 Badawe y cwm ni ac rwy'n gweithio i fynd y d techniwethe swyddfaeth a'r Comit ym Mhwylwyr. Rwy'n vechais bowd am gyfer y cyfanffordd ym Mhwylwyr ar indemn – ymに oedd yn urchwm gwybod mwyledd. Mae ym ymgyrch yn ym ABCD ac yn ymnylch. Mae gennym yn ei ffordd ar gyfer y cyfanffordd cyfanffordd cyfanffordd ym gyfanffordd cyfanffordd. Felly dyma ei fod yn gorfodd cy rusio gan cydnod, y gallwn y cymdeithasol ar gyfer y cymdeithasol. Mae hynny'n ddod o'r ffordd gyfloswyr ar y 28 April a 12 May. A gael y cyfle cyfloswyr o ran ffawr o gweithio, i gael y cyfle cyfloswyr o'r ffawr o'r rai cyfloswyr. Felly, rwy'n gweithio i fynd i gael y cyfloswyr. Mae ydych chi'n gweld pa ymlaen i gyfloswyr Paul Ferguson, ynghylch yn ymgyrchol yng nghymru, of the Institute of Revenue, Rating and Valuation. Paul is also the Revenue and Benefits Manager at Falkirk Council. We also have Gordon McRae, who is the Assistant Director of Communications and Advocacy at Shelter Scotland, and Kirsty McKechnie, who is the Early Warning Systems Project Manager at the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland. In the room with us today we have Betty Stone, who is the chair of the Edinburgh Tenants Federation. We have Karen Carrick, who is the Evaluations Manager of the Improvement Service, and we have Martin Canavan, who is the Head of Policy and Precipation at Aberlare. Good morning everyone. A few housekeeping points just to kick us off. We do have a large panel this morning and given your areas of expertise I'll say that we have a lot of cross-cutting nature on today. Some of the issues discussed is maybe not an area that you need to contribute to, and we are here for two hours. We will have a wee break in the middle, I think, as we are going to need it. Thank you very much for making that time this morning. Don't feel compelled to have to speak to every single point that we are going to put in front of you, and always you can follow up and writing at the end if you think that there is something that you need to make sure that we know. Please indicate if you are in the room by raising your hand that you want to come in. If you are on blue jeans, type who we are in the chat box, and I'll keep an eye on that to bring you in as well. Just give our broadcasting colleagues a wee second to turn your microphones on before you start speaking. I won't forget that comfort break at 10 o'clock because I think that by then we'll all need it. I'm going to turn to questions from members because we do have a lot of them. I'm going to ask them in town. My first question is going to be coming from Paul McClellan, who is in the room, and then to be followed by Jeremy Balfour. I think one of the things that we've probably seen in the last few weeks and evidence is how the private sector and how the public sector deal with debt. The question really for myself is, do you think that the public sector is behind the private sector in dealing with that at the moment? I'm just trying to think that I'll go to you first, probably yourself first, Martin, if you want to come in. I'll open up to see who ever wants to come in. Certainly, and thanks very much to the committee for inviting us along here to give evidence this morning. There's probably others on the panel that can give some real insight into the technical nature of the public sector versus private sector, but I think from what we are seeing at Aberlour, we are seeing a real significant increase in families who are experiencing levels of public debt specifically to local authorities, to housing associations, to DWP and others. We're seeing quite a difficult and challenging circumstances as some of those debts are pursued and recovered by public bodies. I think some of the research that we've been doing that's been led by Professor Traynor at Heriot-Wall University that I think we've shared with you in our evidence has highlighted that there is a real disparity between the way in which public debts or debts by public bodies are pursued versus private sector. The private sector is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and there are regulations around how those debts can be pursued. I think they don't apply to the public sector and what we're seeing is a real punitive approach at times, a real escalation in terms of the speed at which debts can be recovered. That's really difficult and challenging for many families that we are working with to Aberlour supporting who are in deep financial difficulty. What we're seeing is that we're actually seeing the vast majority of the debt that families that we support have is to public bodies and so the circumstances around that debt recovery and the inconsistency often around that debt recovery. I'll maybe speak a little bit more in detail about the inconsistency in relation to things like school meal debt, which we've covered in our evidence, but there's a real inconsistency around how that is approached across the country, but largely it seems to be difficult, challenging, punitive at times and really fundamentally quite challenging for families wider wellbeing. I'm sure there's others on the panel that can speak in more detail about the public versus private sector, however. Thanks for that, because I think I was reading Devan and Chaddon and obviously I think it says in the debt levels in the UK's like 13.5 billion. Obviously, to Scotland takes a share, you're probably talking about 1.5, 2 billion pounds. Just to extend that, if that's okay, it'll probably come to Kirsty on the same question if that's okay. Yes, of course. Thank you very much for having me along today. I think that the thing that we're finding that's quite surprising in relation to the public debt is that some of it could be avoided with better administration through things like universal credit. There's no onus on universal credit really to get decisions right in the first place because all overpayments are recoverable. I think that in relation to council tax, some of the council tax arrears could be avoided if we had a more transparent council tax reduction system, if there were more decision letters issued, if it was easier for claimants to access council tax reduction. I think that, like the other organisations that have spoken before, and I would agree with Martin about the free school meal debt as well, more and more clients are coming with debts that are to the public service for essentials rather than for what would be considered to be consumer credit. I suppose that, just from your point of view, the child poverty action group, are you seeing if it's a split in families? Is there that real distinctive split of families with children and families without? I don't remember who gave us evidence before. The first two or three years are incredibly important in a child's life. Are you seeing that impact going forward beyond that? Is there a real impact that we need to look at in terms of younger children or older kids? Is there a distinctive split in what you are seeing with the work that you are doing? All families are being affected at the moment, but there is evidence from Trussell Trust that, because of the more families that are being affected by the two-child limit in the early years of a child's life, there is an increasing number of families with younger children using food banks, and we think that that might be a direct correlation as a result of the two-child limit. In terms of the public sector debt, that can affect anybody. One of the things that we are seeing at the moment is a very aggressive collection of historic council tax credit debt and social fund debt. People who had maybe claimed those benefits in the past are now being sought through universal credit. Often they are so old that there is very little way of anybody being able to find any evidence about whether, in fact, there is a debt there in the first place. There are certainly very few ways for people to challenge those debts after such a long period of time. We can find that absolutely families with younger children are very much affected by the kind of lower income, but families with older children may well find that they are having their benefits deducted because of historic debt as well. For that question, I think that I have seen that myself, where the tax credits and sometimes they are in their thousands and they are from years ago. A family can never get out of the bit when that arrives and they cannot find the information going back to defend their position or change the outcome. I will move to questions from Jeremy Balfour. Good morning, and thank you all very much for coming this morning. I wonder if I can just follow the question from Paul up a wee bit further. I am not sure if anyone wants to jump into that one. My understanding, and I have been trusting officers, is that there is a legal duty on local authorities to pursue that debt under the powers that they have been granted. If they do not do that, they would then possibly lose funding back. Am I right on that? Can anyone give us an answer towards that? I think that we can perhaps go to Paul Ferguson for that and maybe Karen from the Improvement Service as well, Paul. Yes, thank you very much. I am not aware of any legal obligation that it requires to do so, but I am more obligated for the communities to do so because obviously any debts that we pursue proper counsel are to fund the services that we provide, so I think that it is that moral duty. I am not aware of a legal duty, but obviously I don't know that crucial here is about what we need to do, and that is to recover this from those that can pay it and to support those that cannot pay it to the two positive outcomes. The one thing that I would qualify is that when we set counter-stacks, for example, we have to set a bad debt provision. I respect the collection rate. If there are factors that limit that, then that means a larger increase in counter-stacks for other households, so if we cannot collect as much as we historically did, we would have to increase counter-stacks further to fill that gap. Can you follow up on that then? What would be a policy? If somebody comes in with an issue of my going-to-the-council tax or rent arrears, how would that look like in a practical level by local authorities? If I can offer some context to you then, as well as having reviews, I also have advice services at Falkirk Council. I have two roles here. I have worked closely with Cam Caracus and the panel on the collaborative counter-stacks collection, which is a very good piece of work that we will be back in late 2019. I think that the panel has been made aware of it before, and we are hoping to relaunch that this month or the next month. For what it looks like, if somebody comes to us, then our duty is to maximise the benefits, to make sure that all the help is getting, which is counter-stacks relief reduction, et cetera, and the other welfare benefits, and then to look at what opportunities there are to pay the on-going charges and what is left to pay the historical debts. There is no one-size-fits-all, but we need to consider individuals here. There is not a blanket, so we have advice support hubs, so it is an individual case. We assess the individual circumstances, maximise their income, maximise the relief to minimise the charge, and then ensure that they pay the on-going charges in a way that suits their income, and then deal with historical debts. We probably would use nature to get them as early as possible to avoid that debt being too material. I think some of the evidence we've taken in previous panels is that once you're in that system role and you can't pay, there seems to be an almost, you're into a machine, but then you end up with legal action being taken against you. I suppose just from a local authority perspective, is there any way of that being adapted and changed so that if you can't, you don't suddenly end up in the show-of-court? Or is that just something that local authorities again do simply because of the procedures that are there in place? There's an issue of scale here to councils. Council has an annual charge, which includes, obviously, around 27 per cent of that as water charges and more for those low-income. Because of that, we want to make sure that we collect the current year in full if possible to avoid that kind of burden to next year. Yes, we do issue a reminder quite sharply. We do follow-up on those who have found notices, and we do go to somebody who won't because of the cost. Any engagement at all, any point in those areas of stages, will stop the action in a lot of remedy. The problem is what's the trigger for that house, so when is that trigger coming as for help? Our duty is to try to make sure that it comes as for help earlier. That's our duty to continue to improve and improve to make sure that we don't. Those who can't pay and are struggling to try and incentivise them to come and ask for help because we want to create that trust with ourselves and our partners. We don't yet have that as an issue. It's fairly clear from evidence before that people are not engaging with us early because they don't believe that they have a positive outcome. That's the problem that we have to turn around. One final question, just on a slightly different theme. Do we know, in regard to the debt that is still outstanding, how much of it would say be historical, so over 10 years old, and how much of it would be saved within the last five years? Is it possible to get that type of breakdown? Yes, it's got to go, Chris Beggars, and I have to post it on the CTR average terms of the accounts tax, but if I focus on accounts tax, there is a CTR average term that is submitted that includes the age of each debt, so what year the debt relates to free-slope authority, so yes, that information is available. I can try to find a link to it, but that's certainly there in the public sector. Just to pick up on the point that Paul made about the collaborative council tax guide, that was a piece of work that Step Change Scotland funded us to do, and the idea was that we could try and resolve some of those issues at a local level before they actually got to the enforcement process. A range of partners got together and we identified principles that we thought could be rolled out in each local area that would help councils to work with third sector partners and others to actually take a more sympathetic approach, if you like, to recovering council tax arrears, so, as Paul said, a lot of this is actually set in legislation, so there was, we identified that, there was a limited scope for flexibility, but unfortunately the pandemic intervened, we couldn't launch the guide, but we are planning to launch it later on this month. The intention is to follow that up in six months time just to see how effectively it's being used in each area, but if I could say something about sort of public versus private in terms of how things operate. Most councils have fairness and equality duties as well, they also have anti-poverty committees, and there is that imperative in local authorities to try and protect those most vulnerable and make sure that they access the services that they need. So key to making sure that you don't go down the enforcement process, as Paul has said, is to make sure that people get access to advice at an early stage, and I think that's that's kind of critical in the process, and that's what we're suggesting in wider research that we've done, but also in the guide that we've produced, that that's the key point. If you can get people into that, get them the advice, get their incomes maximised, then that will help mitigate against these kind of recovery processes. Thank you very much. I suppose the issue that we've been hearing for the last few weeks, is that that isn't working. So we've got a crisis at the moment with people, with fuel bills, fuel foods, all these issues, and the evidence that we've been hearing is that local authorities seem to be pursuing this quite vigorously, and so it may be a kind of thing that is on paper, but it doesn't seem to be happening in practice, and so I suppose the question for me, Karen, is over the next six or nine months, so six months is quite a long time away in regard to a lot of people who are struggling with debt at the moment, for the next six or seven months, what should local authorities be doing? What advice should Scottish Government, should COSLA, should the Parliament be giving to local authorities at this particular moment in the situation that is here at the moment? I think funding advice services is always a challenge, and I've no doubt other people have said that to you. I wouldn't necessarily accept that it's not working everywhere. I think I can't speak for all local authorities, but there are many examples where there is effective practice in place. We're an improvement organisation, so what we do is gather evidence and use it to suggest improvement actions that local authorities and their partners might take. For the past seven years, we've collected data on how local authority investment in advice services, welfare advice and money advice, so we have that data set that we can look at trends and establish what's happening. Because of the pandemic, there has been a drop, as you know, in requests for advice, but, interestingly, what we also identified in that period—this was before we had the energy crisis—was that demand for energy debt being the primary reason for seeking advice had risen, so that's a flag for the future. I think that we do need to be aware of that that was happening during the pandemic. That's going to take off in the future. What local authorities do when they do best is when they work in partnership, and a lot of that has happened because of Covid. I'm not saying that this is across the board, but there are examples of that. We're doing some work currently for the Scottish Government on accessible advice, but that's about taking advice into areas where people are most likely to use it, for instance, in schools and GP practices. There are lots of examples of that approach that's being taken at the moment. We're rolling out a programme where there are 150 GP practices who will have an advice worker, ultimately embedded in that practice, where there can be a straight, non-stigmatising referral from a GP or a health visitor to actually see somebody in the surgery. We know that that works from research that we've done and also from research from the Glasgow Centre for Population and Health. We're also doing some research on what happens in schools. There are great examples in Glasgow, for instance, of how advice has been provided in secondary schools throughout Glasgow. There are examples in South Lanarkshire where the council are working with the CEB to make sure that people get their £100 payment towards their council tax and in some ways that that's an incentive to access advice services. We also know that digital access to advice is here to stay. We saw from the research that we did that initially, from a period where perhaps about 4 per cent of advice services were delivered, funded by local authorities, were funded, were delivered digitally, that rose to close on 70 per cent, so that there was a marked increase there. I suppose that what I'm saying is that the key to this is access to advice services and they're best served when they're delivered using a partnership approach. Local authorities, I think, do want to offer that service to people because they do recognise the role that they have in relation to promoting equality and fairness. I promise my final question when I will pass on. Again, I understand from evidence that we've taken from previous weeks is that the advice is not a statutory duty for local authorities. I know a lot of them do fund it but it's not something they have to do. Do you think that it would make any difference if that became a statutory duty that they had to offer advice across offer to local authorities to make it so that then at least those who are working in that area would know that they have funding coming for future years as well? I think it's kind of tangentially a statutory duty. The bankruptcy act says you've got to give, make sure that people seek advice, but it's not something that's laid down in law. My concern would be that if it's a statutory duty it'll be added to all the other ones and that will take away the ability in some senses to meet local needs and circumstances. It might be better to think about maybe some sort of minimum standards in terms of advice services that we offer and that would allow there to be that kind of local flexibility engagement that could be adapted for each area. Before I move to my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy with her questions, I've got Martin and Betty that both would like to come in. If I can ask you to keep your comments brief at this point, if that's okay, Martin first. Certainly, thanks, convener. I'll try and be as brief as possible. It was really just to come back to that point of the public versus private debt, and I would agree with a lot of what Karen said there. I think there's a real need to look at how we can have standard guidelines and ensure consistency and a rights-based approach to how we respond to people in understanding local circumstances for people. In terms of where we are in relation to council tax or rears in council tax debt specifically, it's important to highlight that we are, in Scotland, behind other parts of the UK in this, around the statute of limitations, for example, in terms of council tax rears, that historic debt that we've already touched on this morning. We could go a long way to reducing the impact and the financial anxiety and the insecurity that people are experiencing by reducing that statute of limitations to five years, so it's more consistent with the rest of the country, the rest of the UK. There are already steps towards legislating in England, I think, around Government debt management, and I think that that's certainly something that we should consider here in Scotland as well. I think that, in our evidence that we've called for the Scottish Government to look at introducing a public debt management bill that will seek to ensure that there's a consistent approach nationally and that we can respond appropriately to those who find themselves in real problem debt to public bodies. Just in terms of some of the work that we're continuing to do, building on the work that Professor Trainers has already done, she's currently looking at the council tax specifically and the way in which, in the time and the effort that it requires local authorities to chase and pursue the debt that people will be accumulating particularly in relation to council tax and whether or not there's an argument there about whether it's the most efficient use of public resource and public funding. Is there a different or better way that we can think about how we use resources that may be pushed towards recovery and actually thinking about how we just support and respond more appropriately to people who might find themselves in the cycles of problem debt? Over to you, self-betting. Then we've got Kerstu, who wants to briefly come in as well. Thank you for having me this morning. I have a big issue with the council, the way that they approach people for these debts. They send letters out to people. The amount of literacy in Edinburgh alone is 33 per cent. A lot of these people don't even know how to read these letters and that worries me and I'm pushing for to get the housing office back on the ground where there should be, out meeting the people and addressing the issues with the people. When we send them to the services that are out there, there's a waiting list there about three months before they're seen. That is horrendous. As you talk about funding them, yes, they should be funded to help those people, definitely. Thank you very much for that, Betty. Kerstu, please. Thank you. Just coming back to the question that Mr Balfour made about what could the Scottish Government do, what could local authorities do? At the moment, there's no onus on local authorities to provide decision letters in relation to council tax reduction decisions. That means that it's not very transparent if somebody is receiving council tax reduction, if there's a change, that decreases, that could happen mid-year and somebody wouldn't be aware of the change in their requirements to pay their council tax. Because of that, we think that it would be an instruction to local authorities to issue decision letters, which would be hugely helpful to the claimants, to the people who are trying to advise claimants that might help to avoid council tax arrears and to make sure that people are responding to any issues with council tax reduction in a timely manner. At the moment, you can only have council tax reduction backdated for up to six months, and you have two months to request a review of a decision, but if the decision isn't notified in the first place, that two months can quite often disappear without you knowing anything about it. In one of the cases that we submitted in our evidence, in fact, it's somebody who would have been entitled to help with their council tax arrears, but for the passage of time that had stopped them being able to claim the council tax reduction that they would have been entitled to for that period. Because of that, somebody was left with council tax arrears that they could have, in fact, had financial support to pay for. I think that that's something that could change and would improve council tax arrears and particularly improve incomes for people and for the incomes. Thank you very much, Kirsty, for setting that out quite clearly for us. I'll move to questions from Pam Duncan-Glancy. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thank you for all the evidence that you've given so far this morning but also the evidence that you've submitted in advance today. I'd also again like to put on record my thanks to organisations specifically who have been supporting people and their membership throughout a really, really, really tough couple of years. Thank you for all that you've done. I want to explore a little bit of the council tax and the public debt mechanisms that we've spoke about and then also understand a bit about the experience that families are living in just now. I'll start on the same theme that we've just been on. I too, Betty, share your concerns about the way that local authorities are pursuing debt. This morning, I feel, if I'm honest, that what I've heard from members, particularly from people this morning, is that there seems to be quite a bit of onus on individuals. So, like the statutory duty, as you say, Karen, is about ensuring people access advice rather than ensuring that the advice is provided or funded. That really puts the burden of any kind of responsibility on someone who's in debt and someone who's in debt struggling by definition, obviously. So, I wonder if there's anything that perhaps Karen on Paul could suggest that could help shift the burden of responsibility to local authorities to improve the system rather than to individuals to seek support earlier. I'm not suggesting that we want people to seek support at the last minute, either, but I feel like the burden of responsibility needs to change. Karen and Paul, if that's okay? I think it's about providing advice in a way that people can access it. I think that that is the key to it, and people aren't going to access it through letters, but a letter going to them. What they need is to know, in a way that meets their needs, how they can get advice and to get that advice from someone they trust or they can believe in. That could be somebody in the third sector or the public sector. It doesn't really matter who's providing it as long as they can engage with that person, so I think that the onus should be on improving access to advice services. I think that there's a connection there. Councils are starting to do it between revenues and benefit sections and advice. As Paul said, he manages both. He has a good overview of what's happening in Falkirk, but I think that that is probably the key to it. I think that the issue is covered by the three action requirements that apply within the rental sector and the social-renty sector, where we have to provide those links to that advice in advance of taking an action. We tell people how they can get help and how to do that. We try to remember that for council clacks. We should all do a bit more of that. I think that it can, but it's valid. People need to trust somebody. That's my big concern, because people don't yet trust us. I can see why I haven't heard the evidence today that people haven't had bad experiences with councils. Some of the ones that are doing things with my team, I am confident that they will get a good outcome, but the problem is that I need to motivate them to do that. I don't know quite how we achieved that across the whole of Scotland, but I think that it's about making sure that we can outline to people how they can help to give them a choice of places. They can go to CBA, to the council, to a millerthof sector to make sure that they are not compelled to go to somebody that they don't trust. That's what we are certainly trying to do. I hope that we have some good outcomes. Again, we need to build relationship with those partners to make sure that, when they do with that individual, they get a good outcome through that third party as well. I have no quick fixes, but I think that there are opportunities for us to improve that. Paul, can I ask a further question on that? I've only got one last question in this theme. Is there any way in which local authorities collect revenue to stop people needing advice services in the first place? Is there anything that we can do during the revenue collection process that would prevent people from needing them? It would be a bit more preventative. Like, for example, telling people that they've got a council tax reduction. Can you think of any examples that we could use there to prevent it? There are quite a number of examples. Most cases that have a collection policy or a fair collection policy and that sort of frames how we do things. It's all about minimising the charge, making sure that people are aware and the CBA is very good about that. It's a tool to allow people to access that, as is Matt Lewis, to make sure that people minimise the charges. What we do is, at Falkirk, on top of those things, to make people aware of the opportunities of reducing it. We also offer a hundred and forty different ways to pay. People can pay weekly, for early months and for weekly, over 12 months or 10 months for the paper data debit. I'm not calling to do this to make sure that people know what options are out there. I think that what we found at Falkirk is that about 80 per cent of our customers pay on the green plan out with the normal standards because they pay over a 12-month period of paper data debit. That means that, by doing that, that allows us to focus on 20 per cent. That's what we've got to do, to spend that time on that 20 per cent and need our help. Most of our debt—I think that the best thing is that, if I look at my accounts, most of it is loaded by my social rented tenants. My tenants for rent only most of my accounts. I think that we do need to understand those tenants better, what the needs are, whether it be a legislative or beyond that. We have housing officers who are trying to establish those needs and address those needs. We need to be proactive, especially those in the social rented sector, for me to make sure that we can identify what extra support they need beyond the standard letters so that we can tailor our approach to them to meet those needs. I think that that's easy through a period of both sides. It's hard to do if you work independently, so we have to combine the debts. As I think that we said before, councils have a stream of debts to collect. The more you bring them together, the more effective we are at identifying the needs of those individuals who are dealing with them, the more you can make that journey easier for those debtors because they don't just owe me rent, they owe me house, they owe me payments, they owe me Sunday's, they owe me Crown's tax. If the more we consider the joint off, we can give one solution to that, the better chances to provide a remedy to that. Thank you. Much appreciated. Martin, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about the experiences of the people who have been accessing your fund recently. In particular, I was really struck by the way that you described that what you are seeing is not just relative but absolute poverty. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, certainly. Just for a little bit of context, I will operate an urgent assistance fund, which we have operated for a number of years. Unsurprisingly, you will know that, over the past couple of years, since the start of the pandemic, the demand on that fund has increased by some degree. The demand and the increase in that fund and the number of families and applications and awards that we are able to provide has allowed us to be able to identify some real clear patterns in terms of the circumstances of families, some really concerning issues that have emerged as a result. One of the things that we become acutely aware of is the issue of public debt. I think that some in the region of about one in seven families who apply to our fund are applying specifically to access funding, to access help and support to pay off debt and almost exclusively, 100 per cent in some cases for families. The vast majority of the debt that families have is to public bodies. I think that what is probably really important, just to say in terms of framing, is that we are hearing a lot just now about the cost of living crisis. It is everywhere we look, newspapers, television, and I do not think that we can get away from that. The cost of living crisis is a crisis for many people and very serious, but it is not new for a lot of people. For a lot of people on the lowest incomes, they have been experiencing a cost of living crisis for many, many years, long before the pandemic and the current financial environment. What we are seeing through the urgent assistance fund is the symptom of that, the impact of that. We are seeing people who have been accumulating debt around real significant problem situations because their incomes have simply not been enough to cover the costs of heating their homes, feeding their children, providing the very basics. Our concern is not just about the immediate financial needs of the family, it is about the long-term consequences and the impact of what that means for families, families who are trapped in on-going long-term cycles of debt, regardless of who are on the lowest incomes. Even the increases that there have been, whether it has been the universal credit uplift for the period that it was available or the increase in the Scottish child payment. While on the face of it, that might be increasing the incomes of some families. For families who are in real significant debt to public bodies, all that is doing is ensuring that there is more money coming from one part of the public sector and going back out the other way to service the debts that families have to public bodies. In many cases, families are not seeing the impact of the full benefit of those increases in social security that might be on paper. Beyond that, in the financial circumstances, what we know about the long-term implications and the long-term impact of poverty on families, on children and young people's mental health, on parents' mental health, on wider family wellbeing and the impact that children's education can have. It is a long-term and lifelong consequence for families and for children as they grow up and grow older as a result of living in poverty or manifold. We know that. For us, it is crucial that we do everything that we can do just now. There are steps that we know that there is cause in the UK Government to do lots just now to address the cost of living crisis for people. It is a cost of living catastrophe, as I said already, for so many families that Aberlare works with. However, there are other things that the Scottish Government and others could be doing. I know that we will speak about the school meal debt specifically at some point this morning. However, the real concern, as Pam has mentioned, is the levels of poverty that we are seeing, the levels of deprivation that we are seeing, that we would describe as being closer to absolute poverty than relative poverty. Families who are sleeping on mattresses on floors, who are sharing covers at night to keep themselves warm, families who cannot provide just the most simple and basic items for them and their family, that is what our urgent assistance fund is there to provide. However, the sheer demand and rise on the use of that fund over the past couple of years has been really alarming and really concerning. We are really worried about what the long-term implications are for the wellbeing of children and families who have grown up in poverty right now in Scotland. Thank you very much, Martin, for that powerful evidence there. It is certainly something that I recognise as having worked in the support industry in terms of homelessness for a long time. That is an issue that has always been, and it is an issue that is not new at all, so thank you for that. I am going to now move on to theme 2, which is roundabout rent every year. To start us off with that, I have got my colleague Natalie Dawn, who is remote. She will come in with the first questions and then my colleague Emma Roddick, who is also remote. Over to Natalie, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Thank you for your contribution so far. We are looking at the theme of rent arrears. The importance of early intervention has been highlighted throughout this inquiry, and we have discussed that already this morning. When looking at rent arrears, in terms of the pre-action requirements that are in place to protect both social and private tenants from eviction, how effective did the panel feel in ensuring that eviction action is avoided wherever possible? How effective sorry did the panel feel they have been? Sorry, if I could put that to Gordon first, please. Good morning, thank you. Are they effective? Yes. Are they the whole answer? No. The pandemic powers to make the pre-action requirements, of course, have really been a framework for people to engage and to ensure that there is a paper trail. It also takes us closer to a situation in which private and social rented sectors are more aligned. At a time when, through historic decisions, we have decided that more low-income households can only choose housing in the private rented sector, it is necessary that we have protections that match the expectation that Government decision makers have of a sector that is not really set up for that type of social benefit to be able to protect them. We think that it is a good thing, but it needs to be improved. It needs to be enforced. In particular, we would say that there is a real lack of data when it comes to what is called the section 11 notices. That is when a private landlord, or a lender, or a creditor is supposed to inform the local authority that they are about to take possession of a property and make someone homeless. We do not know quite simply, we could hazard a guess, but we do not know a site of enough data to say whether that is working well enough. However, the data that we have is that we know that our, the Shelter Scotland Law Service, continues to be quite successful at preventing eviction because of rent arrears when we are able to offer someone representation in court. That shows us that local authorities and private landlords do not always do everything that they say. They will say that it is a last resort, but either because the protocols are not followed to the letter of the law, or because there is evidence that the tenant would have engaged or was trying to engage, was trying to make a payment plan, come up with a mitigating way of dealing with it, the court finds in their favour. The peer action requirements are a good innovation. We are pleased that they have come in, we think that the discretionary elements of that should be made permanent so that the peer action requirements and the rules around these things should be triggers. We should have judgment and some understanding of individual circumstances, look at cases case by case, rather than saying that you have hit the threshold that you are out in the street. We know that, when eviction takes place, it can cost a conservative estimate for a single person being in temporary accommodation and not requiring much support, which is about £24,000. It is not a cost-effective thing for the public sector. We think that we should keep the peer action requirements in place and look at how to make them more effective, but we should not form a trap of thinking there alone or a silver bullet to the problem. I noted that in the evidence that you put in the cost of an eviction average at £24,000 for a family. In total, the cost of social sector evictions in 2019-20 was £27.8 million. Given both the financial costs to the local authority and the emotional stress that an eviction can have on a person or a family, we know that it does not seem like the best way to deal with rented ears. Especially when you think of it as somebody is going to go back into a homeless accommodation and then they are going to have to get rehoused and it is sort of a horrible cycle. What other options do you think that councils would have in dealing with it and do you feel that there are any further improvements that could be made? I know that you have touched on that. They could be made to the processes and procedures around rent-ear-ears collection in general. I will stick with you, Gordon, just now and then I will maybe bring in Betty and Caden. As we mentioned already, around the sort of access to advice and support, I would also say representation. Representation is a crucial element of that as well. I would point out that making information available is not the same as making a referral. There is still a leaky pipe, if you will, of people being told where they can go, but the resilience of someone who is experiencing multiple debts, not just rent-ear-ears, to be able to then navigate through to the right person, to share all their information again. The adviser then has to get in touch with the credits and get their side of the story once they have evidence that they have the authority to act on that person's behalf. It is good where it works, and it makes a massive difference, but it is not easy. It is time-consuming, it is not well-resourced, we are still very reliant on charitable donations, not just at Shelter Scotland, but other organisations to mitigate those failures by landlords and the social and private sector. It is difficult. The idea is around where engagement takes place early, where we can show that the offer of support advice representation is coming from someone who can be trusted. Paul has mentioned that a couple of times. It makes a big difference that we have been running a pilot in Dundee for some time. It has been incredibly effective at just getting people talking. The first step in most of this is people who are getting letters through the door that they do not want to open, because they know what is inside it. They need that human contact. We need the courts and tribunals to take a holistic view, to understand that this is not just about a narrow view of a very years' recovery, it is about what happens to that household, how does that impact on them and the people around them? It has an impact on our schools and on health. We know that the social impact of eviction, especially for children, is lifelong. If it can be avoided—usually because of family breakdown, because of losing jobs, because of coming out, those are everyday human experiences, they are not exceptions. It is being exacerbated by the pandemic. It is exacerbated by things such as advice services not being open during the pandemic, face-to-face advice not being available. The more we focus on getting people to an adviser, to a service, rather than just a web link or a telephone number, the more difference we will see longer-term. Can we hear from Betty on that, please, and Karen, if she wants to add anything? The difficulty—I think that the worst thing the other has done was universal credit, of course, handing the money to the people in their hands. I have found that rent arrears have went through the rules since universal credit came out. The difference is when they used to take their rent off with their payment in that way, they were insuring it. What we do—we have not been able with the pandemic being there, but we have started setting things up again. We are going to do road shows out in the areas. What we take with us is a housing officer and also an officer that deals with repairs, but we insist that the housing officer and the other council worker are dressed down. There are no labels on them to say who they are, and it is surprising how the public come out and actually talk to them and not realise who they are, but once they realise that they can get the help, that makes a huge difference to them. It has worked in the past, so we are setting them up again to go over Edinburgh in the areas where there are difficulties and where we know the difficulties with people with their rent. However, the rents are horrendous in the private sector, and what I think the council is lacking in is that all those landlords are actually registered, because if they are not registered, they can get a huge fine for not being registered, and I think that they are lacking in that. They used to check up, but I have never heard that. There used to be a committee that sat on it and I was on it, but that is all gone. I think that they need to check back there and put a cap on the private sector on their rents. Thanks very much for that, Betty. I think that it is important to remind us about that change to universal credit and giving people the housing payments in their hand. If we have the Scottish choices where they can choose to pay direct to landlord, it is about the knowledge of that process. It is again back to people being armed with all the information to make the right decisions that work for them. I do not know if you want to come in and in. To echo what Betty said, having the voice of people with experience is really critical in the process. All too often, advice services and reviews have been conducted without that. If there is a process in place, rather than inventing a new one, it would be better to make that one work more effectively and to highlight why it is not in those areas. To give another example in Dundee that is being led by Brooksbank, where they are working with other advice agencies and the council each week they meet to look to see you as capacity to take referrals. By doing that, what they are trying to do is to make sure that people get access to advice quicker and that will ensure that they follow their advice journey through. Paul, do you think that you want to come in as well? Yes, that is great. I want to echo what Gordon said about giving people the point of contact. It is good enough that we need to go and see that we definitely need to make a warm hand over to what we are going to support them through this. On Betty's point, we need to use credit just for some context. I had an election in Parliament yesterday. We used credit in the figures of how that system would work for that person. On the other factor, when we arrived at that stage, we did not decide to go over the election. Now we are going to re-engage with that person and offer support to them. However, I think that the phone call yesterday from my leave and care team, where they had a leave and care person who was taking responsibility, who was on the universal credit, had asked that the first payment of MPP directed at landlord that was not done. They thought that the extra money in the bank account was just because they are now living in their own house rather than because it was their housing cost and they spent it in the net of rent of yours in the first time two months of their tennis, despite them attempting to do the right things. The universal credit is not as effective as the housing credit was if protecting the most vulnerable. That is something that we need to work hard to resolve for those people by educating them and by supporting them. Thank you very much for that, Pauline Martin. You want to come in briefly as well? Just briefly at the end. I just wanted to say a little bit about some of the work that we have got under way in Tayside, which speaks to how we can perhaps think differently and better in a more co-ordinated and holistic way about how we support families who have rent arrears as well as often a combination of other types of debt. We have been running a pilot for a number of months now that is being funded by the Robertson Trust across Tayside, across three local authorities to provide financial assistance for vulnerable families. All of those families have rent arrears among other debts that are causing them real deep anxiety. What we have done is alongside the provision of all welfare rights officers, we are alongside as part of a family support approach. We are also providing help and support for families directly to help families, children and the whole family to support them with the other issues that the financial concerns, financial issues, financial anxiety exacerbate and make even more challenging and even worse. I think that we are already beginning to see some really positive outcomes. As a result, in some cases, some of those families that are referred to us, of which there has been about 40, the turnaround from access in the service to being effectively on an even keel, has been about six weeks in some cases. When they have the opportunity to get that consistent advice, consistent support, direct point of contact as well as the additional holistic family support that goes alongside it to help to address the other issues that families are experiencing, we are beginning to see some real positive impacts. Just to say something about one of the parents that we have supported through that, she commented that the amount of stress that has been relieved now is unreal and now I feel that I am able to maintain and budget my current income to support my girls in the future as my debt has been paid off. I am able to get support for housing and hopefully move to a bigger house with more bedrooms. We are beginning to see a direct impact of that type of approach. It is something different, but it is combining the welfare advice and information and help alongside the holistic whole-family support that we are able to provide. We think that that is going to be a really useful way in which we can look at how we can support families in different parts of the country. Thank you very much. Natalie, do you have anything further at this point? No, not at this point. Thank you very much. Can we move on to questions from Emma Roddick? Just to remind everybody that broadcasting will operate your microphone, so you do not have to worry about that yourself. If we could go to Emma, please. Thank you, convener. I wanted to ask Gordon specifically about the issue of direct adductions, as well as rent being paid direct to landlords. The role of social security is not just to increase income to some magic number where everything is fine. It also plays a part in addressing often extreme cash flow issues and a common one being that rent can total over half your income and adding repayments so that it could be over 70 per cent. Are there concerns about social security being used to underwrite often unfairly high rents, which could even be increased as a reaction to the existence of those measures without actually looking at the fact that the rent is higher than it should be and higher than it is possible to pay? Yes. When we talk about rent rises just now, one of them is that the social sector rent rises are baked into the Scottish Government's model of funding new housing. There is an expectation that more and more of the share of the cost of new development comes from existing rents, so we have seen that pushing up rents. That is a Scottish choice that has been made in Scotland that we could take a view to put more on as general taxpayers rather than existing social tenants. Suppressing or broadening the base for which we fund new investment in housing is one area that we could have an impact on. However, the biggest issue is that we have a scarce commodity, and it is a commodity right now, of homes. We are seeing the private rented sector increasingly the preferred choice of decision makers for low-income households to go into. The rents are set at the local area market level, so the housing tribunal, when they are asked to consider whether a rent rise is too high, is not looking at whether that landlord has a mortgage of 90 per cent or no mortgage at all, is looking at what the next-door property is also challenging. We have a skewed way of working out what is a fair rent. We should have a conversation not about high rents and low rents but about fair rents, fair to landlord and fair to the tenant. The issue then becomes the ability to take money out immediately through some of those debt recoveries. It does just mean that we are placing people in a spiral that they cannot get themselves out of. When you add the fuel poverty costs on top of that and the correlation between people in low-income households and the higher-cost fuel charges that come with prepayment meters and other things, we are not making it easier. The harder you life, the harder you make it. We are now getting to a place where no amount of advice and information can change the fundamentals of people who have too little coming in and too much going out. That is often even where there is no existing debt—we talk about the cost of living—that is what we mean. There is sometimes a risk that we will look at one lever and try to pull on that without looking at the whole picture, but there is more that we can do to say that it is a whole society responsibility to ensure that low-income households have access to genuinely affordable and genuinely secure housing and that, when people fall into hard times, they are not taking money out of their accounts in such a way that we are condemning them to a cycle of debt, which only ends up back at the homelesser service further down the line and local authorities having to pick up that bill. It does not seem to be an incentive between local authority or certainly between different agencies to think about the whole cost to the public sector. It is just that one team's job is to recover arrears, one team's job is to recover council tax and one team's job is to sustain tenancies. Making people work together involving third sector partners in that does make a difference. You have heard today of much evidence from different organisations as to where it works. It works really well. Emma, do you have anything further? Us we thank you, convener. Thanks very much for that, Emma. I am going to take two final questions before we do stop for a wee pause. I have a question from Paul and then from Faisal Chawjee. Thanks, convener. Probably this one is for Gordon Gordon. Some of the evidence that you put through or some of the evidence that we have got through is around advice for the public sector but also against the private sector. I think that there are figures to show the increase for the public sector. Renter arrears, but not so much for the private sector. I suppose one of the questions is around about can we get that evidence because obviously I think you have seen that increase, I think some anecdotal evidence behind that has shown that. How difficult is it to get to the private sector when it is kind of so diverse and what can we do specifically around that because I think noticed one of the things that the key cost for an eviction is around about £24,000. I suppose the other question to yourself is how can we be preemptive in terms of the advice that we give rather than when people arrive on the doorstep or can we be more preemptive to try and get that advice out to them quicker before they get into the metal. Probably yourself, Gordon, then we will be open up to Martin just on that as well at some stage. There are a couple of touch points where I think we can be gathering better data that we don't currently, so there is a lot more of registration. How are we using that as an appliance mechanism or are we trying to understand do we have a point of contact for the landlords and the letting agent, the two and not the same? Are local authorities able to properly identify what the level of rent is? There are also the secured deposits schemes, so when a tendency starts, the ability to, when you are required to, place that deposit in there, there is an obvious opportunity to gather what the level of rent is. We would like to see in any upcoming housing bill a look at using those touch points to gather more data, annual information on what the rents are, annual information about who the responsible person is to get in touch. We also know from just before the pandemic, we did some research and some analysis of the first-year tribunal system in the private sector, looking at the disparity between representation. The numbers for cases where landlords had legal representation and found that their favour was in the region of 98 per cent. That went down to only 88 per cent with the finding in favour of the landlords when they didn't have representation. Inequally tenants only had representation on 14 per cent and 6 per cent at the time, but when they did, the likelihood of them succeeding doubled. What we have is a disparity of arms in the tribunal system. There are lots of reasons for that. There might be cases in which tenants choose to defend or cases in which they are more contested. It is not a straightforward rent that arose or somewhere where there has maybe been an abandonment of the property. However, we have an incredibly diverse private rented sector. Is it reasonable to expect a small local authority licensing team to try to keep in touch with that whole sector? There is a consultation just now on how to improve the fair renting system. It is an opportunity to explore what is the difference between a landlord's regulator and an ombudsman or someone who can act on behalf of tenants so that it is on a case-by-case basis. We have to accept that this is the housing system that we have. We are only offering low-income households' private rented sector. We therefore need to acknowledge that it is costing the public sector money when those tenants fail. However, as we use those touchpoints, we gather the data and make the new powers discretionary so that courts can make judgments based on the case, not on arbitrary thresholds, and then use the upcoming legislative opportunities to strengthen the protections for tenants. I am probably just on the pre-emptive part. There is always going to be the budgetary pressures and resource pressures in terms of hundreds of people who arrive at the door if they like, in terms of saying that they need help. Again, cost-effectiveness can be done more at the start before people get into that situation. You mentioned before that we are in about family support and family advice, which I think is incredibly important. I do not know if you want to just expand a little bit more on that or any more thoughts on that. Again, I suppose that it is almost investing to further down the line if you like to make sure that not as many people get to the situation in the arriving. That is exactly right. We would always advocate for as early intervention and preventative approaches as possible to prevent people from getting into financial difficulty. In our experience, because of the nature of the support that we provide, either through our urgent assistance fund, which in itself by definition is a crisis fund, or through some of the support pilot work that I was describing in Tayside, which is where families have been identified. The families who are referred are in real deep financial difficulty and they require that additional combination of financial welfare advice and support alongside the family support that helps with the other challenges that families are experiencing holistically. The very nature of both those approaches is that they are responding to people with a point of crisis. I think that it is clear that, as I have already mentioned, as we are going through this particular period of real financial uncertainty and insecurity and anxiety for people, all that means is that people who are already in financial crisis are in even worse and deeper poverty for many of the families that we work with. The earlier we can do anything, the better. That includes help and support around welfare advice. That includes help and support around things, very simple things such as budgeting and money management. Although, on that point, I probably would say, because I think that it is quite often a trope that is rolled out quite often, is that it is often perceived that people who are in the lowest incomes or people who are living in poverty are not very good at managing money. I would counter that to say that the families that we work with are actually probably some of the most prudent money managers that you will ever come across. They know where every penny goes and they can count for every part of their income. The problem is that the income simply is not enough to cover the costs, and that is increasingly becoming the reality. However, prevention, early intervention and whatever way we can provide it is always something that we would call for an advocate. That is true around welfare advice and money support services, as it is with anything else. Thank you very much for that. Faisal, just if we suck for a wee break, it is your turn. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I have a small question. We know that sheriffs are making up for lost time because of the pandemic. When is the tidal wave of evictions going to hit? Do you have an estimate of how many families are going to be affected by that? Gordon or Martin, if you want to come in. I will defer to Gordon if that is okay, because it is not necessarily my area of expertise. I do not have a number on this day, but we are seeing the courts panking up. We are seeing some people choosing now to engage in the landlords, although the effective, not actual, but effective eviction ban is in place, we did not see the growth in homelessness that we might have anticipated otherwise. We are now seeing people ending up in court. We are seeing more cases being fought, and we are seeing a steady rise in eviction again. The reason we do not see it as a tidal wave in one go is that there is a capacity limit on courts. There are only so many courts and so many court times. We are seeing more complex cases taking a little bit longer, and we are seeing some people choosing to abandon tenancies or finding other ways out of the situation. In our view, we are going to see just a higher number of regular cases than the pre-pandemic situation, so it will not be in one quarter. We will see a short sustained spike, but we are going to see a higher number over a consistent period of time. Did you want to come in on that, Betty? You do not need to touch your mic. The last time I heard the cases that were going up, there were actually 38 cases going up, because we do have meetings with the council where we were standing with, but I believe that it has risen through the roof since the last time we had a meeting. I do not know what evictions are. I do not think that they help anybody, because they have to be rehoused anyway. I think that the early intervention has just not been there on the part of the council. They do send out letters, as I said, but people do not know what to read these letters, so they cannot read them. I get a lot of people coming to me with their letters and asking me to read them for them. They think that the council owes their money, because they can read numbers. They can tell numbers, but they cannot read the letter, and I have to tell them that they owe the council money. It is difficult. It is somebody's age universal credit getting it in their hand. They thought that their rents on that, but a lot of people thought that their rents on that had been taken off that, so it landed them in debt immediately. The rears in Edinburgh are sky high now, and we have to do something to avoid it, because the stories are horrendous. I am hearing from people that just cannot manage it. How do they pay rent? How do they feed their kids? I have grown men who are actually working not on benefits that are coming and sitting crying, because they have to go to food banks to feel degraded, because they have to go to food banks, because they are not earning enough money to keep their family? That is an important point. We always need to remember the fact that people in work are some of the people who are experiencing severe hardship at the moment, and more people who are in work are going to perhaps find themselves in that position going down the line. Faisal, do you have something to say? How much does it cost local authorities to evict someone and put them into the homelessness system? Research that we did last year showed that for a single male who does not have what we call low support needs, so not someone who is in need of in-depth support for any multiple complex challenges they have and who are likely to be in temporary accommodation for a long time because there is not the move on accommodation that is necessarily available, you are looking at a conservative estimate of about £24,000 eviction. It is a significant cost, both direct and indirect costs. It shows to us that there is not a business case—it is certainly not a moral case, but there is not a business case—for using eviction and definitive eviction as a rent-a-rears collection tool. It does not work at cost you more money, so let us invest in the early intervention services, the advice, the representation that we know works. We can join the evidence and improvement service and others about how it works, but we actually have to do it. It is also in the context that local authorities are under enormous financial pressure, and many are seeking to revert solely to their statutory duties. Those are types of services that make sense because we know they work, but there is not a duty placed on them to do all of them. I am not advocating that we replace more and more duties, especially duties that are not fully funded from central government, but it is important to understand the context within which some of those failures are occurring. That gives us the perfect spot to stop and take a break. We will come back about 16 minutes past, so five minutes if that is okay for everybody. If you need to dip away because I know that we have asked our witnesses to be here for two hours, please let the clerks know if you are not able to stay for the full of the next session. We will take a wee break at the moment, and I suspend the meeting. Welcome back. Thanks, everybody, for making sure that you were back on time, and thanks for those online for being back at your keyboards. I am going to start again on our theme three, which was round about council tax years, but we have already touched on that a lot, so members' questions have maybe changed or they do not need to ask them. I am going to bring in my colleague Miles Briggs for a question on this. Good morning to the panel. Thank you very much for joining us today. I know that we have covered a lot on council tax, but I wanted to ask a couple of questions. I will start specifically with regard to what the committee has heard with regard to legislation in England. The local government act of 1992 gives local authorities in England a discretion to accept reduced payments or write-off debt. Is that something that we have seen applied in any way in Scotland? How could that be replicated to develop a new model to address those two issues? I will bring in Paul first, and then Karen. That is maybe something that you want to… The short answer is yes, but we will probably not do it to a certain extent. The fair collection policy that I referred to in Fife, for example, is where we look at the situation with that individual. We deal with all-go liability and then we look to the mitigation of the historical debt that would allow that all-go payment to be better sustained. It needs to be done in connection with the public's money, which is the cash that bears money, so it can't be done liberally. It is test-aware of the law throughout the few stages. The answer is yes. It is done in Scotland, but it needs to be based and bespoken in that circumstance. Obviously, we cannot incentivise people to clear their ears with the intention of hoping to get those related future days. We need to be very careful. We also need to understand why that person did not go through the bankruptcy process. It is a constitutional debt at the O, and it is not material in terms of the bankruptcy requirements. We need to understand all those things, but it is applied. We do write-off debt of that nature, but it is very rare that we do so whether we are on-go liability because we believe that gender-speaking on-go liability means that debt is collectible if they are not bankrupt. Turning that argument on its head, in terms of different models, Betty Ewing outlined letters, which currently seem to be the main way that people are then contacted around this debt and then how that is pursued. To what extent can we shift towards a preventative model so that that letter is triggering a process, for example, like a financial health check, because we will know that council tax is often the last debt, and people feel that they can start with not paying instead of rent and things. Where could that be a different model? Does anyone have any examples of where different countries are doing things differently like that, and literally being one of the key parts of that? If that is picked up soon enough in the local housing offices, visiting that person as soon as their years start to become into their years, as you see, council tax is the last thing a person will pay if they are struggling with money, definitely. I have seen that ten times. They do not say that they need to pay council tax, they do not think that they can be a victor for council tax. I think that you need more people out in the ground to visit those people. They do come and visit them, but I am getting stories that they are quite aggressive with the people. I have asked the housing officers to be retrained and how to deal with people who do have it, because there is so much mental health out there that people once are talked down to, they will not go back to the council and talk to them. They have to learn how to talk to those people in a manner that helps them to understand that they are in their years and how to pay that and not to say to them, as they have been saying, that they need to pay that off right away. No, work out a plan with them and how to address that, and it does help. One council, I do not want to name them because they are only considering this, are looking at incentivising people to seek advice, so they are going to make a payment to them to help them to reduce their debt if they seek advice services. It is at the early development stages and it is quite a radical approach, so it is under consideration. That is maybe something that you could provide further information for us to investigate and look at separately. Martin, you had mentioned evidence around what you would like to see in a public debt bill. Is there more in that we, as a committee, should consider looking at? With regard to the problems that we have discussed this morning, what would you see? Is that almost a version of what the local government finance act is? I think that the intention behind that would be to bring Scotland in line with what progress has already been made across other parts of the UK in terms of regulation and what private lenders and credit agencies need to do in terms of the response that they take when they are pursuing or looking to recover debt. Within that, there are particular considerations that any bill or any legislation or strategy around it would need to consider. One of the things that we are aware of in terms of families is that we support who have multiple public debts. There are often those multiple debts, or debts, to the same local authority but different departments within the local authority. It is often the case that those departments are not necessarily speaking to each other and recognising and being able to understand and map out where there are families who might well be struggling. That is evident through the fact that they owe money to different parts of the councils. Making sure that councils are speaking to each other internally and that whatever processes are being employed around recovery for multiple debts, including council tax, are done in a way that are first of all responsive and acknowledge the family's circumstances and are compassionate, I suppose, because what we know is that for so many families who are struggling financially, usually, or often, families are also experiencing a range of other challenges and issues in their lives. Being sensitive and compassionate about that and making sure that the response, in the first instance, to try and understand what family circumstances are and what can be put in place is much preferable to a letter automatically generated in relation to council tax arrears that, in four weeks' time, can result in that debt being passed to sheriff's officers or external day agencies or what have you. Just thinking differently, thinking more compassionately, thinking about how we can also use better the resource that might, at the minute, be channeled into debt recovery, but is there a way in which we can think differently in how we do that in a more holistic way that is more responsive to families' actual circumstances? That also reminds me of the fact that councils hold a lot of data and information and there is a need as well for them to passport where a family is eligible to receive another payment, whether that is school meals or whether there are other things that we need to make sure that councils do that as well because we are the holders of that data. Pam Duncan-Glattie, you want to come in? On the point about data collection, some of the evidence that we have suggests that the data collection on council tax arrears and other public debt arrears could improve, so I wonder if someone could mention that. It just occurred to me that it would be good to know more about that. I have a specific question for Paul. This one is probably about public debt but it is not something that has been mentioned yet and it is around social care and I wonder if you could comment on the sort of debt that you are seeing through that revenue stream. Yes, I do not want to act at all locally on the setting of the local social care charges but certainly I am aware. We take a letter that is supposed to recover that debt for specific reasons as guided by the IGIB within the local setting but we have significant debt in that area because we have a policy of charge, a very low charge across a large caseload or rather a large charge to a smaller cohort. What that means is that we have 3,000 or 4,000 people who pay a monthly fee of some sort for their full of care. We pay a small everything at the maximum of £100 a month give or take but that does mean that there are a lot of debters in people because we do not expect to withdraw that service, people do not pay that one and we have never yet passed in those debt to ourselves officers. It is one of the things that is in focus that we have a difficulty with but it is as opposed to the credit approach. We try to support those people individually to address those debts to understand what the cause of that non-payment is but as yet we have not taken any real diligence against those debtors because we understand that their needs for that care and support are greater than the need to recover that money. Sorry, I miss the numbers. Did you say that they are the number of people who are in debt for that reason and the amount or were you talking about the number of people who are charging? Sorry, we charged the 4,000. The number of people who have multiple invoices is about 300 or 400 individuals so it is about 10 per cent of those who we charge for and those range from being a few months to being six or seven years' worth of partial debts since the charging policy came into place. It is quite significant for some but most people only pay what we call the next charges for their divisible and for safety but that is the smallest of the charges but about 10 per cent have a material debt for social care charges in Falkirk. It was just to say in the question to data that we collect data for the local government benchmarking framework and one of the measures is the percentage of income due from council tax received by the end of the year so we can give you a top level figure of how much we've got. We know how much we haven't got or hasn't been collected but breaking it down, I'm not sure of the granularity of that data but I can check that out and see if we've got that for you. Thank you. That would be very helpful, thanks very much. We're going to move on to our fourth theme which is around the role of social security system in debt and I'm going to bring in my colleague Emma Roddick who is online. Emma Roddick, that question is for Kirsty. One thing that I find particularly difficult in thinking about the wait for the universal credit is that debt gets bigger very fast. Those five or six weeks can cause as much to be added to the debt as the person is about to get in social security. What should the Scottish Government be doing about this and what should it be asking the UK Government to do? Thank you very much for that question. The system of the five-week wait does cause a huge amount of debt for people. We know that in November 2021 47 per cent of universal credit claimants in Scotland had a deduction and of them 45 per cent of those claimants it was due to having to pay back the advance that they received during the five-week wait. It's really quite a tricky thing. Ideally we would like to see the advance become non-repayable. That would be an issue for Westminster Government because we know that universal credit is a basic amount of money to live on and right from the off that amount of money is being reduced month on month for people to live on, so there's an issue there. In terms of what the Scottish Government could do we would like to see further investment in the Scottish welfare fund to help people during that period and strengthen the guidance about being able to make payments to people who are struggling during that period. Part of the complexity about the response to the five-week wait is that it's difficult to anticipate how much universal credit somebody is going to receive and that's why it's difficult to make a specific call on the Scottish Government about the response other than something like the Scottish welfare fund, but in terms of the UK Government we'll be saying it should be a non-repayable grant. Thanks very much for that. Emma, do you have anything further on that point? No, that was a big thank you very much. Thanks so much. If we can move back to Pam for questions in this theme and then miles after that. Pam? Thank you, convener. I nearly wasn't ready there as I was taking some notes. Thank you very much for that. I'm on the social security theme. It's kind of an extension of Emma's question. We've taken some evidence in this committee in writing from close the gap and in other committees that I sit on from them as well in person, talking about the specific experience of women who are experiencing significant debt for all the reasons that I know many of us will understand. In particular, they've highlighted the significant debt that is experienced by disabled women, black minority ethnic women and particularly lone parent families. I wondered if perhaps CPAC and Aberlour could comment on what we could do in Scotland with the powers that we have here to try and target resources to those groups. I'll come in there, Pam, if that's okay. You're absolutely right. Women's poverty and child poverty are intrinsically linked. There's no getting away from that. We see the evidence of that particularly through our urgent assistance fund. The vast majority of applications that come through our urgent assistance fund are from single-parent families. The vast majority of whom are women. Even then, with our two-parent households, it's most often the mum who's making the applications to our fund. We also see a disproportionate increase in the number of black minority ethnic and families with no recourse to public funds also who have been making applications to our urgent assistance fund over the period of the pandemic. The families with no recourse to public funds specifically is not a surprise, given that there's very little other avenue for them to seek financial support. We've given evidence to the Social Security Committee previously in the last session about the role of the Scottish Welfare Fund and some of the challenges that we've encountered. During the pandemic, we were seeing somewhere in the region about 10 per cent of applications to our fund. We're from families who had unsuccessfully applied for one reason or another or had not been able to access support through the Scottish Welfare Fund. We know that there are still existing challenges and things that we have called on the Scottish Government, along with other sources in this panel, to do more. One of the things that we would call on the Scottish Government to do right now around the Scottish Welfare Fund is to expedite the review into the role and the management of the Scottish Welfare Fund and the delivery of the Scottish Welfare Fund. We know what lots of the issues and challenges are, and we have, along with others, highlighted that from our own evidence. We think that the time that it has taken thus far and is likely to take for that review to take place before we can start implementing some of the improvements and challenges, we don't think that that should be taking as long as it is. In terms of families, there's no recourse to public funds specifically. I think that there's more that we can do. We've made calls on the Scottish Government to do more and to think better and to think differently about the actions that they could take working alongside local authorities using local government powers that exist as opportunities for delivery mechanisms, whereby we can support families with crisis payments. Section 20 and 22 payments under local government legislation would allow that, despite the prohibitions that are put on other public funds from the UK Government and the Home Office. There is a lot more that we can do, and alongside that, offering a much more coherent and consistent approach to how we practically support families with no recourse to public funds as well. I think that there's much more that we can do. We are doing what we can and other organisations such as Aberlour and Children's Charities are similarly supporting those families, particularly those who are the most vulnerable and have the least access to helping support. However, we would reiterate the calls that we made before and the calls of others on this panel to say that the Scottish welfare fund can certainly be improved. It can be done much quicker than it is. We know what the challenges are and the challenges can be addressed right now. Families with no recourse to public funds have much more that we can also do, as I have indicated. Thank you. I agree with everything that Martin has just said. In addition, we would make the point that, at the moment, there is a benefit system. There are lots of different eligibility criteria for different benefits, including family benefits. One of the things that would simplify things greatly would be to make some of the eligibility criteria the same. For example, free school meals remove the—either accelerate universal school meals or, at the very least, remove the income threshold, because, at the moment, it's not available to anybody in receipt of universal credit. It's available to people who are in receipt of universal credit and have income below a certain level. Because there's different criteria for all those different benefits, it makes it very difficult to automate the system of having—to automate all those payments in that you could apply for one payment, and then you would automatically become entitled to lots of different payments. By improving the eligibility criteria, that would make that much easier. Social security is not the only lever, so we need to look at things like improving childcare, reducing costs of families through things like cost of school day. All of those different things can be done to contribute to families receiving money. Coming back to the point that was made earlier about advice and assistance, if somebody is in debt, that should be seen as an opportunity to pick up on all the issues that a family may be facing, and not just to deal with the debt that is being presented with at that point in time. Thanks very much for that, Kerstin, with regard to the no recourse to public funds. I think that it probably would benefit the committee if we had an update on the anti-distitution strategy that was being worked on, between COSLA and others. Can I now move on to questions from Miles? I wanted to ask, with regard to Social Security Scotland, where you think they could also play a role in that? We have been looking at some of the prevention of homelessness duties, for example, and that preventative model is being put in. With regard to debt, when people are in contact with organisations like Social Security Scotland, where do you think they could also help at least point towards some of the advice services that might be available, but a different model and that early intervention approach potentially to help people? I don't know if anyone wants to come in on that. I'll pick on somebody, I don't know. Paul has an hour in the chat, but it was for the last question, but I'll put the onus on Paul at the moment. I think that most local authorities in Social Security Scotland are present within our various support hubs and deliver on the face-to-face services from there, and I think that we have some staff based within one of those offices. I think that what we want to do is a warm hand-over, so if Social Security Scotland engages with a client that even knows his need of support, then I think that they need to have a proper contact with each local authority, and they wouldn't be able to manage that we deal with that, to allow that warm hand-over to happen. It's not just a referral, it's not just a point to hear so we get help, it's actually the introduction, the hand-over and the reach that we can take home from there, and obviously just keep both parts informed. It's not really what is well during the pandemic, because obviously the face-to-face presenties have been limited, but I think that going forward, I'm hopeful that that will be a fruit for our most vulnerable clients, because obviously those that come and go to Social Security Scotland and will do this year through our disability payment are amongst our most vulnerable households ever. It's critical that we offer them that extra level of support, so I'm hopeful that that will be a fruit, not just in Falkirk but across the nation. That's what's been attempted, of course, of all of Scotland, is that sort of warm hand-over being crucial to the cost of our journey. You know, we've heard quite a lot this morning with regards to different departments within the same council, people having different debts with them and them not communicating. Is that purely just because you've got different teams, and why in this day and age do systems not managed to communicate in the same organisation to red flag debts and therefore create, you would hope, some sort of manageable plan for individuals and at least then potentially have that trigger process to refer to support either within that organisation or towards, and is that something any council is, you know, to point towards councils specifically around council tax and rent are developing models around? I think that's back to your post. Yeah, yeah, thank you. I would agree entirely that if we go back to 1996 when council reformed, there were some councils that kept the rent separate. Those have become less and less frequent, some of the housing stocks, others have submerged it, and those that are keeping the streets have adopted corporate debt policies with a system that combines those debts, so I think that I don't recognise that because in Falkirk we have always had both debts collected together, so we have never had that segregation from my staff, I've always dealt with council tax and rents, and I think that that bears fruit within individual customers, and I think that the movement centre the last 25 years has been to was that being more universal. It's not quite there yet, but I recognise very few authorities that don't combine the knowledge of the tenant with the rent date and the knowledge of the taxpayer for the council tax debt. That is exception rather than the rule in Scotland as far as I'm concerned. I've got Kersti online, who wants to come in as well? I totally agree with you. Communication is absolutely horrendous at the moment between the different sections in the council. I just had a case yesterday where communication was two different sections, and it's landed the person in £1,500 rent area, so no, not on hard behalf, through the councils behalf, and it was in a terrible state over it. We have business meetings with the council, and we started asking for all the different sections to come into that business meeting, so we do have them in the same room, and they do communicate with each other because that has been a huge, huge difficulty in getting them to talk to each other over, especially this last few years. People have been working at home, and they just did not communicate with each other whatsoever, so it's bringing them back to talking to each other again. It's a huge job, believe me. It was really just coming back to the point that has been made about Social Security Scotland and the support that it can provide. We're now in a position where people can claim benefits from DWP, Social Security Scotland, local authorities, HMRC, and it's not only important that staff are able to do the warm handovers for people, but that they are equipped with enough knowledge to know where to make those warm handovers to. The benefit system being so interlinked now, so for things like the disability benefits that will be available in Scotland, may lead to additional amounts in benefits being delivered by DWP, and things like universal credit, will lead to benefits being payable from Social Security Scotland. It's really important that staff have enough knowledge to be able to make those links with the other benefits that people may be entitled to. In terms of the onus needs to be less on the claimant to know what to claim and who to claim it from, and much more on the benefit system to help to make those links for them. Thanks very much. Do you have a supplemental to that, Pam? Thank you. It's just a card to me, and thanks, convener, for allowing me to sneak a wee supplementary in here. It's just a card to me that what it feels like is being described as people being project managers in their own life, so your point better about having to bring in a business meeting to get this sorted. Is there anyone in either a local authority or a third sector organisation that you think could provide that role so that I get the warm hand over thing, and I think that we absolutely have to do that and take the point that Kirsty has made about all the different agencies? Is there anyone within the statutory services that you think could be providing that co-ordinating role that would help? I think that there is, and I think that we've actually spotted something in the council that is a huge role to get people, all the different sectors together, who we are working with now, and has the person made a huge difference in talking to them, and it's good that we can actually just have a private meeting, no agenda, just face to face as well, so that we can make sure that we're talking for the same handbook before we have those meetings. Thank you very much for that. I think that there is evidence of good practice across the country where we have some housing officers that have become neighbourhood coaches and it's a coaching model, and it's a different way of operating, and also universal credit teams being set up that are actually proactively going out into communities or, as Karen said before, you do have financial inclusion officers that are based within school clusters in some areas, and that's making a massive difference, so I think that there's a lot of good work being done and it's how we passport that across the country and how this committee could play a role in that. Finally, on this section, before we move on to a couple of questions about school meal debts, I've got Paul. Thanks, convener, and you've kind of just touched on the point that I was going to refer to. I think that previous stakeholders have talked to them about solutions where people in debt isn't just about reforming the debt processes, and how we deal with that is how we increase incomes via the social security system. Just saying if anybody wants to expand on the point, I think that the committee has touched on about universal credit teams, is there more that can be done in that regard. I think that Kirstie can touch on another point as well. Kirstie, you mentioned about simplification of the process in terms of criteria, but also we talked about the complications within local authorities and about who deals with what, so can more be done in that regard. It was interesting this morning that Audit Scotland had a report out talking about the roll-out of the benefits system so far in Scotland, saying that it's successful, but challenges remain. We've got 20 per cent devolved benefits at the moment. By 2025 it's going to be 70 per cent. Is there any lessons we can learn between now and 2025 and about how we roll out those other benefits to make them as effective as possible? Kirstie, I'll probably come to yourself first of all just on the point that you mentioned about criteria and, I suppose, equity to access to the system. I'll open it up after that. As I said earlier, there are different eligibility criteria for different benefits, but that includes benefits that can be played to low-income families even within those benefits. There are different criteria and that makes it very difficult for people to know what they might be entitled to, but it also makes it very difficult to passport from one benefit to another automatically. It can be done for the people on the lowest incomes, but unless there's parity between all those low-income benefits that are available to families, it's going to make eligibility automation very difficult. Until you have that kind of automation, you're always going to have lower than 100 per cent take-up, so anything that can be done to improve take-up will improve families' incomes. In terms of improving or aligning the eligibility criteria, it will take pressure off administration of the different parts as well, so that will simplify things at the back end, too. I think that that's probably one of the key things that we're hoping to see in the future that would make a big difference to families. I really saw a matter of question for the previous question, and I apologise as it's timing. That's all right. Don't worry about that. Paul, do you have anything further? No, I don't know if anybody wants to come in on that, because, again, one thing is equity, but it's two, as I suppose, is making people aware. Again, that's where he comes back to the point. Mark, you talked about it before, about trying to get that advice out there and being pre-emptive and saying the points about it. I don't know if anybody wants to add in on that, because I think that there is an element of, yes, we need to increase the benefits that are there, but also there's also that accessibility, and we need to do more in that regard. We'll get better, then. I don't know, Martin, if you wanted to say something. My main concern is that a lot of people don't know about those extra benefits. They're never advertised. A lot of people are non-social media, but the council itself does have their own newspaper, The Courier, which is sent out to every tenant. It could be advertised in that. People don't know about those other benefits, and they're never told about them, and I'd be surprised if housing officers knew about them. I'd be really surprised. So it's maybe about education within the system itself to let them know that there is other benefits there. Martin, do you want to come? Yeah, maybe just to pre-empt what I was maybe going to say in the next section, but Kirsty has already touched on this, so I'll maybe just echo that. What she has said, one really straightforward and simple way the Scottish Government could certainly help and support families who are on low-income working families who are not currently eligible for free-skill meals would be to increase the thresholds, income thresholds for free-skill meals as they are. That wouldn't require an increase in other benefits necessarily, but it would help catch lots of families who are otherwise struggling, and a lot of the work that we've been doing around school meal debt has highlighted the real struggles for families who are not who are above that threshold currently, but are on low incomes and struggling to feed their children. By increasing the thresholds, which haven't been increased in line with inflation in under successive UK Governments since 2010, we'd be to increase those thresholds, and potentially the same could be done around council tax thresholds as well. In doing so, you would provide welcome breathing space and much more reassurance for many families who are otherwise struggling, who are in many of the circumstances that we talked about this morning, who are struggling with public authority debts, but at the same time, you would alleviate that and you would also give them the reassurance that they would be entitled to something that would be really, really helpful particularly at this current point of the cost of living catastrophe, as I've mentioned a couple of times before. Okay, so that segues us nicely on to questions around about school meal debts. To kick us off, we'll take a question from Foisal Toadry, please. Thank you. Thank you very much. I just wanted to know that because of the cost of living is rising every day, do you have an estimate of how many families are in danger of falling into school meal debts? Is that for me? So our analysis and the work that we've done in our research so far indicates that at the moment there's around 25,000 children around Scotland whose families are currently in some level of school meal debt. What is probably important to understand is that when you dig down into that data, because of the nature that we've covered in our evidence submission previously, I can expand on a little bit here, because of the nature of the difficulty, I suppose, of being able to accrue school meal debt for secondary school pupils. That data actually really only includes those children in primary schools who are not currently or have not until recently been eligible for free school meals. So we're talking about a relatively small cohort of children, a very narrow cohort, I should say, of children and their families who, on the information that we have, we can see are experiencing debt in relation to school meals that they've accumulated. And for the vast majority of those children, it is primary schools. What we're really concerned about and what we think the research is pointing to—and actually we've got some really powerful anecdotal evidence around this as well—is that there's a real issue around hidden school hunger, particularly for children in secondary school, where because of the automated cashless payment systems that are in place, the high schools now operate, which are the mechanism by which children and their parents pay for and order their school meals, when those accounts are at zero, a lot of authorities don't offer the capacity to be able to access a meal or to be able to build up or accrue any level of debt. So what we know is and what we're beginning to see is that the likelihood is that there's plenty of children, a significant number of children that we're not even aware of, but the scale of that might be who are simply going without. Explicit council policies in some authorities where the school meal debt policies that have a child in secondary school doesn't have any credit on their account, they can't get access to a meal. So that's quite shocking and very, very concerning for us. To illustrate that point, we have done some level of engagement. I'm spoken to some children, young people that we work with at Aberlour, and we explored this with some of them. I'm just going to give you a couple of insights here from some of the young people we've spoken to on this specific issue. One young person told us that, I know a good few people who don't actually get lunch because they feel like they're using the money that their parents could be using for something better. They feel responsible so they don't buy lunch so they can give their money back to their parents. In my friendship group, I'd say about half of them can't eat food when we go out, so you see people buying food for their friends. They come to lunch with me even though they've got no money for anything. We go to Gregg's because I've got £3 to spend. I'll get two yum-yums on a sausage roll and I'll give them the yum-yums because I know otherwise they're not going to have anything to eat. This is the experience of children and young people that we have spoken to. We know that this is a real, real concern. Even the data that we have, we know, is very limited and only gives us a very small snapshot of what we think is a much, much bigger concerning issue of the likelihood of children across Scotland, particularly in high school going hungry. Do you know any percentage of the students bringing debt from primary school to the high schools? We don't have a percentage but what I can tell you is that we've broken down the number of local authorities who have a policy, who apply a policy whereby that debt will transfer. Somewhere in the region of about 11 local authorities said that they would write the debt off at the point at which a child transfers from primary school into secondary school or at the point at which a child moves on from school entirely. So there's a living out of 32 local authorities. I think there was a couple of local authorities that didn't respond to our freedom of information requests but that's less than half. We can then say that the majority of schools operate a policy where that debt that's accrued in primary school will follow children and their families as they move into high school. That debt then, in most circumstances, I think 17 local authorities indicated that where that debt is not repaid within a period, it's then referred to their debt collection agencies internally. Sometimes it will even be referred to sheriff's officers. So there's a real concern around the practice, around the policies at an individual level at schools and across local authorities. The most concerning thing is that it's highly inconsistent depending on where you are in the country. It's a real postcode lottery about how individual schools and local authorities will respond. The other really concerning bit is about families who might register late for free school meals during the school year for any number of reasons and where some of those families who may become eligible or their eligibility may be confirmed at some point later on in the school year, not necessarily at the start of the school year, where they have maybe accrued a level of school meal debt up until the point that their eligibility is confirmed. Councils, some councils will continue to pursue that debt so they will don't write it off, they will continue even though the families are now eligible for free school meals. So there's a real concern for us around the practice and the policies that are in place. What we are calling for is that we are really making a call on COSLA and on local authorities to work together so that they can develop a much more consistent, a rights-based single policy to enable them to respond effectively and compassionately and in a supportive way to the families who find themselves accruing school meal debt. The thing that we are clear about is that families are not accruing debt or not paying for their children's meals because they don't want to, it's because they can't. That's just a real symptom and indicative of the current circumstances in which we find ourselves. The important point to illustrate is that we're talking about families who are working, low-income working families, those are families who are above the thresholds for free school meals. One of the really surprising things that we've been able to glean from the evidence that we've been able to pull together is that this is a much greater issue in some of those local authorities where we would consider them to be wealthier or better off local authorities, so where they have historically below average child poverty rates and therefore they have fewer families eligible for free school meals, the current circumstances, the cost of living crisis, the issues that are going on just now, are manifesting in many more families and, proportionally, in those local authorities struggling to be able to feed their children at school. I thank Martin for that compelling evidence and I think that the testimony from those young people is really important for us to hear. Young people always know when there are issues with poverty and debt in the family and they carry that responsibility hugely on their shoulders. I have my colleague Emma Roddick who wants to come in with a question round about data and I know that Paul wants to come in and I can see Jeremy as well. For Martin, I know from the Aberlawer report, which was very helpful, that councils reported their data very differently and thinking about your points around hidden hunger, is there greater data on who isn't eating at all or perhaps isn't eating enough? Is that available from any councils that you know of or is it something that you would plan to look into? Certainly something that we want to know more about and try to gather what information we can, but the reality is that that information doesn't really exist. I think that that speaks to the way in which a lot of the automated cashless systems are implemented in high schools, the way in which—and they are applied inconsistently. It seems that sometimes at a local level schools will have individually some level of management in terms of how those systems are set up. Sometimes it is done on a much more consistent basis across each authority. Nonetheless, in many cases the systems are set up specifically to prevent people from accruing any debt. What we know is that when that account is at zero and the only other option for a child to be able to access a meal at school in some of the policies that we have been provided with that local authorities have in terms of how that is managed, it requires the young person, the child, to identify themselves, usually to a school member of staff at the school office, to go through a process where they would be given some kind of voucher or token that they then take into the dining hall in front of their peers and are visibly identified as somebody who doesn't have any money for a school meal. Now, while it is probably true that some pupils will go through that process, what we surmise and can make an educated guess around is that the vast majority of children in those circumstances are going to avoid that shame and that stigma and not want to have themselves identified as having no money or the inability to be able to pay for their school meal. Therefore, it is likely that children are going hungry as a result. However, because that data is not captured because it is not something that local authorities or schools individually are able to capture because, as far as they are concerned, it will appear that there is no issue there because children are simply not identifying themselves. I suppose that the other real concern for us is that, in some cases, explicitly within individual school or local authority policies in responding to school meal debt or those children who don't have any money for a school meal or are not eligible for free school meals, the provision of a meal in some circumstances is identified as being discretionary. That, to us, is really alarming because that effectively is telling us that decisions are being made at a local level in an individual and subjective way about whether or not a child will be able to access a meal by a member of personnel in an individual school. That is a fundamental breach of children's rights. Children have a human right to be able to eat and to be able to access food. If decisions are being made for whatever reason that a school or member of school personnel decides on any given day that a child is at their discretion is not entitled to access a meal despite the fact that they have no money on their account, that is a fundamental breach of children's rights. At a point of which we are looking towards the incorporation of UNCRC, I think that it is quite a shocking thing to be able to illustrate in this day and age. So there are a real number of concerns that we are hoping to explore much in much more detail, but the issue of data around hidden school hunger is problematic. That is why it is hidden. Thank you. I found it interesting that you raised the stigma around free school meals. Remember that, when I was in primary school, free school meals tickets were a different colour to the ones that were purchased by other kids. Should there be guidance or maybe even rules on how schools deal with free meals and protect that characteristic or folk's identity? I would absolutely say so. In terms of having a single school meal policy that should be consistent, that is something that I think that we should look at at a national level, but there is a responsibility for all local authorities and perhaps for COSLA to look at leading on that, so that there is a consistent response approach across the country. In some cases, the automated systems are good and work well. One of the things that is good about them is that for those who are eligible for free school meals, they access the automated system and choose their meals through the automated system in the same way as their peers who are paying for their meals or other parents who are paying for their meals do. There is no identifiable difference between a young person accessing the school meal through the automated payment system between those who access free school meals and those who do not. In terms of addressing stigma, that is very, very positive. The problem is that for those young people who find themselves who are not eligible for free school meals and who find themselves having to go through that very stigmatising, visible, convoluted process of saying to a member of school personnel, I do not have any money for a school meal, the process is very visible and very stigmatising and it could be much, much better. Thanks very much for that and questions from Paul McClellan and then Derry. Yeah, thanks for that. I'm conscious of the time. It's really just coming back to the point about the cost of recovery. I think he estimated that the debt was £1 million, but that will probably be more. I suppose it's coming back to cost of recovery, but not also just the cost of resource and trying to get to that as well. I don't know if you have any other figures on that. It seems counterproductive to me staring us right in the face. I don't know if you have any other figures on that at all. All I can say, we don't have any further figures on that. We just know that it's in complete data because we haven't had a full suite of responses from all local authorities, but we can say that it's a conservative figure. Even £1 million is not a lot of money in terms of Scottish Government budgets and national budgets. It could be, depending on which local authority you're talking about in the proportion, it could be a reasonable amount of money for a local authority or for a school. It's certainly that the debt, as it's accruing for families, is a lot of money in their circumstances. At a national level, we would suggest that it would be a very simple and easy step to take for the Scottish Government to work alongside local authorities and work out the best way in which effectively they could just write that debt off, because we don't see any reason why that debt should be burdened with that and that it should certainly not transfer or move with families over potentially years as they move from primary school to secondary school. When we know that it's a symptom of the wider financial circumstances that everybody is experiencing right now, and the way in which that could then be prevented from happening again is simply, as I mentioned, by increasing the income thresholds for free school meals, and then you simply would be removing and reducing the likelihood of that happening again in the future. Okay. Thank you. Finally, Jeremy. Yeah, I think actually the last sentence there almost answered one of my questions, but just to see if you can have a case of money. I mean, I think from August, every child in primary school will get free school meals. Is that right? Primary, I think. Primary, up to primary five get free school meals just now, and then primary seven from August. Or certainly later on in this parliament, I don't know exactly. I think it's August anyway, but we can move to that. But looking at the secondary school issue, I suppose the question I had was, in your previous answer, you were talking about those who are in work, who aren't entitled to free school meals at secondary school. And I suppose the question I had was, is how do you identify those individuals? Because unless you have free school meals across the board, so S1 to S6, and then the danger is destigmatised people because those who have got money go out to get their lunch outside, and those who don't have to stay in the building, which could be a stigma, how do you identify those that need that help? And what way would you suggest schools go about doing that? Well, I suppose just reflecting on a previous answer around the increasing the income thresholds. For many of those families who are on low incomes but working, there will still be on a seat of some level of benefits at times. Kirsty has already spoken to the inconsistency and the different scales of benefits and where there's then accessibility or that passports on to other benefits, including things like free school meals. So if we were to simply raise the income thresholds, you would capture many, many more families, including the majority of families who are struggling but currently sitting above the thresholds. I don't know that that would be in any way more stigmatising than the system as applied is just now, and the fact that we have the automated systems where people who are accessing, famt children who are accessing free school meals are equally accessing it through the automated payment systems as their peers are who are paying for it, and at a very visible level, that's obviously reducing any identifiable stigma. I probably don't have a very straightforward answer to that, other than to say that the first and most immediate step would certainly be to raise those thresholds and then simply your catching and capturing many, many more families and many more children who benefit in giving those families the reassurance that their children are coming to school and getting fed and giving them a bit more breathing space. I have Paul Ferguson online who would like to come in on that. I think that that is quite acceptable. Until the universal uplift to know those thresholds, what focus should we do to mitigate those issues? We apply a consistent scheme that those who are households who are not, although they are thresholds, are in receipt of councillor reduction. We can therefore have a low income, and we will award that family a free school meal as well. I think that that comes across to the council rather than to the Scottish Government, but I think that what that means is that it is best that we can be difficult who we know are low income and we will be able to do that help, but the problem is that until the universal uplift and that threshold then obviously there will be slightly piecemeal, what focus might not be done by our neighbours, but I think that we recognise that there are people who are not eligible for free schools who actually do need that support on a day-to-day basis. Thanks, and I think that that was a great way to end that, because there is good practice across local authorities, but that is them choosing in a local way where they are using their budgets. That is not something that can be applied across the board universally, so I think that that is a good point to end on and for us to reflect on as a committee. I would like to thank everybody this morning. That was a very marathon session, and I think that it is evidence that we needed to hear. If you do have anything that you need to follow up with us, please feel free to follow it up in writing for us as we are moving towards the conclusion of this inquiry. Thanks very much, and I hope that you have a good rest of your day. I will briefly suspend this public session of the meeting so that we can move into private session.