 The next item of business is a member's business debate on motion 3259, in the name of co-cab Stewart, on impacts of benefit sanctions. The debate will be concluded without any questions being put, and I would ask those members who wish to speak in the debate to please press their request to speak buttons. Now I call on co-cab Stewart to open the debate up to seven minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer, for the time today to move my first member's debate. A year ago, I never thought that, as the first woman of colour to be elected to the Scottish Parliament, I would be standing here, and having come from a very modest family background myself, I am well aware of the importance that benefits can have in supporting families at times of unemployment and redundancy. I would like to put on record my thanks to the research team at the Medical Research Council, Chief Scientist Office, which funds the social and public health science unit of the University of Glasgow, based in my constituency of Glasgow Kelvin. Glasgow University has a long pedigree of multidisciplinary research developing and applying the latest methods to help us to identify mechanisms that can bring about change, develop and assess policies and programmes designed to improve health and reduce inequalities. The motion before you is based on research that was recently published in the Journal of Social Policy by Drs Marcia Gibson, Serena Paturow and Nick Bailey. I am hoping that Marcia and Serena will be able to join us in the public gallery very shortly to hear the debate. That research was one of the most comprehensive reviews of the international quantitative research evidence on both the labour market and wider impacts of benefit sanctions. The body of qualitative research has already established that intensified sanctions and conditionality has had important implications for public health and health inequalities. The new scoping review did report positive impacts for employment, but it also reported negative impacts for job quality and stability in the longer term, along with increased transitions to non-employment or economic inactivity. Today, I want to focus on three important issues arising from the study. Firstly, benefit sanctions mask the impact that they have on children and young people through no fault of their own. The Work and Pensions Committee reported in 2018 that children play no part in a failure to comply with conditionality, yet, when a sanction is imposed, they feel the effects just as acutely. How can anyone penalise a child due to the consequences of a period or guardian's actions over which the child has no control? It is heartening to see and know that the Scottish Government took a different path when employment services were devolved. Gone were the mandatory schemes and the new Scottish approach of dignity, respect and fairness to improve outcomes. My second issue concerns benefit sanctions and subsequent reduction in welfare payments. They are a false economy, often hiding the true cost to government in increased crime, poorer physical and mental health and increased need for social care. The wider impact that poverty has on individual and families and communities can manifest itself, for example, in family breakdown, and, sadly, an increase in the number of children entering the care system. Sir Robert Devereaux, the former DWP permanent secretary, admitted as much when questioned how the reduction of the welfare budget under his watch led to increase the costs of other Whitehall departments such as health and justice. He did not know. He was only concerned with reducing the DWP's spending. So while the DWP was being rather smug at its success in cutting welfare costs, other departments were faced with picking up the pieces and paying heavily for it. Who knows who the true cost of society is, but just think of the huge rise in food banks since benefit sanctioning really took off. My third issue is to request—well, no, actually, it is a demand. The DWP needs to give researchers access to data to ensure that there is robust independent scrutiny of the results of benefit sanctions. How many sanctions have been issued? For how long? What impact have sanctions had on job-searching activities? What was the quality of the jobs? How long did they last? How many took a low-quality job in order to escape this decronian regime? Originally, sanctions could have lasted anything from six months to three years. Whilst Amber Rudd did reduce the maximum time to six months, that is still a longer sentence than some criminal convictions. Presiding Officer, I would draw your attention to the 94 studies that have been reviewed from across the world. What would give us the 95th for the UK to release appropriate data to allow independent research to be conducted? Today, I have written to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions calling on her department to promptly grant access to anonymised data from the DWP claims and sanctions histories to the research team in Glasgow so that the scope of their inquiry can be completed. I would encourage my colleagues across the chamber to add their name to the letter, and I will be issuing that out shortly. Since 2010, the coalition and successive Conservative Governments have claimed that it has been helping people to find and use open government data. Yet, despite numerous requests, freedom of information requests and assurances given to successive work and pensions committees such data would be released is still not available. Presiding Officer, I ask myself why. What is it that they do not want anyone to find out? Why would you not want robust independent scrutiny to validate your evidence and confirm your success? In conclusion, this Parliament has debated the impact of benefit sanctions for nearly 10 years now. Despite a Scottish approach, new voluntary employment support services and the new Scottish child payment, management of social security support for the unemployed is reserved. Reserved it may be, but the impact of the sanctions has a knock-on effect for the Scottish Government. It is time that we are open with our data. It is time that the UK Government stepped up to the mark and they were open with their data. Only then can we truly learn from its analysis about what works, what does not, and literally who pays for failure. Once again, children bear the brunt of adult decision making. I look forward to contributions in this debate from across the chamber. I now call Marie McNair, who is joining us remotely, to be followed by Jeremy Balfour. As a long-standing campaigner against the negative impact of the so-called welfare reforms to the UK benefits system, I am keen to participate in this debate. I congratulate Cokab Stewart for securing this debate and highlighting the important work by the researchers on behalf of Glasgow University. It is no surprise to see that they conclude that benefit sanctions do not work and, in fact, they have a detrimental impact on claimants and their children. The sanctions regime in the UK has inflicted much misery and hardship on many of our constituents for many years for no real positive return. They were introduced as part of a callous war on welfare for political impact and gain. They have been a vehicle to penalise those in need of benefits by the success of UK Governments for many years. Tory Labour, Liberal, they all use them. In fact, Dr David Webster, on the way senior research fellow at the University of Glasgow, points us out. The number of sanctions in the UK rose to some of their highest levels when the Labour Party's John Hutton was the Secretary of State at the Department of Work and Pensions. The main benefit for applying sanctions is now, of course, universal credit. The appalling sanctions regime is added to all the other unjust parts of this benefit. The five-week wait that forces people into debt, the removal of the premiums for disabled people, the two-child policy and its appalling rape clause in the list goes on. In his recent regular briefing on sanctions, Dr Webster points out that there is a rapid rise in benefit sanctions again. He states that the harshening of conditionality policy with the instruction of the DWP way-to-work scheme is also bound to increase the numbers, despite that approach being widely criticised. I can also thank Inclusion Scotland for their very helpful briefing. In the briefing, they point out that sanctions have resulted in many disabled people and their families experiencing greater poverty in work than when they were unemployed, and more will face such poverty in the future as universal credit is rolled out. The briefing also agrees with Dr Webster's analyses that the numbers of sanctions have seen a big increase recently to the extent that we will see the highest annual figure for total sanctions on all benefits since 2016. Inclusion Scotland points out that disabled claimants were between 26 per cent and 53 per cent more likely to be sanctioned than non-disabled claimants, so the rhetoric from the Tories and others that it is not impacting on the disabled people is blown out of the water by those statistics. Quite frankly, any politician that is immune to the hardship sanctions are causing needs to get out more. I have seen the impact first-hand when volunteering in a food bank in my constituency. I have seen the look of despair and the empty kitchen covers that causes. I also pay tribute to the advice agencies, council staff, food banks and the caring communities in my constituency for everything that they do to assist those struggling because of benefits sanctions. Out of concern about the impact of this harsh policy, the Scottish Government did amend the Scottish bill for fund guidance to allow crisis grants to be awarded. This is just another example of us having to mitigate against any way in Westminster welfare policy. Given the likely rise in sanctions, it is even more important that the Scottish Government makes sure that support being available is widely known. Inclusion, Presiding Officer, I am in no doubt a policy that leaves people and their families with either no money or less than the need can't have any good in it. It will have no part to play in a compassionate Scotland that has all the welfare powers needed to look after our citizens and help our young people thrive. I now call Jeremy Balford to be followed by Emma Roddick up to four minutes, please. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. A well-won and an effective welfare estate stands to benefit not just those who rely directly for support, but also wider society, as it allows many people to continue to engage in society even when times are tough. Deputy Presiding Officer, times are just that, tough. However, the country begins to recover from a global pandemic, wrestlers were inflating and dealing with humanitarian and supply chain crisis as a result of President Putin's war in Europe. There has been a continuous and tremendous amount of pressure on the people of this country, which returned to the welfare estate to relieve some of that pressure on their and their families' lives. I would like to take a moment to commend the front-line employees and agents of DWP, who, day in and day out, are working hard to ensure that people are supported by every system and leaver that are available to them. I had the privilege of visiting one of the new Jobcentre Plus centres here in Edinburgh just a few weeks ago to see the joined-up thinking that is taking place. It is sometimes easy in these debates to vilify roles on the front lines, and I would urge all roles to minimise that kind of contribution. However, moving to the substance office debate, I have a couple points that I would like to raise. I have a feeling, Deputy Presiding Officer, that there are going to be many representations made about sanctions over the next few minutes, but I will not be strictly accurate. We will be painted as a regular exercise to deny roles that we need help by heartless agents of the state. However, Deputy Presiding Officer, this simply does not match up to reality. They are used infrequently and executed only after careful consideration. In her opening speech, Ms Stewart asked for data. Let me give you some data from party jobcentre, the constituency that she represents. In that motion, it is also mentioned in the motion today, but between July 2019 and July 2020, according to DWP figures, there was no one sanctioned in that within her constituency. We can see therefore that the handing out of a sanction is not something that is done liberally without thought, but rather than a tool that is used to target and is used in a thoughtful way. It is also worth pointing out and noting that the University of Glasgow study cited in the motion is yet to be published and is not specific to the UK. It rather has a much broader international focus and she will be careful of mapping its findings directly on to the UK. Deputy Presiding Officer, I would like to close again by advising Carson to those who will yet use this unpublished paper that is not specific to the UK to simply make political points. We should keep in mind the way that sanctions are portrayed in the media and by those who have their own political agenda are not always accurate and they are to use the language of the Scottish Government a targeted and proportionate measure. I now call Emma Roddick to be followed by Alex Rowley up to four minutes. The UK benefits system that we have is not set up to help people into work or provide stability. It is set up to punish people who are not in work and it does that regardless of whether they are able to work. Disabled people are more likely to be sanctioned, they are more likely to end up worse off financially when they do take up part-time work and they are more likely to experience serious harms when they are sanctioned. The system is not only punitive, it is discriminatory. Jeremy Balfour just reassured us that sanctions are not carried out liberally. The point is that they are carried out and I frankly do not care whether someone has missed a job interview for a reason not deemed good enough, there is no reason good enough to remove somebody's recourse to purchase food and fundamentally stay alive yet that is what the UK Government does infrequently. There needs to be more recognition that people's lives, particularly the lives of many who need to rely on universal credit, are not predictable or rational enough to be measured by some inflexible flow chart in DWP offices. As just one example of that, I had to rely on universal credit in 2016 after the loss of a job. I soon reported that I had found work, a full-time job in the ambulance service and my monthly payment was duly reduced to £0 a month. My new steady income made me look sensible enough to convince the landlord that I deserved a roof over my head so I moved into a studio flat and got on with my life. Then one lunchtime I unlocked my phone to find that I'd missed a call and I had a stern voicemail instructing me to get in touch as soon as possible. After an impromptu 45-minute performance of Vivaldi, I got through to be told that I had to attend an interview the next day as I'd failed to fill in a change of housing circumstances form. For a change of housing circumstances, it should be noted that it would have qualified me for higher housing support and that it had come to their attention when they received my change of address form. I'd committed this horrendous crime of secretly moving into a flat and then cliping on myself by covertly sending the DWP my new address. I explained that I couldn't attend the meeting because I'd be at work and was threatened with a sanction on my £0 payment. They carried on phoning me daily for almost a week and then I received a letter underlining my transgressions to the address that they insisted they knew nothing about. For me, the DWP's nonsensical approach to my getting a job in a secure tenancy was just ludicrous rather than life-threatening, but it's an indicator of how an uncaring, inconsistent and often incomprehensible process can't be rigidly applied to real lives. Many others learned this lesson in a much harsher way. One of my constituents had to isolate with Covid and ended up in a desperate situation after following stay-at-home guidance meant that she had to cancel on a coach meeting at short notice. She and her children suddenly found themselves stuck in a home that they didn't know if they'd had the money to heat, while waiting for those advocating for her to convince the DWP that quickly and crudely cutting her already in sufferably low income was not the right or reasonable thing to do. That is not unusual. As Coghub Stewer outlined earlier, the sanction situation is so bad that the DWP won't even tell us how bad. That's the same DWP that publicly admitted that it had wrongfully pressurised disabled people to accept less support than they were legally entitled to, and it won't give researchers access to data on sanctions. The research undertaken by the University of Glasgow is therefore vital to help us to understand more about what the DWP won't tell us. I thank them for their work, and I thank my colleague Coghub Stewer for bringing it into the chamber today. I now call Alex Rowley to be followed by Paul McLennan up to four minutes, please, Mr Rowley. I'm happy to add my name to the calls against the inhumane UK benefits sanction regime that so many have suffered under, and I'm glad this has been recognised here in this Parliament today, and I congratulate Coghub Stewer in bringing forward the motion for this debate. The research mentioned in the motion confirms what I'm sure many of us here already knew from seeing directly the impact of social security sanctions have on those that have to endure them, while not specifically in relation to the sanctions, the direct human cost of inhumane practices of the DWP are highlighted perfectly in the film I, Daniel Blake. I would encourage any member of this chamber who has not seen this film to do so, as it brings home the realities of being out of work and trying to get access to basic support. I mention this particularly to the Tory benches, as members across from me specifically, as it is their Government and Westminster that insists that sanctions are effective. Indeed, we found out only two months ago that the UK Work and Pensions Secretary blocked sight of an evaluation on the effectiveness of benefits sanctions that the DWP commissioned as part of its own internal research on the benefits of sanctions back in 2019. The DWP at the time promised to make the findings public. I don't doubt that the research had similar findings to the paper that we're talking about today, which means that it was a political choice to continue punishing people when it's obviously not an effective policy. On top of that, shockingly, we have found out this month that the DWP blocked data from a study on whether benefits sanctions are linked to suicides. Thankfully, there is now a massive amount of public evidence that shows threatening claimants with the loss of benefits does not incentivise them to take up unsuitable jobs and instead has direct impacts on their physical health, mental health and even on economic activity. The only thing that proponents of sanctions claim is their main purpose. What it all shows is that plain and simple it is cruelty that is at the centre of these political choices. Previously, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation made the point clear that sanctions are going too far and causing destitution. Here in Scotland, we now have the opportunity to change some of this culture through the expansion of benefits under Social Security Scotland. I would like to make a call to the Scottish Government today to make clear that under new benefits administered by Social Security Scotland, they will not pursue a sanctions regime here in Scotland. I have already been told by a number of constituents in one of the pilot areas for the new adult disability payment that accessing information on the guidance criteria was difficult and there was a lack of clarity causing stress and confusion. I understand that these transfers and changes of benefits will be difficult but from the outset it needs to be a better system than the one that people face under the DWP. I hope that the Scottish Government will listen to the criticisms that people raise with the new system, move forward and commit to making it much fairer. We all continue to speak out against the DWP's unfair and meaningless sanctions that do not help anyone. I now call Paul MacLennan to be followed by Maggie Chapman up to four minutes please. The University of Glasgow study makes a major contribution to the understanding of the current state of the impact of sanctions. The evidence from the study and Charity's Island reports suggest that sanctions, and I quote, have a wide range of negative impacts, including increased hunger, material hardship and debt and inability to pay bills and deteriorating health. The report also states that, given the evidence of potential harms, policy makers should consider limiting sanctions and policies that remove benefit income from households that are already likely to have very limited incomes or savings. My constituency, East London, was the first to pilot universal credit in Scotland. What my council colleague described as an experiment on cruelty, two thirds of council tenants fell into rent arrears and were left without any money for weeks on end. A report by the local CB found that more than half the people who moved into universal credit in East London were on average £44 a week worse off. East London, like the rest of the UK, was hit hard by the implementation of universal credit and now claimants continue to be penalised with cuts and unfair and unjust sanctions. The new law passed just last month, which reduces the period of which claimants can seek a job within the preferred sector, without being forced to look elsewhere, has been reduced from three months to four weeks. Claimants can now be hit with sanctions if they do not take a job of her after four weeks, no matter what the sector. The emergency spell went through and scrutinised and has come under fire for being unjustified with no means in measuring success. The new rule is lacking, I would say. Reinforcing is an insecure workforce and creating an environment that does not mean meaningful employment. Any slowly and food bank usage in the last three months has grown by 40 per cent, 28 per cent and 54 per cent respectively, year on year. Stats also show that more than 90 per cent of people who use the service are working poor. That proportion has grown in the past few years and months. Boris Johnson has indicated that he wants to see a highly skilled, highly motivated workforce. Benefits sanctions will not achieve that. In fact, it will be counterproductive. This is all about the stick, so there is no carrot. The UK Government claims that sanctions are used to motivate claimants into jobs. However, it admits in its own publications that claimants are more likely to enter jobs that are often low-paid with limited retainment. In fact, evidence from the LSE shows that sanctions are unhelpful in moving people into work. Instead, even just the threat of sanctions creates an unmitigated distress that gets in the way of finding work and potentially life-altering negative consequences. Benefits sanctions cuts in austerity are plunging children into poverty, rising energy prices and the cost of living that is already expected to increase poverty rates across Scotland and the UK. The Scottish Government has put in place six new benefits, including the Scottish child payment, to try and mitigate the impact of these toxic policies. With 40 per cent of children in poverty coming from a single-parent household at its peak, around one in five single parents a year were referred for a sanction, one in five, and one in seven had a sanction imposed. That is why it has only pushed single-parent households further into poverty. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that benefits sanctions are having a disproportionate effect on young people under 25. There is also evidence of severe impacts on homeless people and other vulnerable groups. There is a strong link between benefits sanctions and increased poverty. Those on the bed line cannot afford to have the little amount of income support removed as cruel, archaic punishment. In conclusion, I stand by the Scottish Government to review a Scottish social security system with dignity, fairness and respect, one that does not impose life-altering sanctions on the most vulnerable in our society. Politics is all about choices and priorities. The UK Government has made the wrong choice, the poorest in our society will suffer. I would advise that, due to the number of members who wish to speak in this debate, I am minded to accept a motion without notice under rule 8.14.3 to extend the debate by up to 30 minutes. I now invite co-caps Stewart to move motion without notice. The question is that the debate be extended by up to 30 minutes. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. I call Mackie Chapman to be followed by Siobhan Brown up to 4 minutes please, Ms Chapman. Can I start by congratulating co-caps Stewart for giving us the opportunity today to discuss benefits sanctions and to thank the University of Glasgow researchers for their very important work? When a new drug is developed, it must go through careful testing and it will not be approved unless there is clear evidence that it does what it claims to do and does so safely. It is strange that we do not apply the same principle to benefit sanctions. Hundreds of thousands of benefit sanctions are issued each year yet there is very little evidence that they have significant positive impacts. On the contrary, there is strong evidence to suggest that they have a range of highly negative outcomes, both for individuals and for society at large. I want to highlight the mental health impact of sanctions. Take some of the poorest people in the country, make them live off an income that does not stretch to putting three meals a day on the table and eating the house properly and then threaten to remove even that meager amount at any moment. This is a recipe for a mental health crisis and a reality that too many people face—people like Charlie, whose electricity was cut off on Christmas day because of sanctions. He told Essex University researchers that there was this image that will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. On Christmas day, I was sat alone at home just waiting for darkness to come so that I could go to sleep. I was watching through my window all the happy families enjoying Christmas and that just blew me away. I think that I had a breakdown on that day and it was really hard to recover from and I'm still struggling with it. A University of Glasgow study tells the same sad story. Every 10 sanctions applied per 100,000 people were associated with an additional eight people experiencing anxiety and depression and an additional one person receiving mental health treatment. No wonder that National Audit Office found that receiving an employment and support allowance sanction resulted in reducing disabled claimants' time in employment, precisely the opposite effect to that intended. Meanwhile, the DWP refuses to acknowledge the harm it is causing. All this is before we consider the equality's impacts. An LSE study found that independent of age and gender, white claimants were less likely to be referred for a sanction and less likely ultimately to receive a sanction than were claimants from other ethnic groups. Black claimants and claimants of mixed ethnicity were more likely than claimants from other groups to be referred and sanctioned. Benefit sanctions quite simply are racist. However, there is another way. I'm proud that it was Greens who first pointed out that the devolution of employability programmes to this Parliament was an opportunity to reduce the number of sanctions. That's why Fair Start Scotland has been, from the outset, entirely voluntary. It works. Participants benefited from, and I quote, not feeling pressured by the service and felt more able to engage with the support on offer willingly and more effectively. Finland's national trial of universal basic income, something that the Scottish Greens have long supported, which removed all the requirements to seek work, did not reduce the likelihood of becoming employed and that it also led to less mental distress, fewer feelings of depression and loneliness. These are the things we should be talking about. These are the things we should be focused on. To close, Benefit sanctions are not only dangerous and a form of violence against some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our communities. They don't help people find work and they can make it even harder to find work. Most fundamentally of all, they contravene basic human rights. We all have the right to live in a warm, safe home, to food and to clothing. That is why we pay social security and that should never, ever be taken away. I now call Siobhan Brown to be followed by Emma Harper up to four minutes please, Ms Brown. I begin by congratulating Co-Cab Stuart on securing this debate and I welcome the opportunity to speak in it. We have heard that the recent paper by researchers at the University of Glasgow notes that the cruel and heartless benefit sanctions imposed by the UK Government have a significant impact internationally on the labour market and have negative widespread social effects. What's more, the sanctions do the exact opposite of their intention in that they result in unemployment and economic inactivity as people are forced into low-quality jobs that they are not matched to. Allow me to raise the work of Dr David Webster from the University of Glasgow whose research into labour market contributes to the work of the child poverty action group. In his most recent publication for February, he states that the rapid rise in universal credit sanctions, which was noted in November 2021, has continued. Last month in the unelected house of Lords, Baroness Steadman Scott, the junior DWP minister, was adamant that we are not having tougher sanctions, but that is simply not true. In November, the number of claimants serving a universal credit sanction was nearly 50,000, well above the pre-pandemic of 36,780. Yes, I did say pre-pandemic peak. Meaning, as we look forward from Covid and aim to build a fairer society for everyone, the Conservative Government are increasing cruel and ineffective sanctions and, being no doubt, they do not work. The UK Government has announced the new way to work initiative, which has the noble ambition of getting half a million people into work by June this year. But how is it going to do this? It will use the threat of sanctions to force claimants to look for work more quickly outside their chosen sectors. This will force them to widen their search into fields where they have no experience after just four weeks. According to Dr Webster, it is bound to increase the number of sanctions handed out by the DWP and will result in worse matches between people and jobs will damage earnings, morale and productivity. Exactly what we do not need right now. We often talk about evidence-based approach to policy, while there is evidence. Of course, the UK Government is not interested in the evidence. Dr Webster found in his research that, under Secretary of State Theresa Coffey, the DWP appears to have adopted a comprehensive policy of blocking information on the effects of benefit sanctions. Of course, begging the question, what do they have to hide? He is not the only one who thinks this. Chair of the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, Stephen Timms MP, said that this emerging pattern of obstruction suggests that there is a culture of secrecy entrenched in the DWP. The ignorance of the UK Government results in people having to make choices between heating their home and feeding their children. This, unfortunately, is Great Britain in 2022. This is the real experience of people who are being hit hard by the cost of living crisis in which the Conservatives have no intention of doing anything meaningful about. It is the ignorance that is forcing these people into the arms of food banks in my constituency. Let me be clear, I think that the volunteers at food banks are doing a fantastic job, but they should not be needed in 21st century Britain. Of course, Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks that food banks are rather uplifting. Kind, compassionate and caring conservatism is not. Let me close by saying that, while I am glad that we are getting a chance to debate this today, be under no illusion. Boris Johnson does not care what we have to say. He does not even care what his own MSPs have to say. What is the way out of this mess for the people of Scotland? I know what it is, and it is most certainly not Boris' benefit sanctioned Britain. It is that Scotland becomes an independent country, with full powers, showing more compassion to those who need it. I thank Cocab Stewart for securing this member's debate. Colleagues have outlined extremely well how benefit sanctions are inhumane, callous and cruel, and are nothing other than a symptom of the UK Tory Government's out-of-touch and hostile culture towards those who require support the most. Sanctions have consequences. Evidence from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that benefit sanctions increase the risk of homelessness and they put financial and emotional stress on families that do harm children. Ms Stewart has described that in detail. Sanctions also cause health harms and tackling poverty in the cost-of-living crisis already has so many challenges. We have already heard about people's choice of paying their bills or buying food, heating versus eating. There is no evidence that sanctions work. In 2018, I supported a constituent who had been battling the DWP for three years before contacting me to receive the support that she was entitled to. I contacted the local MP, who is now the Secretary of State for Scotland, to help as the DWP is a reserved matter. He offered no support and provided no help. He said that he had full confidence in the decision-making power of the DWP. Because of the issues with the DWP and the extreme stress that has piled on her, she sadly took her own life, leaving a young son and a partner behind. That directly links to what Alec Rowley said about suicide linked to sanctions. That is an absolutely tragic case. It simply highlights how the UK Government and the welfare system do not treat people with dignity and respect. Finally, I want to highlight the particularly negative impact of benefit sanctions on rural areas, including across the Freeson Galloway. Rural transport, particularly for people on welfare support, who are more reliant on public transport to attend job centre appointments, is hugely challenging. Job centre appointment times do not coincide with rural transport timetables. I have found the job centre approach to accommodate in the needs of people living in rural settings to be extremely inflexible. One person I supported was sanctioned and lost 100 per cent of his income because his bus was five minutes late. That punitive approach appears to be continuing now that face-to-face appointments have resumed following Covid-19 protections. I would call on the minister to work with the UK Government to consider the needs of people across rural Scotland to have a flexible and person-centred approach to appointments and not penalise people for living rurally. In contrast, I welcome the Social Security Scotland does accommodate rural needs by offering telephone appointments and advisers that will even visit people at their own home. In conclusion, this Parliament and the Scottish Government are so constrained because we do not have complete control over welfare. We cannot mitigate every measure foisted on the Scottish people. The only way to truly address the unequal cruel carless Tory welfare system is by Scotland taking our own future in our own hands and becoming a normal independent country. I thank my colleague Co-cab Stewart for securing this important debate. I want to take a moment to remind us all how we got to where we are today. Co-cab Stewart said that, alongside what we have already done with the mandatory work programme and our tougher sanctions regime, that marks the end of the something-for-nothing culture. Let that sink in. Treating those of us who have been recipients of UK Social Security has taken something that we do not deserve—a speckless, as lazy, as grubbing. The stigma of that experience for me is still lurking there in the recesses of my mind. If I think back to using my income support to buy my baby's son's baby grows from the charity shops, I was not thinking about the circular economy, nor reducing reusing and recycling. I was trying to figure out how to make the small amount of money that I had go further during a time before baby boxes. How 24-year-old me could have been doing with one of our amazing levelers, the baby box, again seemed by some quarters as being something for nothing. Make no mistake, benefit sanctioning is a political choice. We have yet to be presented with any real tangible hard facts that show that removing people's only source of income, income at a level so low that it is already recognised as the minimum amount that someone needs in order to survive, has any positive outcome. That is a choice that politicians have made and a culture that they have created within our UK benefits system—punitive and punishing, all-stick and scant carrot. When I worked as a senior case worker for an MP, I will never forget the benefit sanction cases that we had coming into our office in desperate need of support. I did not see someone standing in front of me for whom hunger and destitution was an appropriate punishment for missing an appointment, for being on a late-running bus, for being ill, for having the audacity to have to collect kids from school at the same time as a DWP appointment or for not showing 35 hours of job searching. Who knew that you could demonstrate 35 hours of job searching? That blows my mind. I saw many people experiencing multiple and complex trauma re-traumatised by a system that was designed to be hostile, designed to end the something-for-nothing culture, designed to reduce people to being so hungry that they would open a can of soup to drink it cold straight from the tin in a food bank as they had not eaten for days, and the pittance of a hardship payment was gone within seconds of receiving it. What kind of country creates a system that is designed to punish people for being poor and for having everyday real-life situations like I have outlined to happen? Imagine that each time you miss an appointment or didn't manage to finish something in the time allotted, you lost a full months' pay. Imagine losing six months' pay whilst you are living a chaotic life beset with substance use, trauma and built on a foundation of adverse childhood experiences. Is this someone living the high life and getting something for nothing? I would actually proffer the radical thought that this individual's life's chances were continually knocked and that a imposition of hard sanctioning would, in fact, only add to and exacerbate the deep poverty that they are experiencing. Contrast this with our Scottish social security system that is being created with dignity and fairness at its heart, lifting people out of poverty and supporting folks instead of punishing them. I now call on Minister Ben Macpherson to respond to the debate up to seven minutes, please, minister. Thank you, Presiding Officer. First of all, we also want to commend my colleague Ocab Stewart for bringing this important issue and research to the chamber and for all colleagues who have contributed to this important debate. The strength of feeling from across the chamber, most of the chamber, is that the punitive sanctions imposed by the UK Government when it comes to universal credit simply do not work. The Scottish Government, like colleagues I've articulated today, has for some time now been deeply concerned about the UK Government's current sanction policy for universal credit, which allows any claimant, as we've heard, to be sanctioned at any time at the discretion of job centre staff. Would you recognise that, back in November last year, 0.88 per cent of those in universal credit were sanctioned? We're talking of less than 1 per cent, so this is not something that's being used nearly well. Take Jeremy Balfour in good faith in the statistics that he's relayed to Parliament. However, I would also point out, and I'll say something more about that shortly, that during the pandemic there was a position from the Department for Work and Pensions to move away from sanctioning that is now being reintroduced and potentially ramped up to great concern. I would also state that my gratitude for many job centre staff who do important work to help people, but the discretion of job centre staff to impose sanctions can be problematic, as we've heard, from different accounts across the chamber, and some personal, in MRODIC's case. Sanctions are just part of a number of issues with the current universal credit system, which is failing the people that are designed to help and should be helping with punitive policies such as the five-week wait, which I can't believe is still in place, two-child limit of course, and the benefit cap that we have just as a Scottish Government announced recently that we will mitigate. As today's discussion has emphasised, there's long-standing evidence of the detrimental impact of sanctions with organisations such as the Mental Health Charities Mines and Activity Alliance both reporting that sanctions can instill in many people a sense of fear and distrust of the welfare system. That is something with our new social security system that we are trying to change with regard to Scottish benefits. The new study by the University of Glasgow further emphasises the appalling impact of sanctions and the wrongheadedness of them on people's job stability, health and more widely. I'm just wondering if the Scottish Government were in charge of universal credit. Would they get rid of all sanctions completely? Would we simply get rid of them or would we amend them to do it in a different way? I think that we have shown, and again I'll say more about this shortly in time, allowing that in terms of our employability programmes we have shown. This is a conceptual point, but we all know it instinctively from an anecdotal experience that people respond much better to support and encouragement and threat and fear. That's at the heart of our principles of social security of dignity, fairness and respect, and it has been shown to be, as Maggie Chapman emphasised, effective when it comes to employability through our employability programmes. Sanctions increase hardship and they lead to poorer child wellbeing. As the report concluded, the high proportion of adverse impacts on measures of material hardship, health and child outcomes is sufficient to give sufficient cause to concern us all. As others have said, and Cocab Stewart emphasised that in her opening remarks, the unintended consequences of benefit sanctions are significant. The cost on the state and on all of us as citizens in different areas is significant and the report rightly emphasises that. Of course, that falls on community organisations, whether that is food banks or third sector organisations. It falls on UK Government departments, as Cocab Stewart emphasised, but it also falls on the Scottish Government. That is exactly why we are right to be talking about this issue today, because the costs that happen elsewhere in the system are significant and detrimental. It is clear from the research and the debate that we have had as well today that sanctions are ineffective at helping people to pull out of long-term employment, and that is why, unlike UK Government approaches, our employment support services are voluntary, meaning that people are not driven to take part in those through fear of benefit sanctions, but are instead supported. The UK Government suspended sanctions during the height of the pandemic, which I referred to earlier. However, since its reintroduction in June 2021, the number of sanctions being issued has risen sharply, and almost 50,000 people in the UK received a sanction in November last year. Sanctions can cut a person's standard universal credit payment or, in some cases, reduce it to zero. I want to make an important point here in response to Alex Rowley. With regard to the Scottish social security system, there are no sanctions applied to Scottish government benefits, so that is already the position. If sanctions are applied to someone in receipt of universal credit within the UK system and resulting in a zero award, people will still be entitled and eligible to the Scottish benefits linked to universal credit, so there are no sanctions and we are doing what we can to help people if they receive a sanction in the UK system. The points that Mr Rowley made about information sharing in his region please write to me about that and we will work together to make sure that we get the information out that you said people need more clarity on, because we are absolutely committed to that. I want to underline the fact that sanctions are nonsensical. The UK Government tells us that sanctions get people into work faster, but as research highlights, that is nothing more than a quick fix, which then adversely impacts people's longer-term outcomes. It is more about filling gaps in the labour market that is created by bad economic management from the UK Government, including their Brexit position than other things in many cases. As the report highlighted, sanctions were associated with a range of adverse impacts in terms of worsening job quality and stability in the longer term, so they do not make sense and they do not work. The report goes on to state that, although it might get people into work quickly in the short term, sanctions fundamentally lead to higher rates of exit to non-employment or economic inactivity and more rapid returns to benefit claiming, so they do not help people into the labour market in a way that is good for them and the economy as a whole. Just to back up Cokab Stewart's point, it is important that the UK Government release the research. I add my voice to the calls that this information should be issued by the UK Government in a transparent way. In conclusion, the debate and research that is generated prove that the UK Government punitive sanctions policy is ineffectual, unfair and fundamentally damaging those very people that a social security system should be supporting. It is clearly ideological from the Conservative Party and that is why they do not want to release the information—they should release the information—and that is why they continue to undertake the policy position of sanctioning when clearly it does not work. They should change their position and I am glad that the Parliament has, in the vast majority, made its case very clearly today that our social security system should be helping people and when it comes to our devolver's that is exactly where we will be focused on. That concludes the debate and I suspend this meeting until 2 pm.