 I'm a very good morning to you and welcome to the 17th meeting of the social justice and social security committee. We have no apologies for today's meeting and our first item of business today is a decision to take agenda items 3, 4 and 5 in private, are we all agreed? Thank you. O'r ffordd, we will hear from two panels as part of our inquiry into addressing child poverty through parental employment. Over the last few weeks, we have held evidence sessions on issues around childcare, education, training and employability programmes. Today, we are focusing on employers. The need for flexible and family-friendly working was a very clear theme in addressing child poverty in the committee's recent call for views. I welcome to the meeting our first panel of witnesses who will focus on policy. We have Jack Evans, senior policy adviser Scotland from Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Lynn Humdy, co-creator and programme manager, making work work, the challenges group and founder of flexible working Scotland. Nicky Sloe, director and co-founder, flexibility works and Marek Seminac, senior public policy adviser Scotland and Northern Ireland, Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, and they are joining us in the room. We have Jane Van Zill, chief executive officer working families who is joining us remotely. Thank you all for accepting our invitation. I have a few points to mention about the format of the meeting before we start, so we have roughly about one hour approximately to put forward questions to you. Fractural witnesses and members, please wait until I or the member asking the question, say your name before speaking. Please allow our broadcasting colleagues a few seconds to turn your microphone on before you start to speak. You can indicate with an hour in the dialogue box in Blue Deans if you wish to come in on a question. Don't feel that you have to answer every single question and if you have nothing new to add to what's been already said by others, then that's okay as well. Can I ask everyone to keep questions and answers as concise as possible? I'm going to invite members to come in and ask their questions. First of all, can I ask Paul to come in? Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the panel. We're particularly interested in what is happening out there just now and what types of flexibilities are required. Really, to what extent are those flexibilities available just now to low-income parents? I wonder if I can direct that question first. The convener has asked me to be quite specific in terms of how I direct that. I wonder if I can come to Jane first. I'm just looking for a comment on what's happening currently and where are the flexibilities. Thank you very much for having me here. One of the challenges we think is that although many parents in Scotland are working flexibly, the challenges many of them are working flexibly in ways that reduce their income. If you can work full-time in a hybrid way, sometimes in an office and sometimes at home, that's really helpful. If you're working flexibly but that reduces your income, then that is an issue in terms of flexible working because it doesn't mean that you have the right amount of income in order to prevent, for example, in this case, child poverty. There have been lots of studies done, I know, flexibility works have done one in Scotland and our research also shows that many parents are working flexibly. The issue is where you are in low pay, your access to flexibility impacts your ability to earn money that has the impact of reducing your income. How available are the flexibilities for parents at the moment, particularly parents who are on low incomes? Are there practical examples that you could share of where things are working well? Things are working well in the knowledge industry. Anybody who has access to work really using a computer, essentially, and anywhere where there is a tight labour market, but that is around what we would call, quote unquote, the talent, that tends to be people who are on higher incomes. But it's people on lower incomes who are working, for example, in retail, in logistics, in engineering, in hospitality, in education. Those are the people and anybody working in a place-based organisation where you have to go to work. I mean literally from brain surgeons to cleaners, but the issue is that they don't have a choice about where they work. They have to go to where they work. Obviously, if they have caring responsibilities, either for a child or an adult, that therefore means that their ability to earn money is significantly restricted. I wonder if you are just extending from that point about how do we introduce that flexibility. What are the effective ways of doing that, particularly where there are significant challenges on the ground? I'm keen to bring in other members of the panel, so perhaps Nicky might want to comment on how we grow that, essentially. Yeah, we've been speaking to a lot of employers, I mean in general speaking to a lot of employers, but in the run-up to this inquiry, and asking them that very question, you know, what is it that we could do to support you? I mean, more examples, ideas, knowledge, they want to know how practically to do it. We find some employers are disinterested, but many are interested. They're just not sure how to do it, particularly in those sectors that Jane was talking about, where they've got front-line workers. They are really keen to know how they can actually create more flexible working. We have also been talking to front-line workers and finding out, well, what is it that makes a difference to you? They know that they can't work from home. Front-line workers know that. But what they are looking for is things like reliability of shifts, being able to set their shifts so that they know when they're always working. Occasional ad hoc flexibility for when emergencies arise within their family or situations arise. Those are the sorts of things that front-line workers say that they're looking for, and employers are saying that they want more evidence, knowledge and ideas of what they can do. It's just bringing those two things together. I think that we need to do to help employers, because we have to remember that employers are running their businesses, so it's about providing support. A number of employers that we spoke to said that practical support is what would be really helpful. We have worked hand-in-hand with a number of employers, provided that practical support, gone into their businesses, walked around their factories and given them advice and ideas and solutions about simple things like shift patterns, setting down shifts. We've gone back and seen the difference that's made to those organisations. I think that that would be really helpful for employers that practical support that ability to learn from one another and to hear practical examples of what is possible. One of the key challenges is the lack of understanding of the various flexible working options out there. That means both by employees and by employers as well. The pandemic has been great in boosting home and hybrid working. However, that's only one type of flexible working. If you look at the work that we've done in terms of what employers are looking for, home working is actually not on top of the list of priorities of their preferences when it comes to flexible working. That tends to be flexitime. Having flexibility in the new start and finish of work time. One of the reasons there is childcare responsibilities as well. Broadly speaking, about three different categories of flexible working, which is flexibility of where you work, your home working, flexibility of when you work, your flexitime, your compressed hours and flexibility in how much you work, reduced hours, part-time hours, your four-day week, et cetera, et cetera. There's a very clear link between your income level and your occupation and the availability of home working to you, both Mickey and Jane have mentioned that. Already our research shows that actually those on the lowest incomes, those who earn up to £20,000 a year, about 70% of those can't work from home and don't work from home at all. Overall, about 33% of all Scots cannot work from home and 11% do not want to work from home. So that leaves basically half of all Scots for home of flexibility is not an option if you equate flexibility with home working. I believe that we are focusing on employers, but one of the things that working families does is provide a free legal advice line. What we find is that so many employees do not know what their rights are. As Nikki mentioned, employers are trying to run their business and sometimes they just don't have the bandwidth to be able to provide the flexibility. One of the things that we think is really important not to lose focus on is giving employees knowledge about what their rights are and what they are entitled to so that they can have those conversations with their employers, particularly when they are small employers. I am now going to invite James, who is online. I think I will ask my first question to Jack Lennon. One of the things that seemed to come out of the pandemic was our ability for the workforce to work flexibly. What do you think we've learned from that experience, Jack? I think that for many people they learned that flexible working was an option, but for the cohort that probably JRF and others are interested in on this panel about child poverty, as has been given in the previous answer, flexibility was not on offer. Furlow was on offer for them. They took time off the labour market and then returned to the same inflexible low-paid work that they were in before the pandemic. I probably think that the divergence between low-pay and higher-pay jobs has grown. We are entering a system where we have a class of people working at home and in a service industry servicing those same people on lower pay. What I would say about that is to think about the scale of what we are talking about today in light of the child poverty targets being predicted to be missed, as was announced earlier this week. We are talking about changing the work conditions of around 200,000 parents or 200,000 families. Flexibility is just one lever that we can possibly pull. The last thing on the learnings from the pandemic is that the messaging matters. Messaging was key to ensuring compliance with pandemic Covid rules. Messaging about this mission for child poverty needs to penetrate into the business community and the private sector as well as it has permeated within the policy and third and public sector. One would you like to come in? Thank you for the invitation today. I would agree with what Jack said. One of the things that we are seeing now and the previous question was about what is happening out there is we are seeing a divergence between employers who have really grasped the learning from the pandemic and have really seen a new way of working and a way of increasing the diversity of their workforces and the ability to bring different people into their businesses and those who just want to turn back the clock. I think that that shows us perhaps a deficit in management in employers that some managers find it easier to manage people they can see. That is perfectly understandable, but some of those managers have perhaps not been adequately skilled or trained to do that job. It also shows us how difficult it is to maintain culture in a business when people do not come together. We should not assume that flexible working means remote working and there are lots of different ways that people can work a bit more flexibly or a bit more predictably. I think the pandemic showed us that the childcare sector needs a lot of support and I think what we need to support. Let's be frank, this is a gendered issue. We are talking about mums more than dads, although the pandemic did show us that through furlough and sadly through redundancy dads have been able to play a more active role in their families. It has shown us that we need a triangle of policy levers. We have been talking about childcare and flexible working today. We also need to think about getting mums back into the workplace. There is a high level of economic inactivity among mums, particularly single mums. We know that they are 90 per cent of single parents because flexibility is not a nice to have. It is a choice between being in work or out of work. We know that women, particularly women in lower-paid jobs, were much more impacted by the pandemic. We need to help those women who are still out of work because they were made redundant during the pandemic to get back in. Can I ask just on that last point line about childcare? There seems to be a difficulty to have the adequate childcare throughout the system. With flexible working practices outwith working from home, which Jack quite rightly pointed out that I am doing while many other people are unable to. However, with flexible working help, childcare seems to be expensive throughout, it seems to be difficult to get together and so on. Would flexible working take some of the pressure of the necessity for some of the childcare, except in cases like single mothers and so on, that that would not be the case? The two things go hand in hand. If parents have the flexibility to start slightly later, they do not need to pay for a breakfast club if they are children at school. For example, I had to find an overnight stay for my son in order to be here today. I am not a single parent, but my husband works shifts. If this was my daily job, it would cost me between £5 and £15 extra a day if I could find a place in a breakfast club to attend a job that started at 9 o'clock. However, if I could start at half past nine, which I do, then I do not have to pay that cost and I do not have the stress of trying to find that place. I conducted a survey among some members of my community, flexible working Scotland. One woman told me an absolutely awful story. She is a single mum. She has a child with additional support needs. When he was eight years old, so P3 or P4, she had to leave him in the playground for an hour before school started because she could not get any childcare. She wanted to work. She wanted to be a role model for him. She wanted to get off benefits. Luckily, she lived opposite the school, so after school he let himself into the house for an hour before she came home from work. Our children should not be in that situation, particularly not children with additional support needs. Parents consistently tell me that getting childcare for disabled children with other additional support needs is nigh on impossible. Those parents, especially mums, say to me that they cannot imagine ever being full-time again. When women work part-time, they earn less because they work fewer hours, but they earn less because part-time work is paid less. It is valued less. There are employers who think that they are not interested in their career and that they are giving half the effort. I think that childcare and flexible working have to work hand-in-hand and childcare workers have to have some flexibility. I don't know if anyone else wants to come in. Just one short point on the childcare question that was raised. The Scottish Government currently spent £1 billion a year on childcare. It extended the entitlement to 1140 hours, widely welcomed, not always coming through for lots of people in lots of areas. I think that one of the questions that we need to ask is who shoulders the responsibility of childcare and flexibility, whereas the balance between the two. By paying for childcare, are we letting employers off the hook for inflexible anti-family practices and should more be done with employers to amp up that flexibility so the cost of the state is lowered or can be directed to support parents and children in different ways? I'm going to invite Jeremy in. I wonder if I can maybe start with Lino Maric on this one. I'm interested to know about public sector jobs where you have to go, whether that's a hospital or a school, and often we can work where there's no childcare available. If you're a cleaner or someone who works in the NHS, you've got to work Saturday Sundays. How do we deal with that type of issue where you've got to start at maybe 7 o'clock because that's when the ward changes? Are those types of jobs just not possible or have you got thought about any solutions around those types of jobs? I think that's a really good point. The public sector is an area where the Scottish Government has the relationships and the levers to make an impact. We have staffing crises in the NHS, in education. Those were the two sectors where, again, mums were telling me they had the biggest problems. I absolutely appreciate that the ultimate flexibility nurses can't normally work from home, although I think that we were all surprised that GPs can. There are innovations that perhaps we weren't expecting, but as Nicky was saying, predictability is so important in those jobs because people are being called in for shifts at short notice and they have no childcare. That means they do not get paid. Mums were telling me they had to pay for childcare in case they needed it. The average cost of childcare for a day in Scotland is around £55. That's £55 that is not in that parent's pocket because they paid for childcare thinking they had a shift that day and they didn't. Or their partner was home and they didn't need the childcare. The inflexibility of childcare is a big issue for those professions. Also, being able to plan ahead to call in family members or to create relationships with other parents so that they can help each other out, that can only happen if you know when you're going to be working. The other point is the lack of progression opportunities. Even when people are able to find part-time work, for example in the NHS or in schools, it prevents them progressing. Several mums said to me that they were offered a part-time role because their manager knew them and they performed well. However, it was made absolutely clear that they would not be promoted. One nurse told me that she'd had to go down a band in order to get a part-time job and there was no chance that she was ever going to go back up. Women told me that when they have one child, it's manageable to be a nurse. Two children, three children, just impossible. One of the women that came through our making work work programme, she was a highly qualified nurse in intensive care. She had to give that up when she had her first child because the shifts weren't manageable. She became a research nurse. She had another child. It was about manageable. Her relationship broke down. She couldn't be a nurse. She had wanted to be a nurse her whole life since she was a little girl. Predictability in those professions is really important. Job shares are important and part-time work is important. The Scottish Government has an opportunity to trial and test and really learn what can work for those organisations but also for their staff. In a staff in crisis. On the back of that, it's very clear that key workers, especially those working in the NHS flexibility, are a lot more difficult but it's not impossible. There are things that can be done. There are flexible working arrangements that NHS workers can make use of as well. There are ways you can manage rotas, for example, shifts being staggered, etc. I would echo what Lyn said around predictability. I think that's an absolutely crucial part of the picture. She will not thank me for this but I'll use my wife as an example who's a paramedic. She, incidentally, is also on a flexible working contract. All the flexible working contract says that she doesn't work one particular day per week which helps us with childcare. But the thing that made the biggest difference was when she was put on a 14-week rolling-rota system so we now actually can see what the shifts are going ahead years and years. We can plan childcare around that, we can plan holidays, etc. So that is absolutely key. I would agree with that. Can I now invite Miles in? Thank you, convener. Good morning. Thanks for joining us today. I wanted to really look more in detail at what that flexibility looks like. It was a good example that you just gave there, Marek, but to what extent can the Scottish Government do more to ensure that these flexible working practices are put into place and become the norm in the public sector? The example that you gave there, Marek, I don't know for the NHS if that's just within the ambulance service or if it's being adapted wider in nursing. I certainly know a lot of friends who work in nursing that only by going on to the bank have they managed to get any control over their shifts and that's far more expensive for the public as well to fund that. Is there any other examples of what that can look like? I think that it's really important that the Scottish Government sets a standard for the public sector, that it can follow what is expected around some of the things that have been discussed today and really make that quite vocal. I think that there's definitely something that can be done around procurement of services. Obviously, in the fair work first framework we do have offering flexible and family friendly working practices for all workers from day one. We were delighted and really pleased that that was embedded into the principles of fair work first, but we'd like to see that strengthened. We would really like to see all organisations that are in receipt of public funds really being held a bit more accountable for their commitment to flexible and family friendly working, being able to really demonstrate that they are committed to flexibility, family friendly working and it's not just a tick box. I think that really holding them to account and setting some kind of standard is really important for the public sector, for government really important to lead by example, making flexible working the default for all jobs unless it's really impossible not to be done flexibly, advertising roles as flexible, senior and public people endorsing flexible working, role modelling flexible working those are all things, practical things I think that could be done realistically within the public sector. We've also still got at the moment a commitment around the four day working week trial in the public sector and an element of money that's been allocated for that. We would like to see if flexibility works is that trial and that money to be used to look at some of the other types of flexible working, not just the four day working week, so for some of these other sectors like nursing, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, let's look at those sectors and let's look at other types of flexibility and other jobs within the public sector, not just the four day working week. I think that's important and can be a real game changer for people but I think that we should be looking at a wider pilot in the public sector, utilising that money to look at other types of flexible working. Leonard Jack is anything you want to add on? Yes, one point just broadly on public sector and flexibility. The committee's role that we're looking at today is flexible working ability to reduce poverty or flexibility and family friendly working policies to reduce poverty. 6 per cent of people in the public sector are working in the public sector in poverty compared to 13 per cent in the private sector, so the public sector is way ahead in terms of its poverty reducing ability via working in the public sector. I think that flexibility is good in its own right and is important in all aspects but if we're looking for solutions to child poverty, I think that it's incumbent to understand what are those drivers for that small cohort of people working in the public sector who are in poverty. It might not just be flexibility. Jane, is there anything you want to add to bring you in? Thank you. Just to support what everybody else has been saying, it is not just about flexibility, it's about having a living wage, living hours and predictable hours and those are things that could be mandated within the public sector and particularly in terms of the procurement that the Scottish Government has guidance on. At the moment, you insist on living wage but having living hours would make a significant difference, particularly for people downstream in the procurement process. 40 per cent of the Scottish Government's money goes to SMEs and those have particular issues with how to manage that. Again, I support Nicky's view that the four-day week is great but there are other things that we perhaps might be doing differently. Thank you. All my other questions have been covered, so I'm happy to hand back. I believe...Lynn, did you want to come back in? Yeah, just one point. Just to back up what Nicky was saying about really shouting about good flexible working practice. I think through its procurement, through its campaigning, the Scottish Government has an opportunity to really highlight not just public sector but also private and third sector. It's a great opportunity for organisations where flexible working is really making a difference and really showing that using organisations like Nicky's to really show where best practice works because we know that some employers are worried about how to implement flexible working and they need those real examples. They may also need some training but a key statistic that really illustrates this for me is that while Nicky knows how many people are working flexibly in the economy but only 30 per cent of jobs are advertised flexibly and so many more people are actually in flexible jobs, so this means that organisations may be working flexibly and not telling anyone. The women who I work with on our returners programme, for them flexibility is a priority. 80 per cent of them are mums. They need work that works around them and their other commitments. Women are having their kids later. We know about the sandwich generation where women are looking after their kids and their parents. They may have disabled children who they're having to look after as adults. Those women are looking for flexible employers. They're not even looking at the rest. They are designing their work-life blends around work that they are able to do. Those employers are missing out by not shouting about the practices that they might be doing but they don't necessarily realise that people are looking for. I'd like to ask the question from a different angle. Are there any Scottish Government policies that you can point to that are pulling in the wrong direction, in the opposite direction? Is there any perhaps that you could point to? I don't know if either Nicky or Lyn would like to come in on that. I think that there are some. The big one for us, the challenges group, is the provider of support to women who want to return to work after a career break and who we're now able, because we've identified that under-employment is an issue for women, particularly mums. We're now able to help women who are under-employed to change their working situation because we know that when women go back to the workplace they get trapped in work that they're able to do but which is maybe beneath their potential, their earning potential, their skills or their experience. I think that in this whole conversation we're forgetting parents who are at risk of poverty. For parents, particularly single parents, it takes one life event and that might completely tip the balance for them. It might mean they're unable to work, they might have to leave a job, a relationship might break down and particularly women, they're left high and dry. I think that we need to not forget about all those so-called economically inactive women in particular who aren't in the workplace and the Scottish Government has been funding a women return programme which finished at the end of the previous financial year and we're in a hiatus now where they're evaluating it. There's still a commitment to the gender pay gap. There's a commitment to combating child poverty, to helping families to increase their income but there's no women returners funding and in our own situation we're now receiving funding from the UK Government in a devolved area to be able to support women returners. I think that we need to get rid of this assumption that women's careers are linear, that they have a baby and then just jump back into the workplace because that's not the reality. The longest career break we've worked with was a woman who's out of work for 17 years. She has a disabled child and it just hasn't been feasible for her to get back in. She is now back in, she's an engineer, so a very male dominated sector but she could have been contributing if there was better childcare provision, greater flexibility and the support. After 17 years it's easy to assume you've forgotten everything you knew. That is definitely not the case and so we need that support to help women just mums from just being forgotten and our economy suffers. The women suffer but our economy suffers because those women could be contributing. Women tell me it helps their mental health to be working, to be having adult conversations, to be using their brain and those women have just been sidelined. I think that the women returners funding is a key policy that needs to be reinstigated. I would just build on and echo what Lynne said. I've had the privilege to work with a number of women returners over the last couple of years that have been on some of the programmes that Lynne has described and the vast majority of the women that I've met have said that flexibility is one of the reasons that they have left the workplace, lack of flexibility, and they've also said that there's been a lack of flexibility. Lynne said that it's a critical criteria for returning to the workplace and they talk about the value of those programmes and the peer-to-peer support, the confidence building, the building of knowledge. My part in those programmes is very small. It's delivering a hefty workshop about flexible working but in the main the women say they had no idea of the different options that were out there, their legal rights. I think that those programmes are vital to give people the confidence and the knowledge because it's so hard to know where those flexible jobs exist. I would like to just mention employability very briefly. 90 per cent of unemployed women say that having control over where, when or how much they work would make it much easier to get a job. As Lynne said, around about 30 per cent of jobs in Scotland mention flexible working. Over half of Scottish women say that they wouldn't apply for a job if it doesn't mention flexible working. We know flexibility is not a silver bullet but we know that it's really important for the cohort of people that we're talking about. Then we go on to look at employability programmes. There's a lot of really good work going on and a lot of investment from Scottish Government in employability and particularly parental employability programmes. We really need to make sure that we're building in flexible working knowledge for the people who are providing those contracts. It's not about just any job that we'll do, it's about finding a flexible job for people. I think that we should be expecting that to be built into the programmes. We should be asking people who are in receipt of employability funding to report about how are they providing that advice to people who are looking for flexible working, how are they negotiating with employers in their local areas about flexible jobs. I think that that would make a really big difference to some of the employability programmes that have been built in both in terms of influencing employers but also the people who are going through the programmes making sure that they've got the knowledge that they need about how to find flexible jobs. I have a number of questions that I want to ask but I'll start off with the questions that I've been given before we move on. I want to come to you first, Marek. We heard this morning that we need flexible working, we need good job design. We need better quality of jobs. We heard last week from the IPPR that the only real power Scotland has is soft power. It's effectively just marketing PR like the business pledge that we had, which had a reasonable take-up but not great when you'd bear in mind as 109,000 businesses around one or more. My question is, if, as you said in your evidence that in practice what we need is good line management, what's the role of the Scottish Government in that? Do they have a role in fostering best practice bearing in mind that we've already went down the route of the Scottish business pledge? So there's a few points to make. Job quality is quite a broad concept. There's various different aspects to it. Pay, of course, is very important. Hours are very important. Security of contract, et cetera, but there's other aspects and elements to job quality that we do quite a lot of research on as well. The Fair Work Convention does all the research on as well. In terms of the Scottish Government's power, yes, there is the soft power. There is the power of the Scottish Government as an employer, of course, as well, serving as a role model to not just a public sector but a private sector as well. The Government also has a role to play in terms of, for example, supporting more research into the relationship between job quality and things like productivity, so not just employee well-being but also employee performance and therefore organizational performance, because ultimately there's more and more research out there that actually shows this. If you persuade businesses that investing in job quality is not just good for the employees but it's good for the business, well that's your golden ticket, I think, right there. Now you are right to mention management and we mentioned in our submission as well. Good line management is absolutely key to unlocking various aspects of job quality but flexible working in particular as well, because it is good line managers that can speak to their employees and pick up on some of the concerns and some of the needs that they might have and then be able to navigate, for example, official flexible working requests through the legislative route. What the Government comes in is, of course, through the business support services landscape. Most of the things that we have in place through Scottish Enterprise or SDS are mostly targeted at sort of growing businesses. Your skills for growth, for example, very much aimed at sort of larger small businesses who are trying to grow. Now, if you look at the statistics, you've got about 85,000 micro-businesses in Scotland, so that's those that employ between nine employees. Those employ about 300,000 people in Scotland. Now there is no intervention to try and help these businesses with their management quality. What you could do is, for example, look at something that the CAPD has done which was a people skills project where our members gave up some of their time to provide direct one-to-one management support to some of these smallest businesses. There's a pilot that ran in Glasgow a few years ago. The evaluation of that was extremely positive, was oversubscribed in terms of demand, and that is a very clear way to try and reach the sort of long tail of mostly unproductive, some of the smallest firms in Scotland. Sounds like a mentoring system. You said it was a pilot. Why wasn't it continued? That is not a question for me. It was a pilot that ran jointly with Glasgow City Council. I believe that I'm not quite sure why it did not continue. Before I am the else comes in, I've got a couple of questions for Jack. What's needed to ensure private businesses are fully engaged in policy debates around fair pay and family friendly work? When you asked the previous question, you talked about IPPR's response talking about marketing, soft power. First, it's important to remember that that was the situation that we had in when the Parliament unanimously agreed the child poverty targets. We shouldn't underestimate that power, and that power is currently being underutilised. We have a great wealth of evidence and we are very good at describing the problems in the labour market. We are also building up a great evidence of what the solutions are. The missing step is convincing businesses about why they should be concerned about what all that evidence is. Where are the enlightened areas of self-interest that businesses can hear that a flexible contract can help a worker to progress in their career and not lose the talent that they so desperately need in their organisation that also ensures that children are less likely to be in poverty in a working household? At the moment, 67 per cent of kids in poverty are in a working household. That kind of lack of tactics is what we would see in how to get the information out to business that is created and generated in the policy sense and in Parliament and in research institutions all over the UK. The very helpful spice paper highlighted the three ways that that is happening at the moment. It said that the business pledge, which has not been active since 2020, is going through another reboot. Living wage accreditation, fantastic success, but that is seven people working to engage businesses on a specific issue and then sector strategies and highlights retail, which is in its infancy. That needs to be massively grown if we want to have any chance of convincing the private sector that they are part of this mission to end child poverty and that we can all benefit from it. Where I would start, like Mark, looking at the size of business, we also know that 50 per cent of all people in work poverty are in five sectors. Where is the strategy to interact with retail, hospitality, administration, health and social care services, arts and entertainment? That is where the cohort we are worried about is. Where is the information coming to them? Where is the funding to go and speak to those organisations about family friendly working, flexible policies, living wage, living hours, all of that? All that is soft power. That is all carrots rather than sticks. When we talk about not having the powers that is referenced a number of times here and today, I am not sure what powers people would be talking about having to implement to change this. If it was, for example, the living wage, we know that the living wage was implemented to everyone currently below the living wage. That would be fantastic and reduce poverty, but it would only reduce child poverty in our research by about one percentage point. You still have a significant way to go before you get to 20, 30 and you have just one in 10 kids in poverty rather than 18 per cent. Can I ask a slightly different question, if I may, convener? Jack, your organisation, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was a signatory to a letter in April to Lord Calanan. It was to do with implications of the retained EU law, EU law, revocation and reform bill. There was a number of parts to that, the part-time employees prevention of less favourable treatment, maternity and paternity leave, et cetera. Can you just emphasise what your concerns are? Maternity and paternity leave are something that hasn't come up yet, which must be foundational to this conversation about family-friendly working. There's currently about eight and a half thousand children in poverty while their parents are on maternity leave. Maternity leave is a set at a statutory level. The UK level is one of the lowest in the OECD and after the first six weeks you go to about 170 quid. It's way too low to have a decent standard of living and causes poverty in some instances. I don't see the reason why we couldn't, in Scotland, come up with a kind of gold standard, a suggestion of what a proper maternity, anti-poverty, maternity policy looks like. My experience working with employers is that if you give them nebulous or kind of vague ideas, they're less likely to follow on. A good example of that is in procurement when we say, pay the living wage and don't use exploitative zero-hour contracts. What we've seen is amazing take-up of the living wage because it's a positive request whereas we've seen zero-hour contracts increase to now we have the highest portion of zero-hour contracts per capita within the four nations. We didn't give employers the standard, we just said don't use them. With maternity and paternity pay, we take that learning and say what is a way to evidence of what a good maternity and paternity policy level would be to make sure that people aren't falling into poverty and therefore when they're on that maternity leave they're not stressed and worried and they're more likely to dip out and stay out of the labour market for longer. On the specifics of the letter I probably need to follow up with my colleagues as well. The Scottish Government funds a lot of organisations to speak to businesses. In America, we're talking about productivity. There's the SCDI productivity club, for example. Niki's organisation receives funding. There's a plethora of them out there. The issue is about mainstreaming these ideas. Around child poverty, around flexible working so that the same messages are passing through those organisations and the Scottish Government is signalling that this is an important issue for businesses. The UK Parliament, which obviously has the powers to legislate around employment, is about to bring in the day one right to flexible working. We need to be preparing Scottish businesses for that. We have some businesses who are already going way beyond that. It will be difficult to drag to that point, but this will become law. There's a real opportunity for the Scottish Government to use the organisations that it's already funding to prepare businesses for that point. We know that the law is kind of like the floor, if you like, and we want some of them to reach the ceiling, but at least we could be helping them to do that. If I can just add some numbers to what Linja said, we done some research on the day one right to request flexible working. Across the UK, 49% of businesses do not know that it was coming in. This was a few months ago. Out of those who are not already offering a day one right, 46% say it will be quite difficult for them to actually implement this. I think it's a great thing. We've campaigned for this for many years as well, so it's a great thing that it is actually coming in, but businesses A need to be more aware of it and B probably will need some support in how to implement it. Just if I can follow up on what Jack said on the maternity and paternity leave policies, just to speak up for fathers, the paternity leave policy in the UK is appalling. If there is a priority to try and address it, it will be this, and it can also help with the very gender nature of care. A sort of slightly linked issue today is this shared parental leave, which simply is not working, I think, on any measure. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Just to support what Jack and Maric have been saying, we've recently done some research with low-income parents. On average in the UK, women will take nine months maternity leave. But for low-income parents, that reduces by four months, because they simply cannot afford to stay off work with a level of maternity support supplied. I would echo what Maric said. If you take maternity leave, that's at £174 a week. That's pitiful and unaffordable for most low-income families. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time this morning. Most of my questions are covered, so it's not on this theme, but the evidence we've taken suggests that social security rules are repeatedly cited as barriers. In fact, a briefing today repeats this. It's been said that the conditionality regime in UC hinders options for flexibility. Jack, do you have any observations on that point? I'm afraid that I don't, to be honest. I've probably passed on to my colleagues. Social security is not an area that we know that I'm afraid of. Lyn, you touched on the pilot of the four-day working week. Do you have any further views on the merits or issues of such a pilot? I think it was you who mentioned the four-day working week. There's a lot of global evidence around the success of a four-day working week, particularly for countries that are trying to move towards a wellbeing economy. Most of the pilots have been done in knowledge-based sectors. That is the slight concern that we're not really looking at how we'd be implementing such a way of working in more front-line-based roles. I have no companies that do a four-day working week. Some of them are here in Scotland. They're doing it very successfully. The people that work for them have a great work-life balance. The companies are seeing increases in productivity. There are certainly no decreases in productivity, but we need to widen that. We need to look at not just putting all our eggs in one basket. The four-day working week is one type of flexible working, but there are lots of other things that we should be looking at. If there are any pilots of flexible working models, we should be looking wider than just a four-day working week model. If we are just going to look at a four-day working week, we need to be really clear that we have to widen it out to sectors beyond desk-based knowledge-based sectors. One size doesn't fit all, and the four-day working week won't work for everybody or every business. What is really key in this whole conversation is that we are talking about how to get the best out of our staff. If our staff are stressed, if they are worried about their kids, if they are feeling burnt out because they are working more than they feel able to do, if they are parents with disabilities or they are neurodivergent. There is an intersectionality of issues that also impact parents. Employers should be looking at how to get the best out of their staff for their business, and that involves talking to their staff, and not assuming that they impose one way of working and that it is going to work for everybody. It is really critical to listen to staff and to understand their lived experience, because people typically want to give their best, but the structures and barriers prevent them from doing so. I am definitely not an expert on universal credit, but what parents tell me is that there is a really difficult line between wanting to increase their hours, but there is a point at which that impacts their benefits, and it is just not worthwhile, especially when they have childcare costs. Universal credit covers 85 per cent of childcare costs, but that is sometimes not enough. The most important thing when it comes to the four-day week is that we need more evidence. Nicky is right that there are examples worldwide where it seems to have worked. There was a well-publicised trial across the UK as well. However, these trials tend to be more skewed towards certain sectors where it is a lot easier to implement. There are still the same challenges with maintaining productivity for employees and employers as well. Truthfully, sometimes the results of the trials tend to be overwritten a little bit in the headlines when you look at the actual outcomes, and the results of the trials are perhaps not quite as overwhelmingly positive as might be suggested. That being said, there are some very positive signs, but we need a lot more evidence. We have been looking forward to seeing the Scottish Government public sector trial, and I think that we are still waiting for it to be announced. In our experience, most of the things that we are talking about can be achieved with small changes. It does not need to be headline-grabbing. Huge change like moving a company to a four-day working week. When you are given the privileged position of going in and working with an employer and understanding their business and they trust you to do that, sometimes just making the smallest of changes can have a really big impact for the workers within that organisation. I know that we are talking about parental employment today. I worked with an employer recently and in conversations with their workforce I realised that there were a number of older workers who were on the verge of leaving because they had never seen anyone else on the factory floor working part-time. Simply by being able to say to the managing director of that firm that this is the situation, he said, what will I do? I said, could you offer part-time contracts to these workers? He did for the first time. He was able to retain about four or five workers who would have left. The small change does not need to be a huge change, but employers tell us that they need to be given that support. Sometimes that means funding for organisations so that organisations such as Errors, Manics and Jack can go in and James can go in and work with employers to help them realise what those changes could look like. Nicci, not to leave you out, Jane. Do you want to come in with anything? Any points, sir? Thanks very much, Mary. Yes, I'd like to. Working families recently employed a benefits adviser and in the last financial year that single benefits adviser working part-time was able to get £100,000 in unclaimed benefits for working parents and carers. 40 per cent of people on universal credit are in work. That meant, on average, that the people that she spoke to had an additional £2,500 a year in terms of income. That's going to make a significant difference to those people on the lowest possible incomes. There's £1 billion worth of unclaimed benefits within the United Kingdom, so that is again something that I would really encourage Government to look at funding. That's just on the UC. For the rest, of course, I completely agree with Nicci and Mary and Jack. That's interesting, Jane. We've got the director of social security next week, so we'll challenge him on that as well. That came to the end of all our questions unless any other member has any questions that wants to come in on. I thank the witnesses for the evidence that you have given today. I will now briefly suspend the meeting till I further set up the next panel. Thank you very much and thanks, Jane. I know that you are online. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome back. We're now going to hear from our second panel on employers with a panel of business representatives. I welcome our witnesses, all joining us in the room. We've got Andrea Bradley, General Secretary, Educational Institute of Scotland, representing the Scottish Traids Union Congress. Karen Hedge, Deputy Chief Executive for Scottish Care, and Louisa MacDonald, Scotland Director for Business in the Community. I'm now going to invite our members to ask questions. I'm going to invite Katie. My first question is probably better directed to Louisa. How do you think that the fair work agenda, fair work, can best be moved forward in the current economic climate? What's your thoughts about that? It's very interesting. I also sit on the new deal for business group with the Cabinet Secretary and we're having this conversation. I co-chair the wellbeing economy group. Business in the community has been around for about 40 years, champion, responsible business, how employers show up in the world to be fairer and to be greener. What's really interesting at the moment is a lot of economic challenges and the simple way to get through to businesses is to demonstrate the commercial case for being responsible. A lot of what we're talking about and discussing, and we do, this is all we do, we're a UK-wide charity, is show the commercial benefits for treating your people really well. Often that can show up in a variety of forms. We campaign on a range of issues including childcare and parental rights and things like that. We also challenge the members that we work with who generally are not totally large employers across the UK to show up better in the world and to come together as a community in what they can do and how they can champion responsible business together. There's a range of ways. One is to work with larger organisations within their supply chains, that's one thing we can do. Government can show up as a good employer itself and set the agenda and encourage to follow. I know that you're particularly interested in procurement, that's definitely one way to do it. There is a lot going on already but one of the recommendations for the wellbeing economy group will be to combine what's going on in public procurement but also best practice in private sector procurement because there is actually a lot happening. Awareness raising is a big part of it and there are lots of ways to do that but it's hard. We obviously are living in difficult times, particularly difficult times for working people given the pressures of inflation, particularly with food, fuel etc. It's quite clear that in some sectors, in the private sector in particular, trading is actually getting some very good deals, particularly after an industrial action and that might be associated with labour shortages. How do you think that a tight labour market can lead to improvements in family-friendly working? I appreciate your more in the public sector but maybe if you could speak in the round about the public sector and the private sector. I think that the current economic context should and could incentivise employers to do what they can to attract workers specifically around what they offer in terms of pay but also in terms of what they offer relative to flexible working. The STUC would wish to see those changes done on a negotiated basis. All workers potentially being able to benefit from that rather than continuation of the UK Government's provision for individual requests to be considered and potentially rejected. Relatively recent survey work by the TUC involving 13,000 working mothers indicated that only 50 per cent of them had their flexible working requests granted. It's similar research—86 per cent of mothers who do work flexibly faced discrimination thereafter. Even granting of requests doesn't mean that working lives are free of issues. We know that there are real inequalities across sectors and pay grades in terms of the distribution of flexible working. The workers who are most likely to experience in work poverty as a result of under-employment, for example, are the least likely to have access to home working that enables better work-life balance and balancing of childcare and so on. In terms of Scottish Government, there is an opportunity now, given the conditions right now, to support employers towards making the kinds of improvements that we need to see for the longer term. Maybe just to pick up on a couple of the points that Louisa made there. Certainly the Fair Work Convention is a good start in Scotland that other jurisdictions of the UK don't have. However, we are still seeing similar distributions of poverty and in-work poverty in Scotland, as we do in the rest of the UK, which underlines for the STUC that the Fair Work Convention and the whole organisation of fair work has to have more teeth than it does at the minute. At the minute, we need to see greater mandate around procurement, the issue of grants and so on. In the longer term, we need to see the devolution of employment law to Scotland in order to legislate for so much that the Fair Work Convention at the minute aspires to achieving. We will be moving on to issues around procurement and contract compliance later on. In terms of the labour market, in some sectors of retail manufacturing, you are seeing quite high pay increases as a percentage. Public sector is a bit different. However, for the employee, the whole package that matters is pay and all the other terms of conditions such as flexible working. To what extent is flexible working part of those negotiations at the moment? Do you think that there is more that could be done there? The STUC has on its agenda, as does my union, to do more around flexible working in the interests of particularly women workers but all parents, in fact, in order that they can better balance the responsibilities that they have to their children and their family lives and the responsibilities that they have to their employers. You describe the fact that there have been wins within retail hospitality for trade unions. That is indicative of the fact that public sector pay is lagging behind that of the private sector. The Scottish Government has got a role to play in equalising that so that we do not see that hemorrhaging from, for example, sectors like care towards hospitality and retail in pursuit of better pay and fairer working conditions that have been negotiated. However, for all the fact that there have been some wins, those have been hard fought often within the various sectors. What we need to have is the kind of foundations that enable more collaborative working between trade unions and employers such that we do not see industrial action scenarios that ultimately, in most cases, do force better outcomes for workers. Do you think that that will be achieved without the industrial action, often involving strike action and disruption to services, having to occur first and workers being forced into taking that kind of action? If I can bring Karen in about the care issue, we hear quite regularly about people leaving the care sector to go into other sectors such as retail, because they are going to earn more there. What scope is there for increasing flexible working for front-line workers, particularly in the care sector? If you do not mind, I would have liked to answer your first question in that context. That was about recognising fair work in the current economic climate. One of the challenges that we have in policy setting in social care is that it is very much isolated. It is considered unto its own and not joined up with other strategies and policies within the Scottish Government. For instance, the 10-year economic strategy, despite the fact that social care contributes more to the economy of Scotland than agriculture, forestry and fishing. It is the third largest contributor to the economy in Scotland, but it is missing from the economic strategy. There is something there about joining that up and stopping siloing the sector into one place. There is also a need to recognise the impact of monopsony purchasing in the sector. We can pick this up when we get to the procurement and tendering a bit later, but does competition law exist in a sector where there is only one purchaser? That is what drives the challenges that we have in the ability to pay our staff more. Flexible working is something that exists in the social care sector. That is why I am sitting here today. I could pick up flexible hours while I was at university. That is what drove me into social care. I found a career that I absolutely loved and adored. That is what led me here. I think that there are plenty of opportunities for flexible working in social care. It is a 24-hour service, seven days a week, three, six, five days a year. This is about having honest conversations with your employer and having opportunities for real effective voice to enable that to happen. I do not know if anyone else wants to come in. In that case, I am going to pass over to Marie. Thank you, convener, and good morning, parallel. I was going to ask how effective are accreditation schemes like the Scottish Business Pledge, living wage and living hours, and what would make them more effective? I will pop it out to Lisa first. Fascinating. Business in the community does not do accreditation. The reason is that you can have all the policies in the world, but culture eats policy for breakfast, so you can have a big long list of policies that you have yet done on that tick box. If you do not implement them, socialise them and make them the norm, then it is a tick box exercise, literally. One of our members is Phoenix Group, who has a large footprint in Scotland because they have taken most of the standard life pension business into their organisation. I had a really interesting conversation with one of their inclusivity managers a few weeks ago. She said that they were doing a staff survey about policies and what came back was that 60 per cent of men did not think that the parental leave policy applied to them. They were really shocked by that. If my wife is doing the caring, why should that apply to me? Similarly, almost 50 per cent of caring is not children, or you might not be a parent, but you could be a grandparent. They were quite shocked by that. The way that they have gone about it is to socialise the impact that their policies have and to bring them to life and to make them happen. They are on a progress journey to do this. Cultural change is always a journey. It is not just having a policy in place, it is actually making it live and breathe. Aviva, a large employer in Scotland, introduced equal parental leave about four years ago. I mean completely equal, and they socialised it. 50 per cent of the take-up of parental leave now is equal between all carers. They have saved money and recruitment costs because people can stay with them for longer, they can have better careers and people are more productive when you have been in a job for longer. Although it costs a lot to perhaps do it initially, the long-term result is that you have the wellbeing of your workforce and the productivity, if you want to be really business about it, goes up. Acreditation schemes clearly incentivise some employers, but from our point of view largely already good employers, for example Aviva. That volunteerism clearly is not working as effectively as we need it to, given the stats that I quoted in the previous question from those couple of TUC surveys. Another bit of work done by the Equality and Human Rights Commission revealed that one in nine mothers are dismissed, 11 per cent are made compulsorily redundant, what others in the workplace are not. The number of fathers taking paternity leave fell from 213,500 in 2017-18 to 170,000 in 2020-21. That clearly would underline that volunteerism and accreditation schemes are not working as effectively as we need them to. More effective from our point of view and, as we would see in the Nordic models, would be Government policy to support and deliver sectoral collective bargaining, in line, for example, with previous and yet unmet recommendations of the Fair Work Convention on Social Care and Construction. Generally, the strengthening of fair work first guidance for direct funding and procurement to require employers to recognise trade unions to co-create effective collective bargaining mechanisms that would deliver effective flexible working arrangements. We also think that Government could be looking at things like non-domestic rates relief. We think that that should be reformed, making trade union recognition, collective bargaining and flexible working absolute conditions of granting. We also need to see monitoring of adherence to the terms of the Fair Work Convention and adherence to the terms of any kind of accreditation schemes, because there may be a relative ease with which those things can be achieved and granted in the first place. What happens in the months and years following that accreditation or awarding of a grant and so on? Longer term, we think that devolution of employment law will be critical to tightening up in those areas and delivering better for workers and, particularly, workers with families who are trying to balance both sets of responsibilities. Overall, we need to see a shift from voluntary accreditation schemes to more government mandating around grants and procurements and legislation in the longer term to deliver and protect around those areas. We surveyed our members earlier this year about their ability to deliver living hours contracts. 90 per cent of them said that they wished they could, but they can't due to tendering practices. Part of that is due to the time and task commissioning. It causes huge challenges. We have providers who are having tenders that are being rolled over since 2018 being paid the same rates that they were being paid in 2018, so they have that inability to hold on to and retain their staff because they can't pass the same Fair Work Terms and Conditions on in that way. I know that we'll come back to that, but I thought that 90 per cent statistic would have been helpful in that context. How best can the Scottish Government encourage and support businesses to do more on fair and family-friendly working? We've touched a bit on that, Andrea. Anyone want to expand a wee bit on that? I think that there's a partnership to be had here, the raising of awareness. On the one hand, Government could lead by example, both in its own approaches to the culture that it has, particularly around mandating that men can take flexible working to create a better equality and a reduced gender pay gap. Business can bring a lot to the table as well, particularly those who are striving to be more responsible employers. It's not a given that legislation works in terms of bringing to the bare minimum, so I think there has to be a bit of stick and carrot. My original point is that if we can demonstrate the business case for fair work and wellbeing of your staff and flexible working and all that entails, then that's just as powerful a way to do this. Whether there's a role for Government within that is a question that we're asking, but certainly it can lead by example. We've currently been working with Edinburgh University on working on healthy working lives and how we can support our workforce, particularly our older workforce, as many of them have geocating responsibilities. If a pilot is on-going, I can certainly send over what's been happening in that to the panel, if that would be helpful thereafter. That would be really helpful. The answer is obviously the case that encouragement can only go so far, but I think the elephant in the room is mentioned by Andrea, that employment law is not devolved. Andrea, you all believe that employment law should be devolved. If it was, what could the Scottish Government do to secure a fairer and more flexible employment landscape? Some of the things that I talked about is the mandating around union recognition, having mechanisms across all sectors for sectoral collective bargaining. It is things like awarding facility time to trade union reps who currently don't have it, for example equality reps, who are absolutely critical to this kind of work. I think that we would also wish to see the Scottish Government really invest in the facilitation of trade union employer collaboration around some of these issues, ensuring that those who are affected by the decisions that are taken about how we are going to do that. The work that is arranged is properly consulted about job design, arrangements for working hours, etc. Trade unions are a brilliant conduit for that kind of engagement. We would wish to see that kind of thing. As opposed to the aspirations that are captured within the fair work convention, we would like to see more of that translated into legislation. However, Louisa is right that legislation on its own does not necessarily deliver on the objectives. It is all of the ongoing support and resourcing that is required around that. For example, the Scottish Government, in just the last two years or so, has been operating some pilots around a four-day working week. However, we have not seen much emerge from that. That is an area that we could really take forward as a country. That speaks very strongly to the wish to move to a wellbeing economy and to have better outcomes in balancing of work and family life. That is an area that could be mined much more than it has been to date. I absolutely agree about the conversations about effective voice and sectoral collective bargaining in this space, but I have concerns about the conversations that are currently going on about the way that collective bargaining could be implemented in social care. At the moment, the proposition is that for the independent sector, charitable, private and employee-owned organisations will sit separately from statutory sector negotiations, yet because the funding comes from statutory sector organisations, the agreement still has to come. One might come up with a different figure from the other. It is almost like a false creation of sectoral bargaining, which undermines the system and reinforces the undervaluing of care workers who are in the independent sector. I really think that a lot of work needs to go in to come up with something better in that space that is co-designed with the social care workforce. Secondly, when decisions are made about the terms and conditions and the rate of pay for social care staff, it needs to be done within the context, so we know last year, of course, the announcement of the uplift to social care workers actually brought them in at less than what a cleaner gets paid in a hospital. The reason that that is difficult is because social care workers are professionally registered and they have to have qualifications to undertake that work. The message that is given is one that suggests that they are not as worthy as those working in the NHS, so it is much, much bigger than just terms and conditions. It is also about the message that we give in how we value our staff. I totally agree with Andrea about monitoring. You can have your business pledge tick. One of the things that we do with our members when they come into membership is that we do a responsible business tracker. We work with them over a period of about six months to look at all the indicators of being a responsible business, whether that is staff wellbeing, community engagement, all the impacts of your own environmental processes, whatever you do and then we look at where you are failing most and then we work with you and we come back in two years and we measure your progress. That is one of the things that we do. I think that monitoring is incredibly important, but I would also sound a note of caution around devolved employment, adding an additional layer of burden to UK-wide businesses because it gets confusing. It adds an additional level of cost and it can do, and it is cumulative. That is one of the things that we are looking at in the new business thing, to look at the cumulative impact of all of these different levels of business regulation and how do we work with that. Although we would very much welcome the conversation about employment law, I think that the note of caution would be that it has to be in a UK-wide context, otherwise you are going to get unintended consequences. One of the other things that has come out of the other thing that we have been discussing is that the term wellbeing economy is extremely confusing. It means different things to different people at different times. The businesses that we have been talking to are generally within our networks and it is myself, a B Corp convener and a CDI, but we work with businesses that are quite engaged. One of our conversations is about how we get beyond the usual suspects. Terminology and jargon in particular, wellbeing economy is a jargon phrase. Why not economic wellbeing for everybody in a fair and greener world? How do you make it straightforward so that you get more buy-in along that journey? It is a journey. You cannot just do some publicity about it, right, six months and then just leave it and everybody should know that this is an ongoing journey and it has to be cumulative in terms of understanding and where you go from there. I just have a couple of questions to go on further now. Will the strength and field work requirements in the public sector contract and grant result in better paying conditions? It's beginning, I think, is the answer. Yes, it will help and socialisation of what it means and how to implement it is extremely important. Also, as I said earlier, it can be leading the way. It's more about how do you help, particularly the smaller businesses, who are tendering for public sector procurement contracts? How do you help them to that point? There's a range of things that are going on, but sometimes it's a bit—we were talking about this before we came upstairs as a bit chicken and egg. How do you implement that, which has an upfront cost, which will eventually lead to long term? It's a question of investment. Public fair work can definitely help and get the ball rolling, but it's not the only part of this conversation and it should also be ongoing. To some extent, there could be enhancements to pay and conditions with the strengthened arrangements, but STEC believes that they could and should go further. It's around the areas that I've already talked about. There should be requirements around union recognition, collective bargaining and flexible working provision. They should be mandated. It's back to the point about monitoring, on-going monitoring, to ensure that there is sustained adherence to those elements. We need to be cognisant of the fact that low-pay and in-work poverty are endemic to Scotland and, of course, the wider UK, but Scotland has had the fair work convention in place now for some years and yet 68 per cent of children in poverty are living in households where at least one adult is working. We need to look towards non-domestic rates relief and potential reform of that to ensure that businesses who are benefiting from that provision recognise trade unions and provide flexible working. I've already talked about the need for changes to employment law. In terms of unintended consequences around fair work and the different procurement arrangements that there are, I suppose there's the potential for employers, public sector employers to sidestep fair work requirements themselves by contracting work to other providers who are not bound by those arrangements. I think that the Scottish Government in recognition of all of this could be looking to the Scottish child payment to increase that to £40 a week as many anti-poverty organisations are proposing. They could also boost family incomes by offering universal free school meals from primary one to S6, which would save £425 per year as a minimum per family, per child. Given the restrictions that there are around fair work at the minute and the fact that we don't have mandates as strongly as we would wish, there are other things that the Scottish Government could be doing in the middle. In the meantime, we need to alleviate poverty. How has the Scottish Government's social care policy affected paying conditions in the independent social care sector? The minimum rate of pay is set by the Scottish Government how much is paid for our front-line social care staff. In the care home sector, we have a cost model, which effectively dictates how that would be spread out across other people who work in the sector, so differentials and so on. It is applied to a 50-bedded home, so if you have a care home that is smaller than that, then to be able to maintain those standards is impossible. At the moment, we are seeing one care home close per week, so the impact is huge. It is not possible to maintain those fair works and standards. In the care home sector, it is even more challenging. That raises the question of just popping something into a contract. If you do not actually create the conditions to enable fair work terms and conditions in the front-line, where does the responsibility lie? I know what I said earlier about people receiving the same rate of pay for the service that they are delivering since 2018. It is just not possible to pass that on. That is why we are seeing care homes closing at the rate that they are. Care at home organisations are having to hand back ours, which means that we have great levels of unmet need in the community, which impacts people who work because they are having to uptake caring responsibilities in that space. As for the fair work first, speaking from an organisation that receives grants from the Scottish Government, we are now sitting in June and we are still waiting on some of our grant letters. We were not prepared. Obviously, I know that this is coming because I am working in that sector and promoting fair work across social care. There was no preparation to say that this was coming as part of your grant contracts. No conversation or discussion about how we would implement it was just given. Here is your offer letter. You need to sign it off you go. There needs to be more priming of those people who are in receipt of those grants and an opportunity to step up to the mark. I think that there is so much there to unpack. In regard to that, from your experience, if you are an independent home care provider, I get someone who comes in every morning to give me a hand to get dressed. Do those organisations, that kind of company, how much are they involved in this? How much do they know about it if you are just trying to make your business do your day-to-day work? Is there proper communication going on at that level, down to your local company in Perth, Edinburgh, Glasgow, wherever it is? Those conversations will happen in a few different ways and in a few different aspects. The commissioners at the local authority level or the health and social care partnership level should be having conversations with those that they contract with. As a membership organisation, we have over 900 organisations with just over 380 members. We have conversations with our members and I actively update them on what is happening on the fair work agenda. The other place that those conversations would take place would be through the care inspectorate. The inspection regime looks at workforce and how providers are maintaining and supporting their workforce in that place. It is a few different areas where that would be done, as well as the TLSC, who is a regulatory body for the workforce themselves. I know who is raising the voice of the workforce in that space. It is coming to members from quite a few different areas. I guess the challenge is how do we create those conditions to enable them to enact this? From our serving of members, there is a desire to do so. They recognise that to retain our staff, we need to be doing this, but it is how do we do it within the current economic challenge? I suppose just very finely on that one, ultimately what you are saying is that unless there is an increase in the uplift, then this is all going to kind of cause more and more problems. Ultimately it is a financial choice that has to be made here. Absolutely. Beyond the commissioning authorities as well, thinking about the HMRC payment for mileage, it has not increased since 2011, which has seen providers having to make a choice not to pick up visits that are at a longer distance. Of course, that causes other poverty issues for people not being able to get that service that they deserve. The knock-on effects are much, much bigger. We have to think about what is wider than just the commissioned aspect of that. I am now going to invite Gordon and then I am going to bring in Katie. I have one question that I want to address to Louisa. You highlighted, in an answer to Marie, that you had concerns if there was devolution of employment law because UK businesses want certainty and uniformity if I picked you up correctly. My question is that we are looking today about improving the financial situation of low-income families. We have different political make-ups in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Westminster. Is it therefore acceptable that the consequence of looking at that uniformity is that more progressive policies are delayed and take longer to be introduced because we have to move at the slowest member, i Westminster? That is a very interesting question. There is no real answer to that because it depends on political imperatives and I am not getting into that. What I would say is that being mindful is probably what we would ask, not necessarily slowing it down. If you are looking to implement more progressive policies in one place, what else can you do to talk to equivalent bodies in other jurisdictions about what they are doing? Wouldn't that be just a sensible route to go? I am not saying do this or don't do that. I am saying, can we be pragmatic about this and just have a conversation at earlier stages in order to come to a resolution that doesn't necessarily mean holding back to the slowest implementation? You can always take the lead in something, but it would be sensible to just bear in mind what else is going on. I think that we have seen from recent experience that the kind of dialogue that Louisa is hopeful will lead to the kind of outcomes that we would wish to see would be sufficient to deliver fairer working lives for the people of Scotland, for example. I am just thinking about the UK Government's intervention relative to the Gender Recognition Act and so on. I think that our recent experience of collaborative working or just working with Westminster has not been a positive one, it hasn't been a positive one. From an STUC point of view, we would wish to see Scotland in control of the levers that are going to have the greatest impact on the pay conditions working lives of people in Scotland and so it is for that reason that we would wish to see the devolution of employment law to Scotland. We think that that would stand us in much stronger stead to be able to deliver on the kinds of aspirations that are captured within the Fair Work Convention, but that is a convention and it is by voluntary agreement and we need to see strengthening around all of the arrangements that we are able to deliver on. So many of the agendas that we are all signed up to, closing gender pay gaps, closing ethnicity pay gaps, reducing child poverty, delivering a wellbeing economy, delivering a just transition that truly is just, control of employment law is absolutely integral to that. I wanted to say that, a week past Wednesday, I was here at the Women and Business Committee and there was a presentation on the gender poverty pay gap as well. I don't profess to know much, it's not my expertise, but certainly they were saying that there is a gap around about £350,000 for women and there was a reason why it was a devolved issue. I can go back and get some evidence from that and submit that as well, but we have not covered pensions and I think that it is important to raise in this context. I want to pick up on some of the issues that were being raised around about contract compliance, conditionality and procurement and there was a specific mention to non-domestic rates and of course there has been quite a lot of discussion in some places anyway about the possibility of using land taxes. Speculation based land taxes, sometimes called an Amazon tax, but it wouldn't necessarily just be Amazon to use land taxation as a way to raise funds, but that could be linked potentially to some of the issues that are being raised here. In terms of legislation, we have obviously got new procurement laws that have passed in England and Wales, so they have moved away from the European model and our understanding is that that will mean, for example, that local councils can put conditions and contracts, for example, by local contracts, so therefore they could also put conditions in relation to some of the employment issues that are being raised here. I just wondered whether that is something that you have had the chance yet to look at, but also my understanding from speaking with tax and accountancy experts in relation to other countries that fines are potentially a large way that some countries raise funds, whether that is environmental fines or related to some of these issues. I just wondered if those also were issues that you had had an opportunity to look at and were giving any consideration to in relation to those issues and how we get companies in Scotland and incentivise, if you like, companies in Scotland to carry out some of the public policy requirements that we have in terms of terms and conditions of employment. I do not know if Anjaya would want to come in on that first. Maybe not so much to say on some of the intricacies of those new procurement arrangements, but certainly in relation to taxation, the STUC believes that the Scottish Government could be doing more to raise revenue for investment in public services such that they would be better placed to deliver on the aspirations of fair work, including around flexible working environment. There is decent pay for staff, particularly in the context of the majority of public sector workers being women and the disproportionate impacts of poverty and in-work poverty on women. I think that there is a really strong connection between the healthiness of our investments in public services and our ability to deliver fair work. That is absolutely linked to taxation and how we essentially have to do more to tax wealth and to tax the corporations such as Amazon who utilise so much of what Scotland has to offer and the workforce here in Scotland. However, our minds are not paying enough in terms of contribution towards the social responsibility objectives that there are around the wellbeing economy, just transition and so on. Does anyone else want to come in on that? We have had members coming to us within the last couple of years saying that they are having to change how they are purchasing so normally they would go to their local organisations to purchase from the butchers and so on, but they are no longer able to do that and they are having to move to larger bulk purchasing organisations. Again, that comes down to having to make efficiencies, so the national care and contract rate then has a further efficiency, despite being a model that is itemised, then has an efficiency rate applied to it. They are having to shift the way that they are purchasing, which is against the principles of the wellbeing economy. That is what brings me back to that original conversation about not considering social care and isolation from the other policies that are being set because they are all interwoven in that space. The Scottish Government decided to opt out of the procurement legislation that went through Westminster, because it wants to stick close to European regulations, because that is the policy. Obviously, this Parliament could regulate in relation to procurement, and I was just wondering what that might look like, what you would like that to look like, or maybe you do not want to go down that path, but what would that look like? It is something that I am very interested in. The majority of care providers in Scotland are small family-run organisations that have built up within their local towns and villages, so they are used to having those local networks. I think that the legislation would enable that to happen better, but again it comes down to what we are seeing with fair work terms and conditions. Popping it in a contract does not necessarily allow it to happen. You need to create the conditions that enable that to happen and to see beyond just that bit of social care and isolation. Can I now bring in Miles? Thank you, convener. Good morning. Thanks for joining us today. I wanted to ask a few questions with regard to just transition, which has been raised. A lot of our conversation today has talked about higher employment of female. For example, in the NHS social care education, but it was interesting, the submission from the Joseph Raimtree Foundation pointed out that 72.2% of green jobs are currently held by men. So I wanted to ask your view on what needs to change to specifically around workplace training opportunities and just to capture your views on that. Andrea, I think that you raised just transition. I think that what you are describing there, Miles, mirrors what we know about STEM sectors generally and how we have a disproportionately low number of women working in STEM in spite of the fact that in terms of undergraduate study and so on, we have quite healthy gender balance. That would suggest that there is quite a lot of work to be done by employers in that sector and beyond into the just transition sector in order to sufficiently recruit but critically retain women workers. I think that some of the reasons why we see leakage from the STEM sector and probably why we are seeing that mirrored as we move towards net zero is that there are inbuilt discriminations, biases, prejudices that culturally make life difficult for women workers in the sector and we need to continue to work to overcome as much of that as we possibly can. But there are structural barriers, for example, relative to the lack of flexible working to enable women to balance childcare and other caring responsibilities with their responsibilities as employees. So those are things that have to be ironed out. It's not going to be a just transition without those things being properly considered and these hurdles properly overcome for women. So I think that the design and organisation of training to go to your specific point should be done in conjunction with trade union reps who are operating in these sectors and who know their members, communicate with them and can represent their views. We need multiple options in terms of training patterns and ways of accessing training that workers can meaningfully access. At all costs, we need to avoid the discrimination and exclusions that we see already being baked into net zero transition, otherwise, as I said, it won't be a just transition. So we need to support workers across the board and particularly underrepresented groups such as women to take part in training. So, for example, suitable times within the working day or if they are beyond the working day, then additional payment for that. Suitable venues covering travel costs, providing or paying for childcare, those are all things that employers can do to ensure that women are not left behind in all the training work that needs to go around the transition to net zero. Again, equality reps and union equality reps can assist with designing training arrangements that are inclusive of all workers. I think that all of that should be underpinned by equality impact assessment and trade union reps. Again, specifically equality reps are very well versed in operating those and working with employers to make sure that they are not just bureaucratic exercise but they are actually delivering well for workers. It is not in the interests of employers to have sections of the workforce untrained in the areas that they need to be upskilled in. That is helpful, thank you. We have had certain examples of different businesses that have tried to encourage people to go into industry. The college sector has also got a key role to play in this. I certainly know some of the visits that I have done to some of the fantastic new renewable industry training opportunities. It seems that it is young men coming out of school who are really focusing on going into that. I just wondered, Louisa, if you have any examples of where businesses can really get this resolved earlier on in these new, exciting industries that offer great career opportunities for people. Yes and no. The issue is wider. It is more about gender inequality than anything else. In order to help businesses, one of the things that we need to do is establish caring as the norm, not the exception, and we need to target men for flexible working. That is not just to do with green jobs because green jobs have an expanding definition. It could be a financial services person who runs a premises and they have to look at the net zero impact of that, but that would not be a green job under current definitions. Talking about green skills is probably broader and your point about training is very interesting. It is not specifically to do with green skills, but one of our members had a real challenge with recruitment and retention, particularly of engineers. They had a 43 per cent turnover rate of staff and they could not recruit the engineers they needed. It was a food processing company in the UK. What they realised was that they could not just implement training programming. It just would not work because the majority of their staff were low skilled, low paid and had really negative experiences of learning, particularly at school. They had to take a step back and encourage the expression of things that people had learnt that was not necessarily to do with work. They called it a passion for learning and they sat around at lunchtime and anybody could talk about their hobbies. What was it? They got guitar playing, they got florestry, but people were excited and I learnt to do this and I learnt to do that. All of a sudden the idea of learning became normalised. As a result of that, they moved that on to the next stage and they took their basic operators and created a little pathway. Now that learning was more acceptable and gave them basic training on the machine operating, beyond operating and into repairing. It came with progression, it came with increased pay once they completed the programme. Their productivity increased because their machines were offline a lot less because they could grow their own engineers. Their recruitment and retention went down from 43 per cent to 2 per cent of staff turnover by creating an internal culture that was really positive around learning. Although it is not directly to do with green jobs, it is to do with transition. I do not have a difference between male-female take-up of the engineering pathway, but that is one creative way that an organisation recognised its challenges and overcame barriers to learning. I think that looking at learning more broadly in the round, we had a project that has just been launched yesterday. We did it with digital skills, fund apply for digital skills. What are digital skills? Does it just mean using office properly? What is the definition of that? Does it mean that I have to code? How do we transition particularly low-paid workers away and give them skills that are going to improve prospects but we take away a fear of learning? A lifelong learning commitment is really important and making flexible working equal and caring the norm for everybody and starting at that point and then taking it forward from there. We heard previously about how businesses can benefit from having that flexibility around staff retention. I wanted to ask a question, Karen, and we've discussed this over many years with regard to people sometimes not seeing the skillset they have if they've had a career break, for example, to bring up a family, to care for a loved one. Some of the work—I think it was Fife Council—had done for people over 50 who had been in that position and then got them to go fast-track into social care and just wondered where flexibility then exists for that. I think one of the things we know from workforce challenges is that a lot of councils don't necessarily want people to work part-time because they want them full-time for the current problems we're facing. I just wondered if you have any examples of where that's starting to change, both in the private and public sector. Do you mind if I answer your just transition question as well? Sure. Health care without harm published a report saying that health and social care combines the fifth-largest contributor to greenhouse gases in the world. That's a really urgent problem for the social care sector, where there's absolutely no disaggregated data collection currently. If you look at evidence from the women's project group, they talk about the key role that social care has to play as a green sector. That might help your 72 per cent male characteristic straight away if you start to incorporate a sector that is majorly female-run and delivered. One of the challenges that we have is that policy-making happens again in isolation. Grants that are available through Business Energy Scotland don't lend themselves to the social care sector, which is mostly family-run businesses. I have members who are in touch with me at the moment, a husband and wife who own a care home, really common setup in Scotland, but they are not able to apply for that funding because more than 25 per cent of their business has another shareholder, i.e., husband owns 50 per cent, wife owns the other 50 per cent. They are not able to access any investment that would enable them to introduce green policies. There are wee bits and pieces that happen out there that could easily be addressed from a policy-making level that would enable us to progress in that just transition space. There is also the role to consider that care staff have in supporting people who live in their own homes to live greener lives should they wish to as well, but you have to consider the context when over 40 per cent of social care staff are themselves accessing food banks. We can deliver the training to do that, but are they capable when their mind is focused on when they are going to get their next meal themselves. I just wanted to put that in there that social care is thinking about just transition, but actually we are struggling to make it happen in reality. As for the flexible working side of things, yes, absolutely, we are hearing more and more people are having those conversations. Just yesterday at our AGM, this was a topic of conversation between particularly two organisations in Fife, funnily enough. It is definitely a hot topic in Fife and many innovative things are happening in Fife and social care at the moment. It really is just as simple as having a conversation with your staff. What can we do to enable you to work more flexibly to retain? There is such a workforce shortage in the sector at the moment that providers will really do as much as they possibly can to enable staff. If flexible working is one of those things that they can do, then they are absolutely going to do it. I think that what we could do as an organisation is to support more of our members to do that. Thank you for that. I know that we have run over time, convener. One of the issues that I thought was really useful in the first panel was about the ambulance service changing their rotors to give predictability. I do not know whether you could write to the committee with examples of what you have of that. I think that it is a really important piece of work for us to look at. Thank you very much. I will quickly bring in Paul and then we will bring it to an end. I am very grateful, convener. It is a very quick question to Andrea about the place of trade union learning in terms of lifelong learning. What more can we do in that space so that trade unions have the resource that they need? To support workers to learn in the workplace and to have protected time to do that, essentially? Trade unions in Scotland have, for the most part, enjoyed strong collaboration with the Scottish Government since the early 2000s around union learning, with annual grants awarded by the Scottish Government to support that union learning. In recent times, an element of precarity has crept in around that and that has caused some concern about Scottish union learning's ability to continue the offer that it makes to affiliates of the STUC and has caused real consternation amongst affiliates about the extent of which they are going to be able to rely on Scottish union learning funds in order to be able to sustain the offer that they are making to their members. Certainly, that has been the EIS experience over the past six months or so. I am glad to say that, just in recent weeks, it has been confirmed that grants will continue for this year. I think that it would also be good to reach a position where that is not on an annualised basis. There is an inbuilt precarity around that. As the original legislation around Scottish union learning and learning reps and the really important role of union learning reps, since the inception of that legislation in the early 2000s, we need to recognise the value that that brings and invest in it in a way that gives security and sustainability to all the people who are involved in that. Either in delivering Scottish union learning funded learning or in receiving it. It is a big part of the union learning experience for workers in Scotland. It is a valuable resource, one that should be protected and expanded upon as we look to move towards net zero. There is a huge role for unions to play in supporting workers in terms of upskilling and perhaps moving from one sector to another. To come back to the point that Miles was making about the disproportionate number of men in that sphere, it is also really important that there is the recognition of the huge undervaluing of women's work. That has already been touched upon very slightly in some of the contributions that we have made. Caring has to be seen as a fundamental, essential public service and the people who are delivering that service need to be treated with dignity and respect and properly remunerated for the really essential work that they do. In order that we are sending a message as a society about what we value, not only in terms of the workers who are providing that care, but the people who are receiving it or citizens who are receiving it. We want them to receive it with maximum dignity and maximum quality. The whole union learning experience around that is really important as well. It is not just about the pay and the conditions. It is about the opportunities for professional learning for people who are interested in coming to work in the care sector. It is also about the people who are already in the sector. Union learning is an essential way of retaining those really valuable staff. That concludes our public business today. I thank all our witnesses for taking part in sharing your expertise. It has been absolutely invaluable. We will now move into private to consider the remaining item on the agenda. Thank you once again for coming along.