the halfway point. It's really important to have such a measure, although it's not terribly nuanced at times, if you're just below it or just above it, your experiences will be the same, but you will technically be in poverty or not in poverty. It's important because it allows us to compare, it allows us to track trends, it allows us to measure, it allows us to track progress and it allows us to see how we're doing compared to other countries. That's what we call relative poverty and that's the one you're most often hear about. That's the one that we are in Scotland. The target in the legislation wants to be below 10% by 2030 and it's currently at 24%. The next measure we have is also income, but it's tracked to 2010's poverty income rates with inflation, so what that does is it tracks people's poverty in relation to their living standards over time and we're trying to get that below 5% by 2030 and that's currently at around 18%. The other two things we also measure in Scotland is persistent poverty and those children that are living in poverty year after year after year, my research, which I've been doing for over 20 years, when I track children, the longer they're in poverty, the more detrimental, the impacts, which makes sense, but if you think about it, even five years to an adult of experience in poverty might not seem like a long time, but five years in childhood is a long time. So I think some of the things we have to do is keep in mind of when we're talking about child poverty as the experience within childhood. The final measure we have in Scotland is the joint poverty and material deprivation and that's the one that brings in living standards a bit more. That's the one that is not just income, but is an index of different things that people should be able to afford to have and that should be able to afford to have has been defined by the public, but don't have and that can be things such as like all-weather shoes and such things and that's material deprivation. So we track that too. We're supposed to get that below 5% by 2030 and that's currently hovering around 14% and persistent poverty is currently hovering around 14%. When talking about the definition of poverty, what I'd like to make clear is that we hear a lot at the moment about things like fuel poverty and period poverty and clothing poverty now. We've got clothing banks and food poverty of course and heating and energy poverty and those are not types of poverty in that sense of the word because what they are are the effects of poverty generally and I think it's particularly unhelpful to fragment poverty as an experience into little packages. Now that's not to say that organisations like SatVat's One Parent Families Scotland working on the ground doesn't target those things and give people support because of course you do. You target what people need support with. But it's not a definition of poverty. It's an effect of poverty. Thanks very much for that, Morag. SatVat, I wonder if you could explain what actually poverty means to the people that you work with and the people that you support. Absolutely. I think within the context of what Morag has said, I want to start by saying that the causes of the poverty that the Single Parent Families we work with experience are structural in nature. There's been a real drive in certain parts of the media to get back to poverty being an individual issue as opposed to a structural and societal issue. I just want to emphasise that the many reasons why Single Parent Families find themselves in poverty are as a result of the way we have our systems and structures in place, the fact that most things are still geared around a model of a two-addled family. Most of our services and structures are based around that model of having two people in a household who can share responsibilities. We have a labour market that's hugely inflexible in terms of supporting the needs of parents wanting to go back into work and progress in work. And we have a childcare system which isn't flexible enough and available at the hours that we're expecting parents to be able to work. So there are some of the structural issues that create poverty. But the experience is such that it impacts every aspect of the family's lives that we work with and that can be down to whether they can afford to heat their homes, what they can afford to put on their table. And this isn't as a result of people making certain choices over others. This is as a result of just not having enough to begin with. And I think that's what we need to be coming back to when we're wanting to talk about how we tackle poverty and what we do about poverty's problem. It's about what can we do to ensure families will have enough and how do we ensure that what we provide and how we provide it is accessible and doesn't create more problems, more barriers and isn't provided in a way which increases stigma. I mean, these are the things that poverty... These are the things that we hear about time and again from single parents. Stigma and discrimination as a result of poverty are major issues. Being able to gain qualifications, being able to progress in the labour market, these are things that are not possible if you are having to think about how you care for your children. In terms of the cost of living survey we did last year, for example, three in five single parents were finding it extremely difficult to afford or could no longer afford electricity. We're not talking about luxuries, we're talking about the bare essentials at the moment. 58% said the same about gas and almost 44% said they could no longer afford food. And so they were choosing to feed their children and not themselves as a result of that. 20% couldn't afford to buy clothes, housing issues, concerns, and I think the big thing that we need to think about also is the impact the financial stresses have on mental health and well-being and how the... I suppose the daily grind of having to think about how you cope with these things and juggle these things has a cumulative impact on the families that we're working with. And this is not to say the families aren't without agency, aren't without solutions, this is not to say that we've got a victimhood culture because what I see are the most incredible financial management skills. Do you know? I couldn't work out how to make that money go as far as the families we work with do. Incredible resilience, peer support and community support for each other and the desire to make things better for their children. So whilst we're here to talk about the problem of poverty, I don't... I'm really keen that what we don't do is problematise those who are poor, you know, because there's incredible resilience and strength shown in those communities. Thanks very much for that, Saty. Chris, Satwood talks about some of the structural inequalities that have led us to the data and the experiences that she's highlighted and Mauregg talking about the targets that the Scottish Government and others have. What, from the work that you've done with Joseph Roundtree Foundation, what are the policy and economic levers available to us and are we making the most of them in Scotland to address some of these issues? Where are we going wrong? Yeah, well, I think if we look at the progress towards the targets that Mauregg has set out, we're obviously not using the powers or fingertips as well as we could. If we think that we've done everything we can in Scotland to solve poverty, we are wrong or putting our heads in the sand, full stop. But, you know, we can look at... So Scotland has, in general, lower levels of poverty than England or Wales in particular, about the same as Northern Ireland. Part of that is driven by costs and in particular housing costs because we have actually built social housing in Scotland over the last 15 years or so. Very little has been built in England and Wales. We see the private rented sector start to build up and that is less secure for families because our homes should be the foundation of everything that we do, but also much more at risk of rents going up. So as your rent goes up, if people's incomes, we know people's incomes have been extremely low and have not really risen for most of the last since austerity, so that's when poverty rates can shoot up. Social security is an obvious one, but also the workplace, some of the structural issues that SatVat's mentioned. In-work poverty has grown significantly over the last in the austerity period. We can also see there are things like the IFS have shown that the way universal credit operates to force people into rubbish jobs actually impacts on their long-term ability to make more money over time and we know who that will be in the men, it will be women. Women being forced into very low-skilled, insecure, inflexible jobs which don't allow them to build up the skills to get higher paid jobs. So these are the kind of structure of things that SatVat's mentioned and which leave us in the place where but let's not pretend that there are the weather that we have no control over, that there are these amorphous things that, oh, if only they weren't happening, these are choices, choices we make as governments, as parliaments, as society. We have built the system which creates a level of poverty that we have today. We can build a different one. Thanks very much. Hopefully that's given you a really broad introduction to this topic. I'm keen to open it up to questions or comments from you. If you want to just raise your hand that we do have roving mics, around the place. So I'll call you if you've got any questions. Keep thinking a little bit longer. I'll pick up one of the things that you talked about, stigma and the stigma associated with poverty. How much is that a driver for people either not being willing to say, yes, I'm struggling here and go out looking for help either to the third sector or to social security and other public services. What role does stigma play in all of this and are we doing enough to tackle it? I think stigma plays an enormous role in two ways. One, in terms of what it does to the individuals and the families in terms of how they feel others are viewing them and how they're being viewed. And secondly, how it can stop you therefore accessing support and help that you might want because of how you feel you might be viewed as a result of it. And I know the cross-party group on poverty recently did an inquiry into stigma. And what they said was that it's extensive and deep rooted in Scotland and it's impacting people's mental health and wellbeing. Like I said, it's restricting barriers to accessing support. It can impact on educational attainment. It can influence the design and resourcing of policies that can tackle poverty or it should be doing so. You know, looking to see how are we creating policies and access to support and resources that doesn't make people feel they're going to be singled out or stigmatised. In relation to single parents, single parent rights, which is a UK-wide organisation, undertook some research with single parents where 80% of single parents reported that they'd faced stigma and discrimination as a result. So it impacts how and what people feel they can access as well as on the individual themselves. And it can impact, like for example, if we look at schools and the stigma that many young people feel in schools, whilst there are a number of measures that have been taken to address it, looking at the cost of the school day, I think we need to look to see what more we can do which provides universal offers. So it's not about someone having to show that they need that support. The support is there for all because it's good for all. Free school meals is an example of that. I think we're doing a lot more around things like school clothing grounds, the types of things we expect young people to wear to school and to bring to school. It's about equalising things. It's about looking to see, being able to have our public institutions run in a way where how much you have and what you have doesn't dictate how you feel about being able to go into it. It's really deep-seated within so many things, do you know? So I'll stop there. Yeah, I'd like to comment on stigma as well, completely supporting what Satvaat says there. But also, what's curious about stigma is that you can track the change in the public mood and how the media has approached this over the last 20 years, dependent on who is in government, OK? So for me, stigma is sometimes employed as a tool to garner support for what would otherwise be unpopular policy decisions such as the cap on the two-child limit. So it's an absolute cynical tool when a government or some government wish to implement policies like that, they will start to make noises and speeches that denigrate people in those positions. If you go back to David Cameron's speeches even around 2014 in the run-up to welfare reform or George Osborne's, when he says, the people who are going out to work during the day and they're seeing the neighbours' blinds down because the neighbours are still sleeping because they're not working, you start to build this idea of people as being not willing to work, not willing to contribute, taking the mickey out of everyone else, taking the mickey out of the system and just sitting around having too many children compared to everyone else. And so then you start to garner support for these policies. So stigma then runs deep because it's picked up by newspapers. If you look at the television programming post 2010, things called such like benefit streets and things like that, if you look at the disability, it benefits was a huge one. If you look at the early noughties when we were starting to really increase benefits to people with disabilities, whether they were in work or not in work, to support their lives and enable them to access life the way we can, what you find is that the newspapers at the time are supportive of that. They were like, look at this person who's got a wheelchair and can't get a ramp. That was the type of, often the type of message coming through newspapers. You fast forward 10 years to when you've got a different government who's putting different messages out and newspapers are suddenly saying, look at these people taken who should be in work but they're not in work, they're all sick and they're all pretending to be disabled. The discourse and the narrative changes and becomes far more pernicious and that is where stigma starts. So, we're trying to work on stigma from the bottom up, from schools up. Yes, we can, but really, we need to address the stigma that's aimed from the top down and there should be responsibility in what governments are allowed to say about people in society. Christa, do you want to come? I was going to agree with everything that's just been said there. I think, you know, as Nelson Mandela said around racism, children are not born with discriminatory attitudes, they are taught them by adults. And the free school meals thing is a really good example. Like the drive for universal provision within schools is because adults within schools as well as children who have been taught these attitudes by adults play that out in, because I remember I've sat with some of my colleagues within JRF and I had a fairly standard middle class upbringing. I didn't care if I saw somebody who was getting the meal ticket to get the free school meals, but I hadn't been taught that that was a bad thing and that was something you had to be worried about. But I did see dinner staff being rude to kids. No, you can't have that. That's not covered by your ticket. These are adults. These are adults discriminating against children. And as Morag says, that then gets blown up by politicians intentionally. So I think stigma then bleeds its way in to policy into the five-week wait, into the benefit cap. And I mean, on disability, depressingly, and this partly comes back to what Morag said about trying to stratify or separate poverty in different ways of talking about peer poverty and even child poverty, very deep poverty in the UK has risen for the whole period of devolution. Now, for children it had fallen for a while, it started to come back after austerity, hopefully with things like the Scots champion would come back down again. But the level of very deep poverty has almost doubled. I think it's by the population of Dundee, about 350,000 people. And why is that? Because again, discrimination particularly against disabled people, and working-age adults, single adults, where we worry about child poverty, yet don't worry about the poverty who, children are not in poverty because they're not doing enough hours down the pit. They're in poverty because their parents don't have enough income. So lo and behold, those single adults become parents. So it is a complete policy failure and a complete acceptance of the stigma within our society that we ignore the plight of working-age adults in very deep poverty because they are at huge risk of long-term health problems and lo and behold, they will become parents and their children will have a tougher upbringing as a result. Can I just make a point to emphasise how much this is created by society stigma? So you know I work in a university as a professor and researcher on poverty matters. And I was doing some analysis with a colleague in Germany. We both used data. I used data that's called the Growing Up in Scotland data. It tracks children over time. And she was using data in Germany called the Pairfam data, sort of another family survey. And we were doing some comparative work between Scotland and Germany. And I said to her, it would be really interesting if we could look at the data and see if we could somehow get some sort of measure of stigma. Because it asks lots of questions about how people are feeling and how they feel they're treated, et cetera. It would be really good if we could get a measure of stigma and it would be really good if we could explore that for single parents. And she looked puzzled and she says, what do you mean stigma for single parents? Seriously. And I said, well, you know the whole narrative and discourse that single parents don't work, have too many children or scrounging of the state. And she laughed and said, yeah, we don't have that in Germany. And she says, we give our children proper financial support, et cetera. And I just thought, all right, okay. So that was that academic idea out the window, you know. No comparison to be made there because the situations were not comparable. Thanks for that. Really, really interesting to see what we take for granted as just normalised here. I see a couple of hands starting to come up. See a person on the side in the middle there? Thank you. Yeah, it was just this time yesterday afternoon. It was another event in Parliament which was workers' rights, who cares. And I looked around at the half-empty room in the committee room and I kind of thought there in lies the answer. But then I came away much more positive than I started the afternoon. But I think the two are connected between yesterday and today. And obviously the panellists have touched upon it, particularly Professor Traynor, in that it's a question of what society we want to be and why are we not angrier about the level of poverty that exists, particularly the amount of people that have to rely on food banks, the amount of children that live in poverty in Scotland, but also UK-wide. And particularly people are probably kind of aware that it was a YouGov study last week about people's attitudes towards the poor. And it highlighted that people still have a very kind of Victorian workhouse mentality towards the poor, blaming the poor. But also this idea that the poor are undeserving, that a quarter of people, a quarter of respondents in the survey said that the poor don't even deserve to have a balanced diet. The poor don't really deserve to actually pay their fuel bills. And then we get into leisure because definitions of poverty, what actually is, you know, what is the definition of poverty. And people said that there's only 27%, I think, that said that the poor deserve to socialise. Now, so not only are we actually not angry enough, but, you know, the attitudes are shocking, but not that surprising. And I think it dates back also to, and I'll be interested to hear the panelist's view on this, to neoliberalist politics in the 80s that were introduced in batterism, to create this individualist society where people care about themselves. And, you know, speaking as a teacher that's relatively well off, I feel that there's a lot of people that, you know, in my situation, maybe teachers that are okay. They did all right from that right policies, and they kind of like inherited and all the rest of it. And it's a question of, yes, they care. And yes, they may get a little bit, you know, they would like things to be different, but do they care enough? And I think that was the, and speaking as a, you can probably tell, an anti-thatcherite. You know, that was a genius of thatcherism, because it created a schism in society, where not only have you got society divided by rich and poor, but also a lot of people that are just comfortable enough not to be angry enough about the situation. So my question to the panellists is, how do you tackle those, how do you tackle those problems? And I know it's less of a problem in Scotland than it is UK-wide with the Tory government in Westminster that really kind of pebbled this line, but we're fighting against, as Professor Trenor has already mentioned, the kind of right-wing media who kind of set the narrative. So how do we actually kind of convince enough people that this is unacceptable and we need to have a grown-up conversation about what society we want to be? I mean, if we could bottle the answer to that, and it's your challenge, if you can bottle the answer to that question, then we might have poverty solved. But Chris, I'll come to you first. I mean, there's a lot in that, neoliberalism, the structure of our economy, I think ties in very closely with the questions around stigma and the lack of anger. You know, why aren't we angry? What are your thoughts on how we, how do you dismantle neoliberalism? What? Easy, easy question. What time do we finish? I mean, to come on the question around the kind of attitudes thing, I think partly, and I've probably commissioned research that does the same, partly we need to stop asking people stupid questions in stupid ways. So it's like, do you hate this thing that sounds hateful? Yes, I do. It's not a good question. So I think it's like, and J.R.F. had done quite a lot of research around this stuff, about how we frame the argument that we've put together. And to go the way wrong, we don't, we cannot avoid the attitudes that you're talking about because they're real, because as you say, we've had 40 years of training of this mindset, of this bootstraps attitude that you're in Reagan of. The only way to succeed as a country is to be individual, to have lots of stuff. It's, you know, your home is your castle, all of these kind of things. And it has sought to basically protect and then build the inequalities that exist within our society. So I think when you look at how you carefully frame these arguments and if you speak to most people and talk about the kind of structural barrier, like if you were to sit down with Satva or any of our colleagues and take almost any example of someone who walks through your door for help and says, you know, they're struggling to make ends meet, struggling to get into childcare, struggling to get into work and all of those things. You explain that to people, most people go, yeah, that's hard. They're not asking for that much. They should get that support. And it's not there. So I do think that the media narrative and stuff, it's partly due to power structures within the UK, frankly, is that we have this very close network of people who speak to each other and they all think the same. They're not diverse in thought and that's where we've got to. So I think we partly have to talk repeatedly about that more positive vision for a good being. Like the labour movement in the sense of the union movement is an interesting example. Like if you look at the sectors where people work who tend to be in work poverty, there's five sectors in particular, I won't try and list because I'll get them wrong, but there's very low union representation within those. And it's mainly women who work within them. And so we have, we've also lost some of that power structure around people in work and how people used to collectively fight for the conditions and pay. Because actually pay in the UK, terms of real living wage and stuff like that, it has caught up with what is a not unreasonable comparative level across the world. But conditions are rubbish. Flexibility is rubbish. Security is terrible. The UK economy is now built on labour market flexibility. If you run a business and your demand goes down for whatever reason, you just sack people. That's how you do it. That's why you don't give people long-term contracts. You just sack them. That's what great British industry is built upon, is built upon the flexibility of our workforce. That has to change. And these are the structure of things. And I don't think, yeah, you might get a taxi driver who will give you this kind of crap chat, but it, sorry, no, it's my line, but actually crap's really probably it's the thing I've ever said. But we have to get into these things, which actually most people want to see that change. If you ask people, do you think the economy that we have just now works for you? The vast majority of people will say it doesn't, because they're right. Does that one need to completely agree with that? I think one of the major successes of the Thatcherite ideology was the way it pitted people against each other, which we've seen and which the questioner spoke about. I also think we have such a focus within these conversations on income. Who's earning what? Oh, look at them. They're on benefits and I'm working and I'm getting an X and I'm getting Y, but people aren't asking. I don't know if we need to create spaces where people can come together and start to ask some of the bigger questions. The why is that the case? Why are we accepting that? Why are we not focusing on the incredible increases we're seeing in wealth inequality? The bigger picture. I mean, what I would say neoliberalism has done has really successfully created the situation where we just look in here in our own communities and compare and then think that's not fair. It's making us shy away from the fact that not only do we have this incredible increase in wealth inequality, we've got an incredible concentration now also of those wealthy individuals and corporations being the ones who are creating the structures and holding the power. I think that's something we have to bring to this conversation around poverty is power and wealth and what we need to do to shift those. I mean, something in that isn't there about the illusion of choice because it's like you can have a new house and your door can be red or blue, but we're not going to ask you if the house is accessible. Does it actually keep you warm? Are the windows draft proof? Those kinds of things. I think that speaks to your question around your point about power. Morag, do you want to come in and then I'll come to you. A couple of points relating to this. One was when Chris was talking about the rise in the non-standard employment types in the UK since the 2008, since the recession at that point. That has been the main. That is what's kept employment rates relatively low in the UK. We've got quite a low. It's because of these non-standard contracts. Lone parents were four times more likely to take on those non-standard contracts than anyone else, and people from an ethnic minority background were twice as likely, and people with a disability twice as likely to be on non-standard contracts. The paper I wrote recently again analysing that data I was talking about looked at the recession and looked at the quality of people's employment for mothers and looked at what impact it had on their children's well-being over time, the change in quality of employment over that period. And what it showed is that it did have adverse effects on child well-being, child conduct, child emotional problems, not the fact that their parent was working, but the fact that their parent was working in insecure and low quality jobs. So it has an impact on the wider family too, as well as being incredibly stressful. I'm going back to you saying what can we do about it, how can we shift apathy? What a great question. I might nick that for my next essay-setting question. Of course, that's my next week's job to write essay questions for the year. I might pinch it. I think something that has happened with this fragmentation in society and individualism and not being able to empathise because we're not seeing people in these situations. People are too much in their own little corner. I would be really keen that how do we create a society where people have to or are encouraged through credits of some sort to actually either take up volunteering or do social science modules or something. I'm appalled that police officers get to be police officers without any formal education. That scares me half to death. And yeah, I'm a professor, but it's not just because when people have an element of education, be it A-levels, be it Further Education College, be it Higher Education College, it improves their engagement with citizenship, with society, it makes them a better parent, it makes them a more empathic human being. So there's something about allowing people that space. If you are on certain benefits and whatnot, for example, you're not allowed to volunteer, what kind of nonsense is that? Why shouldn't people be given extra support to volunteer? Because once you start working with people and walking in someone's shoes for a while, then you start to understand what people need and how society is structured. So I think even just again, the political system makes it almost impossible for people to become educated or to volunteer or to become community engaged. So there is something very much about that isolation individualism, you know, the no such thing as society, which turned out to be a big load of nonsense during the pandemic when we relied on it so heavily. And the build back better, what happened to that? So we saw this during the pandemic, what was required and what was valuable and what was necessary. And then we turned our backs on it as soon as the virus wasn't as powerful to us anymore. It was dangerous to us. So there's a lot in that. And we'll keep the conversation going. I've got a person at the front, right in the front row. I have a specific question, I think probably to Morrigan, to Sawaad. When we're talking about one parent families and the effect that all this has, the stigma and all the rest of it, do you find in your studies any difference between men-led one-parent families and women-led one-parent families? And you mentioned just now ethnic minority groups. What is the effect of these ethnic minorities, the other members of their society, how they might see somebody who is on benefits? Thank you. Yeah, you take that. I think that's a really interesting one about what differences are there between female-led and male-led one-parent families. Interestingly, in the male-led ones, employment levels are higher, income levels are higher, because for many of the men up until then, they've maintained jobs and careers, not taken career breaks or not worked since their children were born. In some other ways, they experience the same discriminations as the mothers do, as the single mothers do, because the structural issues are there for them, around not having the childcare and the other types of support available for them to be able to maintain that. So, there are some differences just around lower levels of unemployment and higher levels of income still amongst male-led one-parent households. But a lot of the single dads we work with, we'll talk about experiencing in some ways, worse stigma and attitudes on the one hand of being a dad. On the other hand, and I've seen this personally as well, it's almost like an overcompensation by others. Oh, my God, isn't he brilliant? Look at what a fantastic job he's doing raising the kids on his own, when actually 92% of kids raised on their own are raised by women. So, there's all the contradictory things that you would see in society, as far as intensified in a way in the experiences of single dads and single moms. In relation to the ethnic minority question, that's not a simple one to answer because ethnic minorities are not a homogenous group. So, it's very difficult to answer that. We are increasingly in some parts of Scotland working with more single parents from communities of colour, visible communities of ethnic minority communities. Many of whom have found themselves in the situation of being a single parent as a result of our sort of pernicious and nasty immigration policies. Many of whom have found themselves of being the one parent who was able to flee with the children whilst the other one remained at home or wasn't able to flee the country where the conflict is because they simply couldn't afford for everyone to travel together. So, there's a whole series and range of issues that we're dealing with and complexities which add to the situation of single parents from communities of colour and from black communities. And actually, one of the things I do want to say is when we're looking at the priority family groups in the Child Poverty Act, ethnic minority families are one of them, this is the group where we have seen the least shift in the levels of poverty. Yep, and JRF have just published a report on this, so I'm sure Chris will want to come in here to talk more about that. But there are different types of stigma due to cultural issues as well, and we fully acknowledge that. And we had the case where we worked with quite a lot of ethnic minority to single parents in Glasgow, and we asked whether they would want a specific, you know, a group to be able to self-organise with our support, etc. And they said, no, we can get that from other community organisations. When we come to you, we want to be with other single parents because that's the bit of our experience and identity we want to share here. Chris, do you want to come in on that research? Just to back up what's up at the same, particularly for minority-ethic workers we looked at in Glasgow in particular, and the findings are depressingly consistent with what others have seen over time, is that it's a near universal experience of racism from colleagues, bosses and customers. So, yeah, you're a single parent, you're already facing structural discrimination within the workplace about the terms of how it's set up to exclude you from being able to earn a decent income, while also the levels of both under-employment over qualification of minority-ethnic workers compared to their pay-in-things is really quite shocking. And as Satvat said, these are one of the allegedly and frankly misnomered priority groups for tackling child poverty for the Scottish government. And that's one of the few where it's really gone up. It's almost 50% of children in minority-ethic families in Scotland are in poverty, and we'll get the census results soon, which will probably show almost a doubling of a minority-ethic population within Scotland. So, I mean, racial justice within Scotland is required to meet our child poverty targets full stop. If we want to ignore that, then we will fail to meet our targets and rightly be criticised for it. Great. Thank you. I've got another question. The third or fourth row back, a hand up there. Thank you. Thank you. Building off of a point that I think Chris Burt said earlier, I've heard a lot about young families and children, and I'm curious to hear a little bit more about either policy efforts or gaps in policy efforts to address poverty among older adults, especially, again, building off that point of increased rates of long-term illness and disability and then also very limited means to increase their incomes. Chris, do you want to pick that up first and then we'll come to you? Can I just ask the academic question? What do we mean by older adults? Can you define your terms? 65 plus? 65 plus. So, we're talking about retirement age, basically, rather than people 48 to 65. Age that may have difficulties. OK. Well, indeed. Indeed. Yeah, indeed. I will be. I'm just saying, you know, as a broad brush. Retirement age. Ish, yeah. This is an area where, and it's going backwards, so bear with me. But at the turn of the millennium, one of the big political debates was around so-called pensioner poverty. Because at that time, you had a generation of people, you know, this is the generation who still had kind of living memory and connections to the war, lived through the establishment of the welfare state, had worked all their lives, miners, steel, but, you know, all of these kind of things, and then got to retirement age and odir. Incomes were pitiful. Cold people dying in cold houses and all of these things. And pensioner poverty was, forgive me, I can't remember the exact number, but it was about 30%. So, basically, if you didn't own your own home, if you didn't have access to private pension, you were stuffed. And government policy radically changed that. So pensioner poverty went from almost a third to almost a 10%. Now, 10% is too high, of course. Why was that? Reforms to the state pension, things like pension credit now, the triple lock, these ensure that if you have stable housing costs, so, basically, if you retire, at least until the last few years, if you retire with very low or no housing costs and have access to full state pension and pensions credit, you should avoid relative poverty, particularly if you're in a couple. If you're a single older person, it's pretty close and it's getting worse because the triple lock is being eroded and housing costs, we're starting to get the generations through now of people who are unable to afford their own home. So I think... Want to just explain what the triple lock is? Yeah, sorry. So it's the fact that the state pension should go up by, thanks for asking me a technical question, Maggie, which I will now get wrong. So I'll just make some noise while I try and remember it. Either goes up by a minimum of 2.5%, average wages or inflation, so whichever is the lowest of those. And we've had campaigns in the past about applying the same to working-age benefits, which hasn't been the case. But again, it's that kind of stratification of the gentleman that I talked about, the deserving poor. But I do think now, with the cost of living, where you see energy prices going through the roof, where the £100 winter fuel payments might have in the past, that might have been 10%, 15% of your energy bills, is now naff all, it's gone in a week. So I think that, I think both, I think the story for older people in the UK is both one of showing the power of government decisions, as I was saying at the beginning, poverty is by design, it could be designed out, and government's made positive decisions to do that in the UK, but those are starting to erode. The housing crisis is one of them, and the fact that the level of those state pensions is starting to wither again, I think creates risk factors for older people. Thanks Chris, Morg, did you want to? Just absolutely what Chris said, is that we managed to half pensioner poverty, who want to call it that, or older people poverty, because of the policies we enacted, which shows that policies matter, what governments do matter to whether someone lives on poverty or not, there's not an inevitability. It may have been considered an inevitability 20 years ago, that if you got older, you would invariably, once you stopped working, necessarily become impoverished, and then we proved that no actually, if you put the protections in place, that is not the case. And even now people having to be part of a pension plan, hopefully helps a bit in future, but the housing is the massive thing, because people did have their own housing, and we are starting to see these pensioners who are in private rentals, which older people in private rentals, which is really insecure and really expensive and really unpredictable housing costs, so that will start to have an impact. So it's one of the things that prove that we can change things, is actually how we've managed to improve older people's poverty, but it is on the turn now I'm afraid, that positive story, that downward trend has started to flatten off, and it's starting to increase again. So I was actually going to come back, Chris. Do you have confidence that we actually are using the right projections, because that point about older people no longer having that housing security of having bought and paid off mortgages and all of that kind of decades ago, with the next generation of older people, are we relying on wealth that just does not exist, and therefore our entire, whether it's social security, whether it's other forms of support just is poorly, is not equipped to deal with it? I think we have a very fragile state at the moment, is that, because you could have people now who are saying they're early 60s, we're getting towards the end of a mortgage, but the mortgage payments have just gone up by 40% and become unaffordable. So they might need to divest themselves of their house to be able to get by today. Now that's the understandable decision today because if you end up in universal credit for that period, you're going to be in very deep poverty, and frankly, because of the asset you've got, you're not going to get very much. So you've got this high risk system within, say, working agents, or you'd said it, working agents that stop at 65, but then if, so we're going to have people who have fallen out of that, again, we are now in a period where housing costs in Scotland are starting to creep back up, housing, house building is slowing down, and we also, we do need to get back to some fundamentals, and it's partly again what the gent on the side said, is it used to be the consensus that it was part of the welfare state, is you pay in as you, as you, through your lifetime, and from cradle to grave, you'll be looked after. Now, grave came a lot earlier when welfare state came along, and now we have a social care system, which is literally in Scotland built on the National Assistance Act, Scotland, 1948. 1948, we have a system of social care built, I can't even do the maths of how many years ago that is, and that we haven't had a discussion, now we have free personal care in Scotland, which isn't free personal care, it's a big subsidy but it's not free, and older people should be able to live longer, healthier lives, and things like good, flexible, available social care are vital to that. That shouldn't be seen as a huge problem, it should be seen in the same way as that, you need a decent bus service and a decent train service to get it back, it's a defining part of our quality of life, and at the moment it's really bad, so I do think yes, the housing thing is a worry, but I also think we should aspire to more than people being able to sit in a house that they're not going to be evicted from with a tiny income. Can you pass the mic, yes, thanks Rob. Two things, one is what we need an economy that looks after people and planet, so you can all join the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, thank you, but secondly, if we're really looking at a radical shift in this, and we would want to see predistribution rather than redistribution, nonetheless would something like a universal basic income help us move our society towards a much fairer and a much way of losing some of the stigma, so that jobs like caring become much more valued and people feel they can go into them, would that help? So I'm going to give you a fudge, and it's not a fudge to answer, it's like maybe it's I, maybe it's no, right? Yeah, because actually I am not a proponent of universal basic income, because... We are not allowed to remind them. Okay, so I... I think it's an interesting... I like the idea of it. It works if we're all kind of the same, and it works if the basic income is sufficient, and it works if it's genuinely universal, possibly, but all the pilots that have thus far happened and been analysed across the world have not yet been a universal basic income. They have not been universal, they've been targeted at unemployed people, that makes it an unemployment income, not a universal income. They have been, they started off in Finland, I think it was saying we're going to make it 2,000 euros a month, and then it gets reduced to something like 800 euros a month. Well, that is not sufficient, especially in a country like Finland, it's probably no more than your basic benefit levels. So it depends who's designing it and for what purposes. So for example, I think if everyone got a universal basic income of a high enough level, then you could start taxing it straight away, so we wouldn't need £12,500 tax-free allowance, but you could have a £12,500 universal basic income, for example. So there's other ways of working this out that would be quite interesting. Where my problem with universal basic income then comes in is that, okay, what about the number of children you have? Do you then get a different universal basic income if you've got more children? What if you're a lone parent compared to a couple parent? If you're a couple parent and you've got two universal basic incomes, if you're a lone parent, do you only get one universal basic income? Some people call it a citizenship income, but children aren't considered citizens because they're not able to vote yet. So do you... And some of our most vulnerable people are not citizens, so is it a citizen's income? What is it based on? And what about people with disabilities and the varying degrees and types of disability? Do we then give people, in that situation, extra money? And in which case, is it not starting to look a little bit like a benefit system? Absolutely, absolutely. I was going to say I... I mean, in Scotland, certainly through work that we did on the Social Renewal Advisory Board and through work that's been done by IPPR Scotland, what we've been exploring is how we can develop something called a minimum income guarantee instead. For all those complicated factors that Morag just raised, do you know, no two families are alike, no two households are alike, so what do we need to be putting in place which can recognise where income can come from, but actually what is a good minimum we want in this nation for all our households and for all our individuals, which then addresses some of the issues that we've spoken about today about the enormous unpaid workload that's carried by women in society, do you know, incorporating all that, the value of care, things that we really don't value at all, would be the types of things which would be much more possible if we are able to arrive at a minimum income guarantee and get the buy-in from the public and the electorate that that is set above any poverty level, because if we truly are wanting to build a system based on dignity and respect, we cannot have people remaining in poverty. And I absolutely agree, alongside that comes a look at how we predistribute, not redistribute, but also a look at what it is we need to be measuring that's important to us, as opposed to what we're currently measuring now. Chris, you're too. I mean, I share the scepticism of Sapat Marag, if that's a fair summation of your view. Like, I think the minimum income guarantees definitely a place to start. There is broad public support for the idea that should be a floor below which no one should fall. But again, this is a bit sneaky, like the questions in the survey. Like, you asked somebody that question, most people are going to go, yeah, it sounds about right. But what most people do not understand, unless you have experienced it yourself, is just how far universal credit is from that. So we've done a campaign with the Tristle Trust to look at what we've called an essential guarantee, where we sat down with groups of folk from across the UK and said, right, what are the absolute basics you need to get by? So, eating, clothes, simple toiletries, foods, these kind of things. For a single person, it's about 80 quid a week. And for a couple, it's about 200 quid a week. And we are talking bare bones, right? Universal credit for a single person this year is what, one, two, five? No, I've got it the wrong way around. It's 120 is what you need for essentials and universal credit is 85 quid. So you're in destitution if you're on universal credit, you're a single person. And for a couple, you need 200 quid, you get 130. So we're already in a position where we're in complete destitution if you have to rely on universal credit. So I think like UBI is a nice idea. The bit that I think is particularly attractive is the destigmatisation of state support thing and the value of care and stuff. But we have carers allowance, it's pitifully low. We have maternity pay, it's a joke. You know, we can change these things, just requires people to make better decisions. Okay, we've come back to the audience for a couple more questions. I see somebody on my left in the check shirt. Thank you. So I suppose my question is related to a lot of the solutions that have been put on the table during this panel discussion. We've heard that there are lots of options, but what I keep hearing is that they're going to take investment, both short term, long term, from both business and from government. And I think there's general agreement that that's what's needed. But how do we then counter the narrative that that investment costs too much or the money's not there? Because that is essentially the reason why we're still in the position we're in, why in some cases poverty is not dropping fast enough, it is a lack of movement that is always countered with there's no money left. So how do we counter that effectively and how do we really bring forward sensible arguments to counter that? Yes, please do. Again, this is about government choice on how it spends its money. It's not that government doesn't have the money, it's that government chooses not to spend its money on policies that would reduce poverty and redistribute income and wealth. For example, we get tax relief on our pensions every month. Now, I have a colleague that would really like to track this as a social security benefit. And so has written to the government and the ONS and the tax office, HMRC, and said, how much money do you lose each year by giving this tax break to people, especially the higher the income you have, the bigger that tax break. It goes from 20% to 40%. It's a massive tax break. I get that tax break, but what do you lose? How many billions do you lose to the public purse by having that tax break in people's pensions? And they said, we don't publish that information. Of course they don't publish that information because this is a type of welfare payment to people who are working. So we choose what we do and we choose how we measure it and we choose how we publish it. For example, there's also a complete under people are not claiming the benefits they're entitled to. So we know that only two thirds of people who are entitled to pension credit, for example, are claiming it. Now, that could be lack of knowledge. It could be stigma. There could be a variety of reasons or not knowing how to with things going a bit more online. It gets a bit more difficult for older people or when you're in poverty and you don't have access to the same access to the internet or the technology or the skills to use it, et cetera. How do you do these things? So we need to increase people's uptake of that as well. So what can we do? We can have some honesty about where the money actually goes because the billions that is saved on that one thing alone, not taxing people's pension at the point of employment is huge. So these things are not impossible. They're all doable, but they're all choices. There is the money there. You just need a government who's willing to spend its money differently. This is slightly more a very fair answer than the excellent that Margaret's just given. But I do think part of it is about this building. I'm politics in Scotland. I will do a plague on both our houses and that this goes for both sides of a constitutional debate. So there's an idea that the Scottish government has a fixed budget and the money's all spent. Therefore, he can't ask us to do more because we don't have any more money. We already spend in £47 billion or something and independence wouldn't mean that suddenly new money appeared from nowhere. You'd be able to choose to spend the money which the UK government spends in Scotland in a different way. But it's also spent at the minute. And from the same perspective, if you come at this from a unionist perspective, you say, well, Scotland does well from the Barnett formula. It gets 127 pence for every 100 pence that somebody gets in England. So, you know, be grateful. No, we can't be grateful for the situation which we have just now. But that's not necessarily the fault of the constitutional settlement. It's the fault of the choices that the UK government makes and the Scottish government makes. And we have to be able to make different choices. There are plenty of choices that can be made in the chamber, wherever it is from here. That would make a difference. So, we do stupid stuff. Like, we had a stamp duty holiday during COVID. Why? Look at house prices. Now, house prices might be coming down now because of Liz Truss and quasi courting. But we basically gave a tax cut to people who wanted to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds. We could have spent that money on providing emergency food aid during COVID. Now, we spent quite a lot of money on that. But you see, these are the things. And I do think... I think there is something starting to change. So, for example, on things like second homes or Airbnb's. There would have been an argument that had been said at one stage. But what about the landlords? So, you've got to have tourists come to your place. There's hotels. Where do people... Like, I live in rural Perthshire. Businesses can't operate because they can't get staff because people can't afford to live in the area on the comparatively low wages and hospitality and tourism. That doesn't help business. People are only in those properties. Like, I think it's 37% of the year. What economic benefit does that have to an area compared to a family with kids who go to a local nursery, kids go out and parents who work in local businesses? So, I think we have to... You know, things like UBI, I really like the idea, but they are quite ambitious in the future. There are simple things that we can do now, which actually a lot of people would support to take back the agency which sits in this parliament. We need to put that agency into local government as well. And then, importantly, the changes that we all want to see will come in people's communities. And it's this parliament, it's councils, who need to create the conditions that make it easier for those communities to flourish. Not doing enough of that now. And they have the power to do it and need to stop thinking that they don't. A question. I'm dying to come in on that, but I'm not here as... Great, great. I must be. I'm here as the Futures Forum director. You know, I think the last comment is getting towards what I was interested in asking about. I was thinking about Richard Tony, who said what rich people call the problem of poverty, poor people with equal justice call the problem of riches. And I wondered if we could talk a bit about the problem of riches and what we do about that. It seems to me that we get preoccupied with policy and avoid politics. Chris, before we came in here, we were talking a little bit about the problem of wealth and how we don't recognise wealth as being part of the solution. Do you want to say a little bit more about... In the UK is one of the best countries in the world to make loads of money while you do nothing. To sit on the wealth that you have. And we have seen that, like... I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole, but how quantitative easing after the financial crash went into banks and basically didn't go very far, making a small group of individuals incredibly wealthy for the benefit of the economy. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I do think... I keep tweeting about this every few months, every time the results for Shell and BP come out. Like, I think this is really... Twitter will probably have exploded in itself after a while, but these will be great for historians. You can go back and go, look what these stupid people were doing. People couldn't eat, their homes are cold, and Shell made the biggest profit they've ever made in their history. In their history. They've done pretty well for the last wee while. And now in a crisis, while the planet is quite literally on fire, they're making record profit. So, I do think... I think how, you know, so much wealth in Scotland is built, it's in our housing. And we have to think about that. Council tax system is nuts. It needs to change. We need to think about how the wealth within our housing is frankly distributed more fairly. And for me, that would be a real, very good place to start. Mory. So, I've got that Richard Tony quote in the book I wrote, actually, so it's one of my favourites too. I think we have to look at wealth. And even when I'm teaching at the university about poverty, I teach about wealth and wealth inequality. Wealth inequality has become extremely concentrated at the top end and the gap is increasingly big. Now, one of the problems about wealth or the understanding of wealth is that people don't think it relates to poverty. So, people don't mind people being very rich and they think the rest of us are jealous that other people are very, very rich. They think that these people must have done something to deserve their wealth. There's no concept of undeserving wealth. The way there's a concept of the undeserving poor, they think they've done something to deserve this wealth. The very wealthy, there was a study done on the very wealthy, who they also think they deserve their wealth, you know? It's like, do you think that you're cleverer or better than other people that you managed to accrue this wealth and say, yeah, yeah, I must be really, really special. So, we have this understanding. And in fact, someone was speaking to me, they have been in a taxi in London and they were speaking to a person of Indian heritage taxi driver in London who said, you have to be careful about going after Rishi Sunak about his wealth because you're looking at a community that's very aspirational and very proud of his wealth. You know, that's what the taxi driver said. Would you disagree? So is that a problem then if you go after wealthy people because people have it disconnected from poverty. But in fact, what we really need to get across is that as wealth increases at the top and becomes more concentrated and then poverty also increases, there is a direct pattern, correlation completely the same pattern between poverty and increasing wealth inequality. So, these things are utterly connected because those people are not getting more wealthy off their own sweat. They're getting more wealthy off the sweat of people on these non-standard contracts with poor working conditions that we talked about earlier. So, we can't disconnect them. Politically, we can't disconnect them. But it's how do you target that because even politicians don't want to go after the wealthy. I mean, it is not all for some of us, do you? But I think it is interesting that, you know, there's been... Where is the media who hire about the millions, the billions of pounds that were transferred to the wealthy during COVID for PPE contracts that never delivered any working PPE? You know, all of these, where's the Daily Mail headline about that? Doesn't exist? There's no Daily Mail headline about that because it's the wealthy who control the likes of the Daily Mail. And this is when it comes to wealth, isn't just about the amount of money you've got. It's the power and the influence it brings. And there was a report, I think it was published by LSE Centre for Analysis. It was an Oxfam funded report called Double Trouble, which made the, yeah, absolutely, evidenced the correlation between wealth inequality and increasing poverty. But I think there were a couple of things they said in that report which I thought was really interesting. And the one I touched on earlier was about the fact that, you know, you've got this growing rich and powerful international and national elite, which has the political power and the access to decision makers, but also they influence legal frameworks and government policy. And they're going to influence that policy in ways that benefit them, not that benefit, you know, the masses and the population. So not only do you see that greater concentration of income and wealth, but that leads to fewer resources to be shared amongst the rest of the population. And that's where you see the increase in poverty. And actually, less concern for income households, low income households. And we were talking earlier about the fact that it's completely beyond our ken how anybody could go anywhere where a meal would cost £12,000. Right? Because that's what I think of the Vishisunakin family in the state, at Disneyland or somewhere. And what is that? That's about the equivalent almost of an annual pension, you know, so for someone like Sunak, sitting in power in Westminster, he's not going to have any understanding of how little and how difficult it is for people, because it's completely out with his experience. If he can think nothing of spending £12,000 on a meal, he's not going to think about us. A children's meal? A children's meal, sorry, yeah. That was a children's menu. That was a cheap menu, was it? Yeah. I was at Disneyland with his children. So we do need to do something about the disconnect that we've created in society, you know, which we're beginning to see, the polarisation and the impact it has overall on everyone. But if the disconnect with politicians because I'm going to put money on it that Vishisunakin has no idea how much any of these benefits are, or how much a pension is, I'm going to put money that he has not a clue. Boris Johnson didn't when he was questioned. He doesn't have a clue about much, but, you know, he didn't have a clue about that for sure. Hopefully, with a 12 grand, I don't know how old Vishisunat's kids are, but I've got a four-year-old, and I guarantee you, if I spent 12 quid on a meal for a hand, I'm not eating that. So hopefully that food is sitting there and he's cheesed off like everybody else trying to get a four-year-old to eat anything. But I think the thing, like I think we have to keep in mind is that those extremely wealthy individuals, loads of income and assets and stuff, are actually a reasonably small number in Scotland. I mean, there's quite a lot in the UK. Some of them have Moscow post-codes too, but we can do a separate event on that. But I think in Scotland we have such an issue with our land and housing and that it's so focused. And that that is like we can have another debate over whether wealth can be useful to the economy, you know, like investing money to spark business, to spark innovation. Like I can get into an argument about that, but getting into an argument on people sitting on huge banks of property, which don't do very much, whose rents are going through the roof. And you know Edinburgh is slowly squeezing the population out of it who are not ultra-well. We're not quite lending yet, but we're heading that way. And I think, like for me, that the wealth thing in Scotland that we have to look at is our land and property. I think we've probably got time for one more question. Yes, the person just on the end there. What troubles me sometimes, pardon me, is how we all absorb these ideological views without even knowing it. So, you know, why do we not look at the top 2% or whatever? And I have become more aware of kindly people saying, you know, I shouldn't have a pension because there are people who need it more because they are getting a lot of information about poverty quite rightly, but they take it onto themselves. So in the end, it could be an argument for working against a universal system, which would actually be against the interests of everybody. But I think that there is definitely a move against kind of universalism at the moment, and not just from those who are Tories. So I think there needs to be a way of presenting the arguments around poverty which brings in the way in which, in a sense, it affects us all. Chris, do you want to come in on that because I know that JRR has done work on the social and community costs of poverty and why it is everybody's problem. It's not just the individuals who are suffering it. I do think we are at a dangerous tipping point which you're talking about is... So quite often, you know, if we think about the kind of cultural influences on the UK and Scotland, obviously in Scotland we have England and Europe we could talk about another time, but of North America. Now, there are lots of amazing social movements in North America, but that is in the context when they have no welfare state. So food banks are almost a kind of import from America because they have built up in communities there due to the complete lack of minimum support. If you speak to folk who are brilliant organisations like Atruso Trust, a lot of their volunteers walked into a food bank maybe in the winter of 2010 and thought, it's going to be a tough couple of months and then I'll look forward to going back to running my youth club or whatever I did before. 12 years, 13 years later, they're still doing that job and I think that that's the thing. Atruso have brilliantly, have it as their strategic goal to put themselves out of business in terms of being a food bank and that's the right one. And I think that's something that anybody who believes in a society that's free from poverty is we have to see these as temporary solutions to something which you don't have to be a Marxist to believe that there is a standard level of state support which is that minimum, which holds people up, which is what the welfare state and things we're supposed to be and then there's space for philanthropy business, all of these kind of things to go in the only human endeavour that is frankly more fun than just surviving. But we have to fight against the idea that big society crap which David Cameron used to push, it's so vital that we push against that because if we go over that tipping point, it's a hell of a long journey back. Morag, Salwet, do you want to come in on that? No, I absolutely agree and I think it's a really important point that you've made and it goes back to that thing about how, you know, we're so focused in on income differentials without looking at where some of the big differences are that you know around wealth that we can make a point that we have that thing about, oh well, you know, I don't need my state pension, I can get by without it because I've got a private one but actually we need, it goes back to the idea of the mig or the universal basic income that we all, the state should be providing a certain amount for us because of what's been paid in, et cetera. But also do you know how hard it is to get things back to universal after you've lost it? And I think that's a really important point to make, you know, I could argue I didn't need the child benefit but I fought really hard for it to remain a universal benefit and I think it's critical that we continue to do that and don't, as you say, shoot ourselves in the foot in a way by thinking, oh there's a little bit here we can redistribute, actually there's a much bigger piece of the pie we need to be bringing in to redistribute. I completely agree with that. If we move away from these universal provisions what will happen is those provisions will start to degrade and deteriorate and they will lose support and they will become another source of stigma. One of the things that put the triple lock on the state pension was the influence of middle class and multi pensioners. It wasn't the poorer pensioners that had that power. So there's power to be had in universalism. So there's therefore, there's a rationale for a government who doesn't want that type of power to be in the hands of the people to not have universal services because universal services are popular with people. The people who were very upset at losing, even I knew a few people who didn't necessarily need the child benefit but who were very upset at losing it because they had put that aside for what they did with their children, you know. And so just losing it lost that particular stream of income that to them psychologically was for the children. And that's also remembered for a lot of women. It was, and for a lot it still is, the only source of independent income that they can control which is critical if you're trying to escape any sort of abusive situations. Absolutely, yeah. So yeah, it's problematic and it would degrade the whole system for everybody else if we'd move away from the universal system. Thanks for that. Before I allow the panel to give their final closing remarks and reflections, I just want to say, Scotland's Futures Forum is about to embark on some work on exactly these issues on how we break down the structural inequalities. What are the structural changes we need to make in Scotland within the powers that we have and using the full powers that we have to create that fair and sustainable society that we want to see. And I suppose I'm going to start with you, so I'm going to move along. If you could, in your final two minutes, reflections, but also given what Chris and others have said about not asking stupid questions, not just keep asking the same questions sometimes or looking, look, they are poor people. Let's look at them for a bit. Actually, what are we doing? What should our focus for the Futures Forum work but also more generally for governments to, so we're not here having the same conversation in future years? I mean, I think there are a few things that we've already started to do in Scotland that we need to increase and improve on. And if we're looking at child poverty, which is the main sphere that I work in, I would say having the Scottish Child Payment in place and looking to see how we can invest more in the Scottish Child Payment. But also it's that thing about, yeah, it's great to have that flat level of payment for families in poverty. Then it's worth recognising where are the differentials that we need to be addressing. And we, I mean, I'll be plugged for a campaign we've got at the moment, which is around the young parent penalty that as a young parent, you get a lower rate of universal credit, then you would if you were a parent over 25. Do you know? Now, we're campaigning to get that change that Westminster level, but we would also argue that in Scotland we should look to see what we can do for the Scottish Child Payment. So there are some very practical measures we can take within the powers we have and the monies that we have. I think on a broader level, we need to be thinking about, and one of the things I think will be really useful to explore with the Scottish Futures Forum is how we can use opportunities like the fact that we have to transition to net zero and beyond as a way of resetting things after a just transition. Now, I work closely on these issues as a just transition commissioner, but we've been pushing for social infrastructure to be a key part of how we develop a just transition. If we're having to make big structural changes now in relation to the climate crisis that we've got, we should be looking at how we do that in a way that provides greater equity in Scotland. So that would be one. Another thing is never lose sight of hope. I'm a real optimist. I do think we can make things better because I think with hope, I mean hope for me is something that's built on agency and it's that sense of agency we need to be using, our own agency, agency in communities, et cetera, to build and to campaign for the type of society we want to live in. A few points I suppose I would just like to sum up with is it kind of goes back to this gentleman's point is that too often when we talk about poverty or look at poverty, we focus on people living in poverty. And I think that's unhelpful. We need to keep the focus on the structural reality of poverty and how it and how changes to those structures would improve poverty. And that would bring in the wealth question as well because we can't look at poverty without looking at wealth inequality, particularly in the ways that Chris already outlined. Another thing I'd say is that there's also a disconnect in Scotland from when we're looking at social systems or social renewal, if you want to call it that, after the COVID pandemic and economic systems and economic renewal. So when they had the economic renewal advisory group and you had the social renewal advisory group, I looked at who was on each. Saatvaat was on the social renewal advisory group. I was involved in one of the circles of the social renewal advisory group and I thought, let me see who's on the economic advisory group. Why are people who know more about how society operates and how people in society are impacted by economic decision making? Why, let's see how many people like us are on the economic renewal advisory group. How many do you think? None. None. They went to the business community to talk about economics. Now, there should have been people from an economics background in the social renewal advisory group so that we could start to understand because you cannot separate these and governments continue to try to separate these and they are not separate and they are not distinct. So we have to be working across all areas of government and I know people in government always say, oh yeah, we're doing that or we're doing that better than we have. No, no and no again. No, do not and you're not doing it well enough, quite frankly. Did I have another point? My pen ran out so it's a wee bit. Oh yes. So my other point is that we also have to have an honesty. Some people's poverty is caused by things like discrimination. Whether that's discrimination against disabled people, whether that's discrimination of people from an ethnic minority background, whether that's discrimination against single parents, whether they're mums or dads, we need to be honest about that. So that means doing a lot of work. We have a thing that we focus on in policy matters called employability which again focuses on the people without the jobs to say what can we do to fix them a bit to make them more employable. And I've come across and frequently say to government, well what are you doing about employability? I'm taking credit for that one. What are you doing about employability? What work are you doing with employers to say this is how you could be doing it differently and it would be advantageous to your work and it would be. I'll give one wee example if I may is 25 years ago I worked in a call centre when I was a single parent and I was still a student. No, I wasn't a student, I was a single parent, I was no longer a student, I worked in a call centre. And this was in 97, so it was actually 26 years ago. That call centre used to take over the local primary school in the summer holidays and get nursery and school staff in there in the summer holidays so that all the women working in that call centre had childcare all summer. And you got fixed days and fixed hours. There was no variation, you chose them. So there was women that said I only worked six to nine cos my husband works during the day or some women saying I only work Saturdays and Sundays cos my husband is at home, et cetera, et cetera. And then they took over the school. So we had childcare, we had fixed hours and that was the most tremendous workforce because they knew everything about that business. They were an amazing team and they were valued. And we don't have that now, we've got the insecure employment and the poor conditions where we're not providing something simple like support with childcare during the school holidays. And we've been in a place before when we have done this and we've lost things that we used to have. So when we talk about what can we do, there's an assumption we've never done it before. What we need to do is roll back a bit sometimes to what we've already done in the past and do it again, but better. Chris. Yeah, just to thoroughly agree with that, we quite often, particularly if we have meetings with civil servants, and I say this with love, some of my best friends are civil servants. Literally, literally. But we go looking for innovative solutions, these wild new ideas to solve, you know, it's not that the solutions are there. I mean like a really good example, you know, the next Westminster election people are talking about the potential for another Labour government and things and some of that new Labour did around Sure Start. Worked. It was then just cut. It wasn't that something like, well this isn't working, we need to, we could use this money elsewhere. It's been studied within an inch of its life. There was suggestions for how it could be tweaked and improved and we followed those, it just worked. It brought people in, it brought people into access services, helped them get benefits, all these kinds of things. What most people are not looking for is they don't want to get a degree and all of these, you know, loads of really complex stuff. It's how am I going to get childcare? How am I going to get transport? My house is crap, my rent keeps going up, these kind of things. People are not actually asking for the world, but to be able to access the world, you need those simple things. And I think that coming back to that point around agency within this building, within other public institutions in Scotland and the UK government, of course, they have a massive responsibility for this and a massive responsibility for causing a lot of the poverty we see today. But we can change. We've seen with pensioners over time we saw a child poverty drop. We've built social houses in Scotland that's kept poverty levels down. The Scottish child payment will lift tens of thousands of children out of poverty. These things make a difference. Do more of those and we'll be winner. We must end it there. Thank you. Can I ask you to join with me in thanking our panel, Chris, Morg, and Tata? Thank you very much for coming along today and for your contributions. I would also like to thank our BSL interpreters, Heather Graham and Zoe Lane. Thank you. Finally, I'd like to thank our partners, the Scotland's Futures Forum, for their support in putting today together. As I said earlier, the Parliament's Futures Forum will be supporting further debate and discussion on this issue. So please do check out its website and follow it on what used to be Twitter. It's at Scott Futures for more information. And can I take this opportunity, the final plug, to remind you of a couple more events that are taking place today. The festival isn't quite over yet. We have Scotland, a good global citizen, coming up shortly. And also, where are the ethics in AI, in artificial intelligence, to name but two? I do hope you'll be able to join us again, if not later on today, next year. Thank you very much for coming along.