 Gweithiwch gwaith. Welcome to the 27th meeting of the Social Security Committee's 2018, 27th and final meeting of the 28th Social Security Committee. Will you remind everyone present to turn off mobile phones or mobile devices to silent mode, so that people don't disturb the meeting? No apologies have been received this morning. I'll be moved to agenda item 1, declaration of address. Can I welcome Keith Brown, who is replacing George Adam on committee? I should, First of all, I put my thanks to George Adam for all his work on committee in months going by, and I welcome Keith to the committee and can invite Keith to declare any interests. Could I refer the committee to my entry in the member's register of interests, but I have no interests to declare? Thank you very much. You are most welcome. We moved to agenda item 2, which is the decision to take items in private. The committee has asked to agree that item 5, consideration of evidence that is taken in private, is agreed. I should note that the committee has previously agreed to take item 6 in private, which is consideration of a draft report. We now move to agenda item 3, appointment of the chair of the Poverty and Equality Commission. The Child Poverty Scotland Act 2017, provided for the establishment of a commission named the Poverty and Equality Commission, which is to be established on 1 July 2019. The commission will be made up of a chair between two and four additional members. The Scottish ministers may appoint a person as a member of the commission only if the Scottish Parliament has approved the appointment. The purpose of this evidence session is to allow the committee to reach a view about the suitability of the Scottish ministers' nominee for the position of chair. I therefore welcome Bill Scott's nominee for chair for the Poverty and Equality Commission. Good morning, Mr Scott. I congratulate you on securing the nomination and wish you well at this part of the appointment process. I think that it falls upon myself to ask the first question. Just before you arrived here, the committee members were looking through some of the key skills that are required to fulfil the job of the chair. One of them was under the heading of a strong understanding of poverty and equality issues in Scotland. That seems as if we are stating the obvious and saying that that should be a core skill. I think that the reason to start off there might be to ask you to demonstrate your knowledge in that area, but I think that it would be helpful if there would be any practical experience on the ground in that area that you have or any direct experience yourself? I was born into a working-class family in Scotland, a large family with five children. Although my father was a skilled worker, he worked in the building trade and there were periods when he was laid off where we experienced a fair bit of poverty. I was unable to put fuel in the fire. My mum was having to borrow to put food in the table. That has stayed with me all my life, the memories of that. The memories of the community that I was brought up in had a lot of solidarity between the members of that community in helping one another when times got tough, mainly a mining community. That is the lived experience that I have, but that is a long time ago now. When I worked in the civil service for eight years during the 1980s at the height of a recession, mass unemployment, and I worked on unemployment benefit, I saw a lot of people who had been in work, had been managing very successfully in their lives and felt that they had been thrown on the scrap heap and wanted a new start. I saw my role then and I still hope that it is the role of many civil servants to help them to get what they were entitled to. I then made the move to welfare rights in 1989, just after my daughter was born. At that point, I wanted to move to being a gamekeeper resource to a bit of a poacher, which is that I wanted to help people to get what they are entitled to and do more than a civil servant to fight appeal battles for them and just help them to negotiate the system a wee bit more than we were allowed to help people as civil servants. Again, I worked in an area of multiple deprivation down in Pilton in Granton in Edinburgh, so I had a lot of experience of assisting people and seeing them helping other people with the increased knowledge that they had of the system to help people to get their entitlements. I was director of Lothian Antipoverty Alliance for five years. During that time, my main role was to support local community projects, develop antipoverty initiatives. I worked across Lothian and we managed to establish a number of different initiatives. I was talking about one just before I came in, a milk token initiative, in which people—women, primarily—used their milk tokens to get milk from shops up until then. We saw that there was an opportunity to buy the milk wholesale, give it to the women when they exchange their tokens, but also give them a community benefit, which was 50p into a credit union account for their child for every milk token handed in, 50p towards a book token for their child, and free fruit that we handed out with the exchange. What we saw was the women coming back to us to do reading classes so that they could use the books that they were getting through the scheme. They were educating themselves to be able to interact with their children, to read to their children and things like that. Poverty damages people in many different ways. One way is the deprivation of human contact, deprivation of intellectual stimulation. I saw the milk token initiative through books on that, by doing a really big job of getting mothers and their children to have real contact with one another. It was not just tackling material deprivation but tackling some of the other issues in the community. The credit union stuff—I know that it is not a lot of money, 50p a week—was the idea of starting up a credit union account to get low-cost credit at some point in that child's future when they grow up and to get the idea of saving for the future as well and putting away some money. The free fruit, as a side benefit to the health of the child and the mother, getting them something that was quite a premium in local shops where an apple could cost you as much as a pound of apples out of the supermarket. I have a lot of practical experience in working with communities. Over the past 11 years, all the policy work for my employer, Inclusion Scotland, has been based on engaging with disabled people, taking from their lived experience and bringing it back to Parliament to inform the policy making here. I would see that continuing if I was successful in being given the role of the chair of the commission. A little bit more about that, because I suppose that the roles of engagement change a little bit where you may be previously feeding ideas into Government, some of which they take forward and some of which they do not. Once you take it on this job, should you take it on as chair of the commission, of course, there is a strong scrutiny role that you have. When looking at the current policy landscape, be that at a Scottish level or a UK level, I am assuming—I will give you the opportunity to put some of it on the record—that you will be well up to speed. I would hope that you are well up to speed in the current policy landscape. I would ask you to say a little bit more about that, where the opportunities are in the current policy landscape but also where some of your concerns are. I mean, the concerns are fairly easy to identify. Poverty is increasing amongst families, amongst children, and in particular, there has been a huge growth in poverty amongst working families. I think that the targets that have been set are ambitious ones. They do not sound ambitious. If you look at it from the perspective of, well, it is a long period over which to achieve this change, but it is in the opposite direction for the trend that is currently being established, which is that the number of children living in poverty is increasing year on year at the moment. There are going to be huge challenges for the Scottish Government and its successors up until 2030, in reducing poverty. Some of those challenges are due to the level of benefits, the level of pay that people are receiving in work, the insecurity of many jobs nowadays, zero-hours contracts, et cetera, and the costs where wages are largely stagnant, or have been largely stagnant for several years now, but costs are rising. The main living costs, the costs of housing, the cost of fuel, the cost of food are all rising. For families, whether on benefits or in work, the challenges are getting larger and larger to try and meet their children's needs. The Scottish Government has done things that will help in reducing costs, such as increasing the number of childcare hours. It is initiatives at a governmental level that will reduce the costs to families, which could help. Obviously, the Scottish Parliament has now got social security powers that it did not have before, but it has only got them in certain areas. It has to think how it can strategically use those powers to reduce poverty. That is one of the key principles in the Social Security Act, as it has been passed by this Parliament. There are a number of areas where the Scottish Parliament has powers and can act, and there are a number of areas where it has not got the powers and cannot act. It has not got powers over means-tested benefits. It has not got powers over the level of the minimum wage. It has to be creative in thinking how it can use the powers that it has to be most effective in reducing poverty. I see part of the commission's role as offering advice to ministers, as well as holding them into account. That is part of the commission's dream. It is to look at what works, what does not work, and I believe that the people who know what works are those at the sharp end of poverty. They know. I will take you in next, Pauline. I think that that is the heart of what my final question was going to be, your deputy. Can you come in to follow up on what is this? The relationship obviously changes should you take on this role. It is important that you say that you would, well, hopefully a bit more about how you would scrutinise or challenge actions of government where you saw they were not going far enough or were going in a direction that might have some unintended consequences. It is just a little bit more about maybe the experience that you have in providing such challenges over the years and where you think areas that you might quite like—and you have your commissioners together first—but where you might quite like to concentrate on going forward? Well, certainly. I do not see it as my role only. I think that you are right. It is the commission as a whole. Again, one of the key tasks for me, if I was appointed, would be to help recruit the other commission members, because I do think that it has to be a collective view that is reached. It is a view that has to be reached on the basis of the evidence that we are presented with and that we seek out for ourselves as to, again, what works and what does not work. It would be very difficult for me to say right now what the commission will recommend to this Parliament, because I am not the commission. I would not pretend to have those policies in place, because they are something that we should come to through a consensus on the commission and after we have looked at the evidence. It is easy for me to talk in generalities about social security, for example, but it is much more difficult for me to talk at the moment about what we might offer as advice in the future in terms of how to use the powers that the Parliament has and the Government has. It is advice that you might offer. I suppose that it was examples of where you have done that bit of scrutiny in a previous existence. Examples are not what advice the Government may be, but what areas you think are of particular interest for yourself to focus in on. You do not have the gig yet. You are not then bound by whatever you say here, but I think that it would be interesting for the committee to know what you think it would be in areas that you might want to focus on. Again, the work plan of the commission will be drawn up by the commission itself, not just by me. Social security is one area, for example, where I have a lot of experience and I have appeared in front of this committee a number of times. I believe that there is potential for the use of powers in terms of top-up and of targeting to be most effective in helping those families that face the greatest risks of falling into poverty. That would include families with disabled children and disabled parents, but it would also include lone-parent families, BME families, etc. That is one area. The other area might be in the area of costs. What other costs are impacting on people's lives, such as housing, and where could Government action be most effective in reducing those costs? Another area in terms of eliminating poverty in the future would be educational attainment, etc. Again, what can the Government do to make sure that children coming from poorer households get the same opportunities in life as other children do, so that there are a large range of areas in which this Parliament and the Government have powers where the commission could be effective in making recommendations? In terms of myself in holding the Government to account, people will know that I have engaged over quite a period of time with Government and looked at legislation with a critical eye when it has been proposed. I hope that I have managed to work successfully both with Parliamentarians and Government in amending that legislation to improve it. I can give an example in terms of the Social Security Act, which is very recent, where one of our objectives was to make sure that all disabled people would have access to advocacy support. That was something that the minister was not in favour of at the outset. We had to convince her that that would help in her objective in getting it right first time for the agency. I think that that is when scrutiny works best, when you can convince those who you have a difference with that what you are asking to do will help them to attain their objectives. If the Parliament and the Government's objectives are to reduce poverty, we can show, as a commission, that carrying out certain actions will help in that task. I think that that makes the Government's role easier and that it makes the commission effective in its role. I am certainly used to holding Government to account. Again, anybody who has read our briefings, usually prepared by myself or one of the staff that I manage, will see that we praise Government when they take the right action and we hold out my account where we think they could be doing better. That has always been my point of view, as we are there to assist Government in doing its job better. That is the Government of whatever political view. That is very helpful. I know some of the information that I am asking for. You might think that members around this table know already and maybe they do, but this is the public-facing part of the process. It is important to put that on the record for folk out there that are watching proceedings here today. That is my question for the moment. Pauline McNeill. Good morning, Bill. We know each other well. You have appeared many occasions. There is no question over what you have done with the committee. You will also be aware that the appointment itself, the fact that we have a poverty inequality commission, is a really important piece of work that this committee is integral in persuading the Government. That is the right thing to do, so I think that it is a really important appointment. I have two questions. You probably covered the first one quite well, but for me it is very important to get this on the record. You must obviously be willing to challenge the Government where that is necessary because there has to be an arms line through the relationship. I would like you to say a wee bit more about that because, for me, when we come to private discussion with the committee, I need to hear from you about the level of independence you seek to have from the Government when it comes to probably the biggest single issue for this Parliament, which is tackling poverty. Can you say that you feel that you will be robust with the Government on the equation of poverty when the time comes? Again, if anybody has not heard me speaking about it, it is a passion. I sometimes have to apologise for how passionate I get about that. I get angry when I see how people's lives are damaged by poverty and especially when it could be prevented. I honestly have no doubts as to my ability to be independent of the Government and hold on to the account, because if they are not doing something to reduce poverty, if they are not doing everything that they can do to reduce poverty, I want to know why. The commission's role has to be to hold the Government to the highest standards that it can. That is to say that, regardless of whatever political persuasion the Government is, I cannot predict over the lifetime both the child poverty plan up to 2030 who will be in power or whatever. It does not really matter to me. I have worked with parliamentarians of every political party that is represented in this Parliament to try to improve legislation. I will continue to do that regardless of whether I get in this position or not, because I feel that if people want to achieve positive change, I am willing to work with them to do that. I think that any Government now or in the future, I am willing to work with them, but I am also quite a hard taskmaster in terms of looking for the best possible outcomes for the people. I see the commission as trying to represent those without a voice in our society, and that is a lot of people living in poverty who feel abandoned by mainstream politics, do not turn out to vote on many occasions and so on. We have to reach out to them and say that not only do we care about it, but we are doing something about it. It is not just walking the walk. You gave a bit of a critique of your analysis of poverty in response to the communer. A couple of things you did not mention. The first is Naomi Eisenstadt, who is the Government's own adviser to the Parliament. She talks extensively about poverty being more than income. It is about the power balance in society. It is about the networks. If you are poor, you do not have the same networks. I want to be keen to hear your share of view on that. Secondly, for quickness, in the child poverty act, you will be aware that some of us supported the amendment successfully on disability, people with disability and on the issue of single parents. We have seen through the universal credit story that single parents seem to be a group that are highly discriminated against when it comes to poverty. However, you did not mention single parents so far. I want to be clear that that is part of the analysis that you would share on poverty. I think that I did mention single parents. I think that they have done worse together. My background again, back to when I was a welfare rights worker, I specialised in employment rights and I worked with a number of women's organisations at that time to try and use European law to extend rights to women for holiday entitlement. It was largely women because they were part-time workers that were denied what should have been their rights. I have kept that up ever since. I still work closely with Closie Gap, Engender, Scottish Women's Aid, et cetera, and particularly one parent family Scotland who convene or act as the secretariat for the Scottish Campaign on Welfare Reform. I know the gender aspects of poverty, know them very well. Again, we have to take into account women's experience, which can be different and more intense than men's experience of poverty, because they are the ones who are left often with the caring responsibilities and that task of putting food on the table when there is not enough money coming into the house. Certainly, it keeps on coming back to lived experience for me. It is absolutely key in learning what are the main difficulties facing those living in poverty, and then taking that back, and then looking at what your responses can be to tailor them to meet the needs of those that are most affected by your major policy change. The past few years have been disabled people and lone parents, et cetera, but working families are also 66 per cent of all children who are living in working families. We need to address those issues as well. It is particularly case for working lone parent households, where childcare really does not suit. It is not just about having more childcare, it is about having wraparound childcare that actually allows women to make the choices with their lives that they would like to make, and if they want to work, allow them to do that. Good morning, Bill. As Pauline said, we have worked closely together, particularly around the social security bill. I have two questions to explore a wee bit further. The first one is in regard to your full-time job at present. Clearly, including Scotland, you are quite close to the Scottish Government in some way that you have a door open that you can speak to ministers, which I think is a very positive thing. How would you see that balancing between maybe one morning having to go and be a lobbyist and then the next morning being the convener of this group? Do you see any conflict between the two? If so, how would you manage that? I think that that is a fair question, Jeremy. It is one that I was asked at my earlier interview as well. I think that I do not see why it should affect the day job in one way, because they are two completely separate roles. I do not just speak about social security when I am going to see Government, nor most of the time when I am going to see ministers, as you know. I have been working with the agency since it has been established earlier this year on various stakeholder reference groups. I do not go in there as a lobbyist. I go in there to try and share my knowledge of what works for disabled people and tell them about what does not work, and I encourage them to ask disabled people themselves and involve disabled people themselves in the policy making and so on. In a lot of ways, I do not think that it will matter that much, but I do acknowledge that on public occasions the conflict might look more obvious. I think that we are going to have to discuss internally inclusion Scotland about who speaks out on an issue when disability and poverty are being discussed, to make sure that it is not me. Similarly, in the commission, I would be reluctant to speak on disability and poverty issues. I would hope that another commission member might actually do it. Otherwise, it is going to look like me just harking on and using one as a platform for the other. I do not want it to be seen in that way, nor do I think that my interests and my passion about reducing poverty are limited to disabled people. As I said, my background is that I have worked in equalities right across the main equalities groups. Although I have never worked for an LGBTI organisation, I have worked alongside them on cross-sectional and intersectional issues. I take the poverty and inequality part of the commission's role really seriously. I think that arrangements would have to be made for somebody else to be speaking out on inclusion Scotland's behalf if it was disability and poverty and somebody else speaking out on the commission's behalf if it was disability and poverty. Other than that, I do not think that the vast majority of the work that I do is lobbying as such. I do a lot of lobbying with myself, so you probably know me for that. A lot of the work that I do is very practical work and try to assist not just Government, but other third sector organisations, public sector organisations in trying to improve their services so that, in practice, they deliver for disabled people. Again, I can see how the commission can help in that in terms of local child poverty plans, but it would be as evidence-based approach about what works at a local level based on what people in local communities tell us. That is helpful. I suppose that, to be absolutely transparent, I think that you and I come from probably the political opposite extremes of what we can cooperate quite often on specific issues. You have made it very clear within your application that you have political affiliations, which I think are pretty well known. How do you lay aside your own personal political views and work with, for a moment, imagine that 2021 is a very different Government from a very different political perspective? How would you see that working in a constructive way? I go back to you, Jeremy. As an employee of a charity, I have to operate in a non-political or a-political way when I go about my work, and I hope that I do. In doing so, I am, and this is genuine, personally as well as my role. I have always been able and willing to work with anybody that wants to work with you or the organisation that I have been working with, whether that is Inclusion Scotland or Lothian Antipoverty Alliance or Lothian Racial Equality Council or whatever, to try and effect change that will better the lives of the people that I am there to try and represent. I know that everybody that comes in here as an elected member wants to change the world for the better, so do I, so that the starting point is very similar in some ways. That is what makes it easy to work with people who are trying to achieve positive change, whatever their political background and beliefs. I have respect for everybody that is doing that. In your application, you talk about the fact that higher proportions of black and minority ethnic people, disabled people and women are living in poverty, and today you have spoken about the sharp end of poverty being the best place to come up with solutions and that your first role should be appointed will be in the recruitment of commission members. How would you see that role in recruiting and reflecting those that are at the sharp end of black and minority ethnic, disabled and women in forming the membership of the commission? I would be very keen. Again, it would not be me that is making the sole selection and it would have to be based on the public appointment process, but I would be very keen to work with those who are working in public appointments to try and encourage applications for those very groups that you have just listed, Mark. I fundamentally believe that if the commission does not have lived experience in its own membership, we will not be driven by the current needs of the groups that are most affected by poverty. We can do our best to reach out. At the moment, I am thinking about that as a potential conflict to interests in the future. I am a board member of the poverty alliance and it has board members who are on it who have lived experience. I would be encouraging people like that to apply from disabled people's organisations, from lone parents organisations and so on. I have met those individuals. I know that they could perform a useful role in the commission. It is certainly weekly contact with groups in individuals living in poverty. I have got some of the contacts that I could be using myself to encourage people to come forward. I am really keen that they get over the hurdles in the public appointment system and make it on to the commission. As I said, we would be missing something if we did not manage to try to represent the society, but particularly the people who are living in poverty in Scottish society. I doubt that there will be all the members, but we can do our best to ensure that the right people come forward and that they are supported through the application process. One organisation currently helps people who are going for public appointments. There are a number of other organisations that do that. The poverty alliance has to get heard, which is encouraging people to take on the responsibilities and get their voices heard at a higher level. It is reaching out through groups like that. We should be able, I hope, to attract at least some people to the commission, to apply to the commission and hopefully to get through the appointment process. You have a great deal of expertise and experience in this area, and it is clear that you are passionate about the subject matter, which is hugely important. A chair is a key role in any organisation. I would like to understand how the Social Security Committee finds it challenging scrutinising some of the legislation, because it is very technical and complex. I appreciate your background in welfare rights, but I would like to understand how you will help to lead the commission to understand the legislative opportunities that there are and how you will keep abreast of any developments between the two parliaments to ensure that the commission can deliver as optimally as we would all like it to. As a policy professional for a long time now, I am certainly used to digesting a lot of documents at Sarabah. I am also used to producing briefings, which I hope are accessible to people, and I know where to look. I know the legislative process probably inside out, maybe not quite as well as some of the MSPs here, but as well as anybody who is maybe not a parliamentary and can, I have worked in here for four years as well, and I have worked with Spice. In the past, I am part of the expert group externally to Spice on Social Security. I know where the information sources are, and I know how to make information intelligible. I am sure that working with the secretary of the commission, we will be able to brief people about what the opportunities are and what some of the barriers are to affect and change. I think that they make well-reasoned and good recommendations to Government about how to go about their job in trying to reduce poverty. I do not just see it as a national thing, but it is the commission's role to advise and hold the Government to account. Again, if we can assist local authorities and NHS boards on how they go about their child poverty planning, it is an ex-colleague who is working at improvement services, Hannah McCulloch, from the child poverty action group. I know her well, she has worked with her for years. She comes from the same background as me in terms of working with the disabled people's organisation at one point. There is a lot of work that we can do to encourage bottom-up approaches as well as top-down approaches. That will be just as important in many ways, because I was talking to someone just before coming in about how credit unions—for example, I have been in since I was a low-paid worker—was really helpful to us in giving us low-cost credit, et cetera. That is an idea that no Government supports and wants to see rolled out further. We should be, as a commission, I hope, saying how we can provide low-cost credit, because that reduces the cost and makes the income go further. You might not be able to raise wages, but if you can reduce costs, that is another effective way of reducing poverty. I have two questions for you. First, there can sometimes be a bit of cynicism about commissions and what they can achieve. I am sure that you are more than aware of that. What would you say to that in five years' time? What would you anticipate the commission will achieve that would make a tangible difference? If we have not made a tangible difference, I will really concern myself with failure. We need to be realistic about what can be achieved, but we also need to really push Government to do everything that it can. I think that that will become even more important over the next few years. Potentially, there could be a fallout for Brexit in the economy, but there could be more people getting pushed into poverty, even than there are just now. The commission can only do so much. It has not got the levers itself, but if we come up with good evidence-based recommendations and look at what would be most effective—I hate to use the phrase, the biggest bang for your bucks—how do you use your powers and how do you use financial resources of Government to affect the most amount of change that you can? That would be like you have to make difficult choices at times about what the priorities are for change. As a commission, I would say it very much as a collegiate approach, in which everybody has to own the recommendations that we are making, and sometimes difficult arguments that you are going to be having. However, I am used to doing that. I have served on a number of boards, and we have not always seen ITI. However, if you come to it, as I said earlier, with the same approach that you have a job to do and what your job is, it is to make the best possible recommendations for the groups that are hardest hit. You are starting for the right place, and you have the same aim. I think that the commission can make a positive difference in making good recommendations to Government, which are non-political. Your justification for doing things could be that this is not coming from our political agenda. That is what the poverty and inequality commission has recommended that we do, and they have come to us with an evidence-based case. We are going to have to do that, and it might not be always popular things that you are going to have to do, not popularly society. That can be difficult in politics, but if you have good evidence behind it and you know that it will be most effective, in some ways the commission can help in providing you with the ammunition to counter detractors who do not want that particular action to be taken, because it is a more objective role that the commission should be playing. Just finally, you said earlier on about people overcoming the hurdles in the public appointment system. I feel quite strongly about how we make it easier for people from more of the varied walks of life and backgrounds to get into serving the public good. It is not just in public appointments. In general, employment recruitment has become more difficult for people in a lot of ways. Competency-based approaches are good, in that they look at what you are experiencing as they are doing something, and they explain how what you did affected change in your workplace or in society. It is quite difficult for a lot of people who have not got that experience applications to word their application to get through a competency-based application process. At Inclusion Scotland, we have been working with disabled people to try and talk them through it what would be best to go into that application. I think that that sort of coaching should be available to people from low-income backgrounds that want to go through the public appointment process. If you can make it available, it is worth its weight and gold, because people have often got the experience, and they just do not know how to express it on paper. Once they are in the interview, they often can make a convincing case why they should be given a post or an appointment. It is getting them through that first stage is crucial to get them at least in front of a selection panel. I think that the public appointments could be doing more to reach out to those who are underrepresented on public boards to try and encourage them and give them the tools that they need to tackle. For them, that is a new way of expressing themselves, because they have usually just been asked to list what they have done, rather than to say exactly what they did in that role that benefited the organisation that they worked for. I think that we could be doing more. I am not going to be doing it as the chair of the commission, if I am appointed, but I hope that I can encourage some of the groups that I know are out there working with gingerbread, working with lone parents, to work with anybody who is making an application to us to talk them through the competency-based stuff, so that they give themselves the best chance they can. Okay, Michelle Ballantyne. Good morning, Bill. I suspect that you have probably met all of us at some point. I have three. One is just a quick clarification. You said that you took at the post of acting manager of inclusion in 2011, and then you referred to yourself as still acting manager. No, I am not. I am deputy chief exec. I just wanted to clarify that, because it was on your things, so I thought that I would miss and stood it. Two things, really, that I want to pick up on. One is around the fact that social security is a safety net. It is the thing that should help people when things are not going so well or when things have gone wrong and bounce them back onto their feet again. In terms of the role of the poverty and inequality commission, how do you see its role in terms of the preventative agenda, preventing the need in the first place for that social security net? Can you talk a wee bit about that first? I do believe that prevention is better than cure. If you can have a well-performing economy where people are adequately rewarded for the work that they do, you can certainly prevent a lot of poverty in our society. I agree with you that social security is a safety net at times of crisis, but for some people it is also there, for example, to meet the extra cost of disability. Those can be continual rather than one off-course. You have to think about what the purpose of different benefits are to use them most effectively. Again, I have heard talk within Government, civil servants and so on, that you could have a scheme that is like motability but for fuel costs. Through bulk buying, you could reduce the overall cost to a household. Again, that is part of a preventative approach. If you can, you can use the resources that are there to reduce the costs of low-income households. You are acting to prevent one of the key costs that can plunge a family from managing to not managing by reducing fuel costs. Again, we need to seriously look at that idea. I have not come to any conclusions. What is your commission's role to examine the evidence of what could be achieved, what cost savings could be affected by such a change in policy, how many people would that affect, how many children would it lift out of poverty, et cetera, and then present objective conclusions to Government about what we think could be achieved by doing this or not doing it, or that alternative approach might be a better one. In other words, we have to weigh up and see what are the best options within that. That has been talked about in terms of disability benefits, but I know that some local authorities have been looking at it for tenants as well. Which one has the best chances of success in buying by the people that you are attempting to reach? The whole idea is that the more people that join in the scheme, the bulk buying power increases and the lower the cost that you can achieve. You want a scheme if you were to go after something like that, where more people participate than do it. How do you best achieve that? That would be the commission's role, to weigh up those options and hopefully make the correct recommendation to Government about which of them would be most effective. In terms of drawing evidence, you say that you look at the evidence and present it. Do you see the commission's role in drawing evidence from work that other people have done, or do you see the commission's role in engaging with people wider and drawing their own evidence? Both. I would hope that we will engage with people that are doing it right at the grass roots, right down the community level, about what works in their local community, and whether you can roll that out at a national level. Some solutions might just be that. There are local solutions to local issues, and they work well there, but they might not work well elsewhere. Other ones might have that potential to be introduced across communities across Scotland, in which case that would be something that I would hope the commission would say to the Government. In terms of working with local authorities and NHS boards, could they be supporting community initiatives like this within their own areas? That seems to work. It is about testing things, but it will be about going right down to local community level. It will also seek evidence from those with the greatest amount of knowledge on that particular issue. I would not pretend to be an expert on fuel poverty. I would want to speak to people who are the experts—that is people who live in it—but it is also sometimes those who can say, well, this is how you could purchase your electricity, power or whatever, and use it to reduce the cost. I do the fence, the employer's suppliers. Exactly. The other element for me is that, as chair of the commission, whilst I hear what you are saying about inclusivity and everybody else, I was particularly interested in your response to the question about having a broader base of people on the commission. However, your role, particularly in the first year, is very much going to be about setting the ethos, driving the agenda and ensuring that you have a focus on what you are going to do. I would like to bring it tighter to you and say, for you, if you were appointed as chair, what do you want to achieve in that first year? What will you judge your success by at the end of the first 12 months in terms of looking back and saying, have I delivered as chair in that first year? I mean, the first thing is the recruitment. That is going to be key. That we get the breadth of experience that we need on the commission so that we have different voices, different expertise. I would want to be able to know that the other commissioners were bringing something to the table that I do not have. I would expect the same equal amount of passion about reducing poverty, but I would want them to have expertise in other areas, more knowledge than I have in those areas. I would want us in the first year to establish what our work programme is going to be, what are the priorities that we want to look at, establish a risk register and make sure that we are trying to avoid any damage that could be done to the commission's reputation, et cetera, but also how to establish us in the public eye as being independent of the Government and there to listen to the communities that we want to work with to try to improve our own lives. I suppose that it is establishing an independent persona to the commission, a work programme that is achievable, as I said, setting our own priorities, which would be to show our independence for Government, but also looking at what is happening and making sure that we are fitting in to an extent where the policy agenda is. You can be independent in terms of commenting, but you need to know what is happening on the ground to be able to influence it. If you know that there are opportunities coming up, it would be stupid to ignore them. We need to do full sort of analysis that we would do in setting policy for any organisation and working out a business plan. The important role is to get us established, that is recruitment, setting your sales to the wind and saying which direction you are going to go in, and then getting on with it. That is enough for the first year. Thereafter, we would hope to have more influence, but the first year is getting solidly established so that we know that we are working on the right issues and that the recommendations that we eventually make will be solidly grounded in evidence. In terms of not establishing yourself as independent from Government, there has been some questions that I have asked earlier. How do you think that you can establish yourself as independent in terms of being politically neutral, so evidence-based, rather than any kind of political bias? For me, the question is really there. We need to be seen as independent in the Government, which I think means at least speaking to some of the communities to feel neglected, to feel that they are not being heard and saying that we are here to listen in some ways and to give us your ideas about how you want to see us tackle this problem, a persistent poverty in our society. We are not just going to listen to you, we are going to take on board what you are telling us. I know that the Government does that as well, but I think that the commission, by going out and being seen to not just talk the talk but walk the walk and eventually making recommendations, as I said, might be difficult for Government to live with. That is when we will be seen as fully independent, probably not until then, not until we make some of the difficult judgments that we are going to have to make, but we can start that process, at least in the first year, by speaking out on poverty and really trying to convince our society that it has to be tackled. I do not just think that poverty damages the lives of people living in poverty, it damages the whole fabric of society. That is a message that we have to get out that we might be talking about doing with that problem, but that is a problem for everybody, not just for those living in poverty. One final question from Keith Brown MSP. Before we draw to a close, we will probably be on by a lot of time here, but I thought it was just, I talked to Deputy convener earlier, that given the first time that we have carried out this process and it is open, public and transparent, we want to give as much time as possible for questions. I do not see any other bids for questions other than Mr Brown at the moment. If there is, please catch my eye, but it would have to be brief, but it is a final line of questioning from Keith Brown. It was two questions, if it is possible, convener, not the five that Michelle asked, but two. I am happy for them to be brief answers, but the first one is, on the one hand, we have quite similar backgrounds, although there were six kids in my family out enough. Like you, I have been in the public sector for a long time and had to argue throughout that time to make sure, for example, that councils put into their anti-discrimination policies the grounds of political views, which surprised them. It was hard to do with a number of councils, so I would abhor any idea that we would try and preclude somebody because of their political views. I would hope that that would be taken forward in the appointment of the commission members. On the other hand, you mentioned before the voiceless, and I just wonder how inevitably being a product of all the different organisations that you have been working with in the anti-poverty field—very good people, very good organisations—there are people, as you yourself identified, who will not relate to any of those bodies, and they are completely cut off. They do not vote, as you have said. How would you intend that the commission would engage with people like that? That might take a longer answer than the question. I think that there is work that you can do to reach those people. It is not easy. Again, I have worked with homeless people, and they can be some of the most difficult people to reach, but there are always somebody that they have to be in contact with. Quite often, in that case, it is health services. You have to think of the groups that you are trying to reach and think where they have to go, and then try to reach them through that. I am a big supporter, for example, of welfare rights in health centres, because that is where people who are in the greatest need often go. Even when they have completely lost contact with local authority, etc. To bring them together is a much bigger task. I think that there has been some successful work done by agencies such as the Poverty Alliance that reach those groups, but there are always people who are really on the margins. Again, you just have to, in some ways, try to take them into account, even though they are not always present. However, keep on thinking about how do we bring them into the tent to begin that discussion, because there are techniques to reach them out, as I say, through health services, etc., where you can reach some of them that you might not otherwise reach, but there always will be very difficult groups. The second question was, in relation to the Smith commission and what is now the devolved settlement, it strikes me that, with experience, you can see in somebody that it is a complete nightmare. It does not work. Consumer protection is just bizarre. Without asking you to say which power should be dressed where, in the field that you expect to be covering, is there one measure that you think—I am not saying that it should be devolved or re-reserved or whatever—is there one measure that you think you would make a big difference if it lay with the Government that does not currently lie with, if you can follow that? Pass record on the Smith commission is fairly well known that we argued for all social security powers to be devolved. That is included in Scotland's view. It is probably my own as well, because I think that a meshmash of social security line in one place and another is not easy for policy makers. I would like to see that, but that is a personal view, I have to say, and not the commission's view, because the commission will take its own view. More devolution in that area might be helpful, because it can lead to more coherent policy responses, in which it can tailor all the benefits to do the job that it wants to do. That is not the situation, and we have to work with what we have. We have to look at utilising the powers that we have to the utmost effectiveness. I think that there are ways. The Scottish Parliament does not have power over the minimum wage, so it has chosen to go down the living wage route and encourage employers to begin paying their staff the living wage. That has been effective for thousands of workers. There is so much that it can do by encouragement and other means. We need to think about what we can do through things such as the living wage campaign, as well as what we can't do. One final thing. I was asked to write to the outset what my vision was. My vision is that Scotland is free, want and hunger in stigma poverty. That is what everybody in this room wants to achieve. I hope that, if I was appointed, that would be something that we could work collectively on. Thank you very much, Mr Scott. It probably is the first time that I have been sitting in what feels like a job interview experience in a public session of Parliament. A little bit artificial. Had it been a normal witness session, I suspect I would have truncated some of your responses and some of the questioning as well. However, I felt that we had just let that run its course for public transparency. There is no point in doing these things unless we let them run their course. Thank you for your time this morning. I should inform you that our committee will report back to Parliament in relation to the appointment decision before us. We hope to do that in good order. I thank you for your time this morning and wish you a very happy Christmas when it comes as well. We now move to agenda item 4, which is a decision to take at another agenda item future meetings in private. The committee is asked to agree that the discussion about its next potential inquiry on housing, I understand, will be held in private at its next meeting, as the committee agreed. We have previously agreed to take it in private, so we will move into private session.