 Welcome to the ninth meeting of the Social Security Committee. Can I remind everyone to turn off their mobile phones and other devices to silent mode as it does interfere with the recording equipment? We have received an apology from Mark Griffin, who hopefully will be here shortly, but unfortunately due to travel difficulties, so I'll set Mark's apologies on that one. First on to agenda item 1, that is taking decision in private. Basically we will be hearing evidence and we decided to whether we take agenda item 4 consideration of evidence here today in private. Is the committee content to take that evidence in private? Thank you. Agenda item 2, presentation of Sheffield-Hallam research. In June, the committee agreed to commission Sheffield-Hallam University to conduct follow-up research on the impact of welfare reform. The report was published earlier this month and today is our opportunity to consider the report formally. Can I formally welcome Professor Steve Forringill from the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield-Hallam University, and can I invite you, Professor, to give you a presentation? Thank you, Sandra. Good morning, colleagues. This is very much a joint piece of work as I'm presenting, by the way, as you can see. It's been an effort by myself and my close colleague, Christina Beattie. This is actually certainly not the first time that I've been up here giving evidence on the welfare reforms. Myself and Tina Beattie actually did four reports for this committee's immediate predecessor, the welfare reform committee. Back in 2013, we documented the expected impact of the last round of welfare reforms on Scotland. That was followed up by a report in 2014 that looked at the local impact, tracing the impact right down to electoral ward level, a further report on the impact on different types of households and finally one in 2015 on the impacts on the Scottish labour market. You might wonder why does the Scottish Parliament keep coming to Sheffield-Hallam University for these studies? Two reasons, I think. One is that we've accumulated a tremendous state of bank and a lot of methodological expertise in terms of picking apart the regional and local impacts of welfare reforms. The other thing is, I've got to say that you've got this work on the cheap because you've been able to piggyback work for Scotland on the back of substantial research that's being conducted across Britain as a whole, so don't get the impression that somehow you've been profligating and have been shoveling money south of the border. I think, Professor, you always know that Scottish people are quite careful with their money, so maybe that's it. Just to continue the tradition, in fact, the new report that you've got today is really another example of piggybacking a piece of work for Scotland on the back of something that's been done for Britain as a whole. The new report is really son of a document that we've published called the uneven impact of welfare reform, the financial losses to places and people. That came out in March of the show and really was the first attempt to document in a quantified way the expected impact of the new round of welfare reforms. What you've got today is a report that zooms in very specifically on Scotland. It looks at how much, in terms of pounds and pence, claimants in Scotland can expect to lose as a result of the new welfare reforms announced since the May 2015 general election. It looks also down at the local authority level, so there are figures documenting the losses for each of the local authorities in Scotland, compares Scotland with the rest of Great Britain. I've got to say that all the figures are brand new, absolutely brand new, because though we published a report back in March, we were then wrong-footed by the Treasury. We published our report I think in early March and two weeks later the Chancellor in his budget produced revised estimates of the financial serving that he expected from the welfare reforms that he'd announced the previous year in 2015. That's required us to re-jig all our calculations, so the figures I'm presenting today and that are in the new report for Scotland, you won't find in that GB report from March 2016, they're absolutely brand new figures. I should say by the way that when we document the impacts of the welfare reforms we're not attempting to pass judgment on them. Now as you might expect, someone like myself and my colleague Tina Beese, we do have personal views on the pros and cons of the welfare reforms, but that's not the point here. The point is to sit back and very objectively try to document what will be the impact on specific places in this instance on Scotland. Our starting point is always the Treasury's own estimates of the financial savings arising from each element of the welfare reform package. The main way we then move down from the national, from the UK scale down to the local scale is by deploying benefit numbers. We know how many claimants there are of each benefit in each local authority up and down the country. We can get expenditure figures as well, so we begin to translate the national figures down to the local level using all of that claimant number and expenditure data. It sounds very simple, but actually it's a lot more complex than that and we have to bring to bear quite a lot of other official data. For example, from the Government's own impact assessments where they might say, for example, that they expect such and such a reform to impact more severely on a certain type of household or a certain place, etc. That said, I've got to underline that it is an imprecise science. Not imprecise because our methods are somehow flawed, but when we're looking forward and trying to predict what the impacts of the reforms will be in terms of financial losses, the world is always uncertain. The world never works out quite as the Chancellor, for example, might expect. There can be quite a difference, and I will show you in a minute an example of this. There can be quite a difference between what you anticipate initially to be the impact of the reforms and what is actually the outturn. What we've got to do really is make the best possible assessment at this point in time. Let me just take a step backwards here and move away from the new reforms and refresh your memories on the pre-2015 reforms. There was a lot going on that impacted on Scotland. I've listed here the eight big Westminster-instigated changes that led to financial losses up here. I'll just go very quickly through them. Housing benefit changes to local housing allowance—that's about housing benefit for those in the private rented sector. Non-dependent deductions—that was about contributions that, for example, grown-up children in employment should make towards the housing costs of their parents if they're still living at home. The benefit cap, I'm sure you're familiar with that, the changeover from disability living allowance to personal independence payments, a whole raft of reforms to employment and support allowance, or what was incapacity benefit. ESA is the new incapacity benefit. Some of those reforms came into effect in the post-2010 period, but were initiated by Labour. However, there was an additional layer on top of that that the coalition Government introduced, particularly around means testing of ESA for those in the work-related activity group. Changes to child benefit were drawn from higher earners, for example. A lot of detail changes to tax credits, which had the effect of reducing entitlements. On top of that, we had the 1 per cent operating of benefits, which certainly the chancellor intended to be a below inflation operating. It didn't quite work out like that, because inflation slowed down a great deal. You might think, well, aren't there one or two things missing from that list? Yes, there definitely are. Up here in Scotland, you managed to avert, of course, the impact of the bedroom tax. You also managed to avert the impact of reductions in council tax support. In both cases, that was only a version of the impact on claimants, because it was still a financial loss for the public sector up here for the Scottish Government and for local authorities. What was also initiated prior to 2015 was perhaps the biggest reform of all, which is the change over to universal credit. What you need to understand about universal credit is that it has essentially been a repackaging of existing benefits. It wasn't certainly in its original form intended to save money by reducing the entitlement of claimants. That is changing. Some of the changes are going to be in the figures that I am going to show in a moment. There are also a number of other detail changes, which I won't go into. A lot of people zoom in on sanctions, for example. Sanctions were not new, but they were applied a little bit more vigorously—well, quite a lot more vigorously, actually—in the post 2010 period. Let's go back. Let's stick with those pre-2015 reforms. First off, just look at what was expected to be saved or taken from claimants up here in Scotland, and what is our best estimate of what was the outturn at the end of the day, or rather by March of this year. Back in 2013, when we did that very first report for the Scottish Parliament for your welfare reform committee, a predecessor committee, we estimated that the reforms in Scotland would lead to the loss of £1,520 million a year from claimants' pockets up here. The outturn has been very substantially less than that. We put the figure at £1.1 billion a year. You can see which were the big elements and which elements have resulted in smaller savings than were originally anticipated. What stands out from that is employment and support allowance, where the anticipated savings have actually been only a fraction of what was originally anticipated. That's not because we got it wrong. It's because the world didn't develop in the way that the Government expected. The work capability assessment, for example, which I'm sure you should all heard of, did not move large numbers of ESA as was expected. Even for those staying on ESA, a far higher proportion were placed in what's called the support group rather than the work related activity group. Therefore, when the Westminster Government means tested the benefits to those in the work related activity group, it's saved far less money because there were far fewer people in that group. A major undershoot in the savings there has had big implications for Scotland because Scotland has very large numbers of adults of working age out of the labour market on employment and support allowance. Other things, if you look down that list, when we first came here, we anticipated the bedroom tax to be impacting up here. Of course, you averted that, but you can see the broad package. The operating of benefits didn't take as much money from people because inflation slowed down, so in effect that was a smaller saving to the ex-checker. That underlines that this is a somewhat imprecise science. Anyway, let's move forward now to the new reforms and just go through what they are first. These are the reforms introduced by the Westminster Government since the general election in May 2015. Change is the universal credit work allowances, which basically means that the threshold at which universal credit is clawed back from claimants as their income rises has been lowered. George Osborne originally was going to introduce that reform to tax credits as well. He got knocked into touch on that one by his own back benches, but the same reform is coming in to universal credit. It is already operational, indeed, on universal credit. Of course, people generally have been moved over from existing benefits on to universal credit, so ultimately it has essentially the same effect, only it is rather delayed. Then there are a whole raft of changes to tax credits, of which the big ones are around children. It is about eligibility for the third and fourth child for tax credits. That is going to be removed for births after March of next year, and the removal of the family element as well. Mortgage interest support is going to be changed from a welfare payment to a loan. The local housing allowance LHA cap in the social rented sector that has been applied to the private rented sector will also be applied to the social rented sector. That is going to limit housing benefit entitlement, particularly up here in Scotland, where you have a large social rented sector. Housing benefit for unemployed 18 to 21-year-olds is coming to an end as an automatic entitlement. Employment and support allowance back to that old Horry chestnut. The work-related activity group, the benefit rate there, is getting cut down to the GSA rate. The benefit cap is being extended. In fact, that extension came into effect, I believe, was it last week or the week before, very recently. It has come into effect this month. It is now set at £20,000 in Scotland. It used to be £26,000. Finally, we have the four-year freeze in the money value of benefits, which in real terms is going to mean a significant reduction if inflation accelerates. Also, do not forget that one of the big pre-2015 reforms is still trundling along into the post-2015 era. That is the change over from DLA to personal independence payments. That is not anticipated to be completed until 2018, and indeed the existing claimants of DLA only began to be reassessed from October last year. That is an on-going reform from the pre-general election period. There were some things too that Westminster has introduced that do not apply to Scotland to pay to stay and the changes in social sector events. Let us get to the hard numbers in all of this. This is the most complex slide, but unfortunately the most important in the presentation. Some of the staff of your committee did a rather nice graphic. I can see that it is in front of you, which rather summarises—that is the one in pink—some of this very nicely. Let us start off with the bottom line. How much do we expect to be taken from claimants in Scotland by the time, by 2021, when the new round of reforms comes to fruition? We expect the annual loss to be a little bit over £1 billion a year. To put that into context, I showed you figures earlier that suggested that the rate of loss from the old pre-2015 reforms was about £1.1 billion a year. If we take the decade as a whole, we are looking at just over £2 billion being taken from claimants and, in effect, the pace of welfare reform is not slowing at all. It is very marginal slowing. Look down the first column in terms of which are the big things and which are the small things. The big financial losses that we expect to come from the benefit trees, the changes to universal credit work allowances, the continuing change from DLA to personal independence payments and the cuts to our tax credits. By comparison, the tweaking at the edges to the housing benefit for 18 to 21 euros is relatively small financial savings. Looking at the second and third columns, they probably looked at best together because some of these reforms hit very large numbers of people but take modest amounts from them, whereas other elements of the reform package hit small numbers of people but take quite large amounts from them. The benefit freeze, which means that your benefits do not rise with inflation, hits very large numbers of households, but the average loss by the time that you get to 2020 is relatively modest. I think that it will still be quite painful for many people but, in the £450 that we are estimating there, it spread across 700,000 households. By comparison, the extension to the benefit cap, if you look third from bottom on that list, 11,000 households estimated to be impacted here in Scotland, but the average loss to each of those households on an annualised basis is £2,400. Even 11,000 households may not sound very many, but it is interesting to compare that with the pre-2016 benefit cap, where the figures tell us that only 900 households were affected by the cap, but that lowering from 26,000 down to 20,000 as the maximum amount impacts on a great deal more households here in Scotland. We cannot add up all of those numbers to give you a final figure for how many people in total are affected by all those welfare reforms, because you need to bear in mind that some individuals are affected by more than one element of the reform package, so that, if you are out of work, sick and disabled, you may be affected by the changes to employment support allowance, you might also be hit by the change over to personal independence payments. If you live in a social rented accommodation, you may also find that the new LHJ cap impacts on you, and you might even find that if you have a child and are claiming tax credits for that child that there will be a financial loss there. Each of these changes may impact on the same people on some occasions. It is important to bear in mind, however, just exactly how these reforms do impact on people. Here, I have got to say that the Westminster Government has been really quite clever, or perhaps they have been cleverer than they were last time round, because comparatively few people will actually find that their cash payment is reduced from one week to the next. The benefit freeze, for example, is a cut in the real value of benefits, not in the cash value. Then there is a whole raft of the reforms, which impact not on existing claimants, but on new claimants, or claimants with revised claims, so that, for example, the work allowances within universal credit are only coming to effect if you are transferred on to universal credit for the first time, or if your circumstances change and you have to make a new universal credit claim. Likewise, the lower ESA payment rates only impact on new claimants. The ones that reduce people's cash payments from one week to the next are anybody who loses out as a result of that change from DLA to PIP and the lower benefit cap. They definitely are reducing existing payments. How does all of this impact on individual local authorities up and down Scotland? The measure that we have used in this particular list is the financial loss averaged across the whole working age population in each of the local authorities. This is the best measure of the intensity of the hit. The hit is virtually all on working age adults. It barely touches pensioner households, so looking at the loss per working age adult is the best measure. In Glasgow, the figure averages £400 per adult of working age. That is not per claimant, it is averaging the financial loss across every adult between the age of 16 and 64 in Glasgow. At the other end of the spectrum in Shetland, we are estimating the losses of £160 per adult of working age. That does not mean to say that anybody who is losing money loses less in Shetland than they do in Glasgow. It really is a reflection of the fact that in Glasgow there are far more welfare benefit claimants, far more people in the seat of benefit than there are in Shetland. If you look along that list, you will see that it is older industrial Scotland that is really in the firing line here, in the Glasgow, Western Bartonshire, North Ayrshire, Inverclyde, Dundee, North Lanarkshire. At the other end of the spectrum, it is the hitherto prospers oil locations Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Shetland, and Edinburgh is well towards the prospers end of the spectrum these days as well. This is a pattern that we have seen before in our earlier studies for the Scottish Parliament. There is a clear relationship between the scale of the financial hit, the intensity of the financial hit and the extent of deprivation. This is a little diagram that economists would like to produce. On the vertical scale is the scale of the financial hit in terms of the financial loss per adult of working age. On the horizontal scale from left to right it is the share of LSOAs, which is basically neighbourhoods, amongst the most deprived 20 per cent in Scotland. The level of deprivation goes up as you move from left to right. Each one of those dots is a Scottish local authority. There is a clear relationship in here that the higher the level of deprivation, the bigger the financial hit from these welfare reforms, which is exactly what you would expect. A deprived area, almost by definition, has quite large numbers reliant on welfare benefits. If you are cutting benefits, it hits the poorest areas hardest. How does Scotland compare with the rest of Great Britain? You are more or less on the national average, actually, in fact, fractionally below. But bear in mind that at least one important element of the reform package that impacts in England is the pay-to-stay arrangements in which social tenants have to be charged market rents better off. That does not apply up here in Scotland. That is one of the reasons why you are fairly well down the rankings. As you can see, those welfare reforms, that 12,295 at the bottom is the treasuries. The treasuries are on figure about what they expect to save, about a billion of that in Scotland. On average, across all adults of working age in Scotland, all adults between the ages of 16 and 64, the financial loss will work out at about £300 a year by the time that these reforms have all come to fruition, which is in 2021. Now, before I wrap this up, let me just ask a couple of questions. Firstly, will the financial loss be offset? Because I think if you had a Conservative Minister here, they would say, ah, well, we are cutting welfare benefits, but we're also putting money back into people's pockets through other routes. Well, let's just take a look at that. Certainly, the present Westminster Government is planning to increase personal tax allowances, and if they deliver on the promise that was published in the summer budget last year, that increase in personal tax allowances will be worth £380 a year per taxpayer by 2021. Though, let's be fair, it would only be worth probably about half that much if we allow for inflation. But what you do need to bear in mind when you're looking at welfare claimants is that only a proportion of benefit claimants pay tax. That actually even includes some of the people who are in work and claiming benefits. If you are in part-time low-paid employment, you probably do not earn enough to be paying income tax, so a reduction in the personal increase in the personal tax allowance is not worth very much to you. Then we've got the national living wage which has come in. There is no question at all that that's good for the earnings of low-paid workers, but bear in mind, as earnings increase for those in work, benefits are withdrawn as income rises, so there's a bit of an element of swings and roundabouts in this. Then there is discretionary housing payments which are on the table to assist with people who hit particular problems in relation to housing benefit entitlement in particular. The Westminster Government has put £800 million on the table for discretionary housing payments, but that's over a five-year period. If you work that through, it only comes down to £15 million a year in Scotland, which, in relation to the overall welfare cuts, is quite modest. I would imagine that, here in Scotland, you've got that pretty much all committed already to offsetting the bedroom tax. Then there is improved financial support for childcare tax allowances, and I know here in Scotland as well that you are going to introduce additional three-child care for three- and four-year-olds, and that's helpful. There's no doubt that if you take that package as a whole, some people will have some of what they lose through the welfare cuts offset through one or another route there. However, there's no guarantee that the full loss will be offset, and sometimes those positive changes will be impacting on people who are not affected by the welfare reforms. The childcare changes, for example, may simply help people who are in work and are not claiming benefit at all. The other question that I would ask is, will more people find work as a result of the new welfare reforms? Again, I think if you had a Conservative minister here, indeed, I think you had the Secretary of State here, didn't you, a couple of weeks ago? No doubt, I expect the Secretary of State would have said that the welfare reforms will encourage more people to find work. Well, let's just look at that claim. Firstly, you do have to remember that in the vast majority of cases, claimants were already financially better off in work long before all of these welfare reforms. The tweaking at the edges and the new withdrawal rates in the universal credit may affect just how much better off they would be, but it was always the case that the vast majority would be better off in work. You have to bear in mind that reductions in in-work benefits, and that applies to the universal credit work allowances and to tax credits, actually make employment rather less attractive. That's the reverse effect. Bear in mind too that the big numbers out of work on benefits these days are not on job seekers allowance. They are on employment and support allowance, the modern day in capacity benefits. That's true across Britain as a whole, and it's particularly true here in Scotland. The barriers to getting people on ESA into work are rather more complex than those affecting GSA claimants. Often there are health issues that have to be addressed, as well as issues of skills and indeed the availability of appropriate employment. The highest claimant rates are also in the places with the weakest local economies. I've got to say, going back to our previous work that we did for the welfare reform committee, we could find no evidence so far—that was up to 2015—of a positive impact on the Scottish labour market of the last round of welfare reforms. Will more people find work? I'm sceptical on that front. To conclude, therefore, firstly, bear in mind that the pace of welfare reform is barely slowing. It's my observation, and correct me if I'm wrong, that welfare reform has dropped down the news agenda a little bit of late, probably because it's been obscured by other things like Brexit, but also because it's seeming like old hat, it's seeming like an issue of 2012 or 2013 rather than 2016 or 2017. Not true at all. Welfare reform is full steam ahead. Second point, bear in mind that in Scotland, as in the rest of Britain, we're looking at financial losses both to people in work and out of work, that there will be multiple hits for some households and individuals, and that, once again, it's the post places that are hit hardest. Finally, and this is a little bit of a plea particularly to this committee, don't be blinded by the devolution of welfare powers. I know there will be a natural tendency for this committee to focus on the powers that the Scottish Government does now have over welfare issues, and I'm sure that that will become a large part of your agenda if it isn't already a large part of your agenda, but Westminster is still the very big player in all of this, and Westminster still has a huge impact and is having a huge impact up here in Scotland. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. That was absolutely so interesting. I know we have here till 10 o'clock. I'd like to sit at the background and listen to the professors as well. All right, that's absolutely great. You're more than welcome to do that. Do you mind taking a couple of questions or observations? I'd be delighted. I would just like to, what you said before, but Westminster having the most, obviously, they've still got 85 per cent. We only have 15 per cent. It's always been not just my case, but others as well, that we would have been better with 100 per cent. We could have looked at the whole thing, but we are where we are, and we have to look at the 15 per cent. I just wanted to ask the absolute huge jump with the lower benefit cap, basically going from 900 households to 11,000 households in Scotland being affected by that. What knock-on effect do you think that will have on their lives? Even if they are trying to get back into work, they are certainly not going to help them anyway. I would imagine that this is going to be a rather acute problem for a lot of households. It isn't as if there wasn't a benefit cap even before the Government first introduced 1 of 26,000. People's benefits were capped on the basis of the sum of their entitlements on individual benefits, and they were all worked out very carefully in terms of what claim have you got from housing, from the number of kids, etc. There was a cap before. We didn't call it a cap, but there was effectively a cap, and it was the sum of everything to which they were entitled. As you progressively lower that cap, and it's a big jump down now from 26,000 to 20,000. Those are people whose benefit already was means tested, in effect. It was based on their needs and their lack of other income or the lack of servings. I can only imagine that this one is going to be very painful. Whereas in contrast, for example, when there were child benefit changes in the last Westminster parliaments, most of that impact fell on higher earners. They might have winced a little bit, but that was not going to be plunging relatively poor people even further into poverty. I don't know what the feedback on the ground is yet, but I can only imagine that this is going to hurt. Thank you so much. Ben, did you want to come in and forward by Professor Hanson? Thank you, convener. As well as from a social welfare perspective, I think that analysing this from an economic perspective is quite interesting. I noted with interest the points that you made about £1 billion a year coming out of the system pre-2015, more than £2 billion a year until 2021. What are your estimates on the totality of the demand that is going to be taken out of the economy from that, as well as the impact that it will have on individual claimants and claimants as a collective? Do you have any analysis of that? Let's take the GB situation as a whole. By the time we get to 2020, we are now estimating that the whole package that has been introduced since 2010 will take £27 billion out of welfare claimants' pockets. To put that into context, that is about £1 in every four that used to be paid to working-age benefit claimants. £27 billion is a very large sum in macroeconomic terms. It is equivalent to about half the public sector financial deficit at this point in time. Ministers would argue that if we did not take that money out through welfare cuts, we would have had to take that money out through other routes to try and balance the budget or move towards a more balanced budget. We would have had £27 billion of tax increases instead of £27 billion of welfare cuts. Well, maybe, but the tax increases, if they had happened, would have fallen on different people to the £27 billion of cuts that we are talking about. In terms of the impact on the overall dynamics of the national economy, it depends really as to whether or not the financial savings would have been made through other routes. In itself, that is a lot of money, and it is being taken out of the poor economies, too. In a poor economy, that is going to add a particular vicious downward twist to an already difficult situation. The UK Government analysis does not take into effect potential multiplier effects with the demand in those local economies. We did some very rough and ready calculations in our GB report in terms of the knock-on consequences for job losses. I would not put too much weight on them, but we are talking significant numbers of thousands of knock-on job losses if you take that spending power out. Of course, you might have had to take that spending power out through tax increases. That is what ministers would argue. There seems to be an apparent lack of consideration of the impact on local economies of those reforms. The map clearly highlights that. As a general rule, the more deprived local authority area, the greater the per capita household hit. We are going to be looking at some excruciating impacts here, and they seem to be so localised. If local people have less money in their pockets, then other businesses and so on are going to be hit. If I had brought along a GB wide presentation, I might have been able to show you a lovely map of Britain as a whole with where the impact of all of these reforms fall. What you are seeing in Scotland in this list of the poorer areas versus the more prosperous areas is writ large across Britain as a whole. There is a large square of southern England outside London that is relatively lightly affected by the reforms, and across Britain as a whole, as in Scotland, it is the poorest local authorities that are hit hardest. That has rather been glossed over by a lot of people, as if welfare reform is something that affects everybody equally. It does not work out that way. It does not work out that way. If you cut welfare benefits, welfare claimants are in some places rather than others. They are not sitting in in Theresa May's constituency or in David Cameron's old constituency. They are sitting in Glasgow, or in Liverpool, or in former mining villages in Yorkshire. It is those places that are really in the firing line. As I said, it adds an extra downward twist to the local economies. They are often struggling for other reasons, and suddenly you are taking more money out. There is an amazing coincidence between the electoral geography of Britain and the impact of the welfare reforms. The places that are escaping from the welfare reforms—or escaping relatively lightly—are the places in which the Conservative Government in Westminster draws its political support from. You talked about cutting overall value of benefit, but not in cash payment. You also indicated that there is a sort of approach in those reforms for those coming new to the system to tend to be the ones who are affected by, I think, lower payments going forward, if I can put it that way. Would you agree that it is a better way to work a system or plan a system to do it in that way? Is there a lessening impact on those currently on benefits and allowing people to adjust to a new state of affairs? In terms of minimising the anger that would be felt on the ground, it probably is a more sensitive way to handle things. For example, the reductions in tax credits for people with large families, if you already have more than two children, then the new changes will not affect your entitlement. However, if you have a third or fourth child after the spring of next year, you will not get the benefit that you previously would have. The net effect is, at the end of the day, going to be the same, because this is still a reduction in what is paid to households or individuals. However, because you are not, in many instances, reducing the payment from one month to the next or whatever, the pain will probably be felt less. The anger will not necessarily be felt less, but it will probably not generate the anger that a straight cash reduction in payments would generate. Having said that, there are some of the changes, particularly around DLA and PIP and the benefit cap that we talked about a moment ago, that will still have that reduction in cash terms. However, it is a clever way. It is a way of averting some of the indignation of the net effect. Is it not a way of lessening what might be considered a negative impact on people? The way that you phrase it is almost a political statement. You talked about lessening the anger and so forth. I am talking about the actual effect on people and how they relate to the system rather than a political statement attacking the Conservative UK Government. I do not think that I was trying to attack the concept of government. I was trying to explain how the system works here. At the end of the day, it is still a cut, but the way that the cut is experienced is different. It is implemented in a way that some people will not realise that they are getting less now or in future than they would have done if the old system had stayed in place. However, they are getting less. I remind members that I did the other week that we treat everyone in this committee with dignity and respect. Adam Tomkins Thank you, convener. Thank you, Professor, for the presentation, which I thought was very useful. Would it be fair to say that there was a difference between the very detailed and very helpful data that you presented and some of the conclusions that you suggested, which were all together, if I may say so, more speculative? In particular, I just want to test you a little, if I can, on the conclusion that you have reached that there is no impact on the labour market as a consequence of the programme of welfare reform, which has been on going since 2010. I wonder where the data is that underpins that remark when there are now, as we all know, more jobs in the British economy than ever before, more disabled people in work in the economy than ever before and more women in work than ever before. One might say politically that there is no impact on the labour market, but in terms of hard data, what is the evidence for that claim? We are going into the territory that was covered by one of our previous reports to the welfare reform committee as it was then, the last of the reports, where we did present the data on all of this. What we found when we looked at the pattern of change in the Scottish labour market over the period from 2010 to about 2014, we found that claimant unemployment, the numbers on GSA, was falling fastest in the areas where the welfare reforms were hitting hardest, which at one level would be consistent with the argument that the welfare reforms were actually moving more people into work. But what we also then did, we looked at other upturns in the economy and asked whether the same pattern could be identified at previous points in the economic cycle. What we found was that you had exactly the same effect going on in other economic upturns, even well before the introduction of welfare reform, which made it hard to conclude that the improvements, or certainly the reductions in the numbers on GSA could be attributed to welfare reform. It is much more an effect, we thought, that when there is an upturn in the economy, it is easier to bring down the numbers on GSA where the numbers are large than in the areas where the numbers on GSA are fairly small anyway. You can get a four or five percentage point reduction where the starting point is eight or nine per cent, but not where the starting point is three per cent. We were therefore skeptical on the basis of the evidence that we were able to assemble of a positive impact on the Scottish labour market. We could not discern any clear relationships between the impact of the welfare reforms and changes in numbers on employment and support allowance. It was only on GSA where there was some potential evidence, but then when we looked back in time, we thought, no, this goes on every time the economy upturns up. That last point, that last bullet point there on that slide, is rooted in hard evidence, but the hard evidence is in an earlier report. To make sure that I have understood it, if I may, I have spent 25 years as an academic, I understand that proving causes in social science is incredibly difficult to do, but we can see nonetheless a correlation between welfare reform and employment growth. We could not find a correlation with employment growth, but we could find a correlation with the reduction in the numbers on jobseekers allowance. The number of jobs in any locality is not changes in employment and changes in the numbers on GSA in any one locality are not the same because of commuting patterns, etc. It was looking across the 32 local authorities within Scotland. We could find a correlation on changes in GSA. We also found a very similar correlation with changes in GSA in previous upturns. Thank you. Can I ask another question? Are there those who want to come in? I want to come in and then George Adam. Thanks for your presentation. It was very interesting. I was depressed but not surprised to see my own area, North Ayrshire, as one of the hardest hits. I just wanted to make the point that that money is coming out of local businesses as well, because people who receive that money spend it locally. The question that I wanted to ask or was interested to hear your reflections on was the impact on other public services, because when there is pressure, although the money is coming out of the welfare, it is putting additional pressure on perhaps local authorities that are having to pick up some of the slack on health. Do you have any data or information around that that would let us see that? Unfortunately, my simple answer is no. I think there are probably plenty of other people, including some of the academics who you might be talking to later, who have a better handle on that knock-on impact. Some of the agencies on the ground will have as well. I suppose that one would assume that if the financial losses are bigger in some places than others, the implications for local services are going to be bigger in those places. I was actually interested in what you said towards the end of your whole presentation, Professor, but particularly the bit at the end where you said, do not be blinded by the devolution of powers, Westminster is still a very big player. That, to me, is quite an interesting point when we are going forward. You also said in the report that the devolution of welfare powers should not obscure the continuing dominant role that the UK Government plays in determining welfare spending in Scotland. Is it not the case that when you look at PIPP and other ones, by the time the budget line has actually come to the Scottish Government, there has already been such a dramatic change that would it not be the case that, as the convener quite rightly said, we are only at 15 per cent of the powers, if we had all or more of the powers, we could have a bigger impact in trying to make the difference in our local communities, as opposed to just having these ones where the budget seems to be dwindling as time goes on? I do not think that it is my role to get into the merits or the demotes of what should or should not be devolved to Scotland, but I can confirm what you have just said there that, by the time that Scotland does get control of the personal independence budget, it will be smaller than it is now, because we are going through a period where the spending on that particular package of benefits, DLA and PIPP is still being reduced. By the time you get the first strings, it is a smaller purse. Can I ask a second question that you have got so about five minutes left? It is a very short question. It has to be a very short question, Mr Tom, because you obviously have your teams over. Indeed, but you said that we had the Professor until 10 o'clock, so the question that I wanted to ask, the statement that you made, which I think is absolutely right, Professor, is that welfare reform is continuing. It is an unfinished business, but it would also be fair to say, wouldn't it, that it is significantly changing direction under the current Secretary of State, Inkin Browson, with the Secretary of State that started it in Duncan Smith a few years ago? I wondered if you had time to reflect on the changes that he has signalled recently in the current green paper on improving lives, the green paper jointly published by the DWP in the Department of Health, which picks up directly on a very large number of the claims that you were making in your research about ESA. I am not sure I could comment in detail on the changes that have occurred, because from one Secretary of State to another, but let's just take the green paper on work and health if we could for a moment. Myself and my academic colleagues have done an enormous amount of work, quite separate to what you're hearing today, on incapacity benefit claimants, as were ESA claimants now. We've got work on this extending back over 20 years. We have a pretty good handle, I believe, on why do we have quite so many people out of the labour market on these benefits? Just for the uninitiated on this, let me underline the point that, across Britain as a whole, we have around about 2.5 million adults of working age out of the labour market on ESA—well, a small number is still on pre-ESA benefits—but 2.5 million on those benefits compared with what is it now on unemployment-related benefits. It's not a great deal more than 600,000 or 700,000, is it? You look at what is emerging from the Department for Work and Pensions and from the Department of Health on how to go about reducing these numbers. I've got to say, I don't think their analysis of the cause of the problem is correct. That is because they don't look down at the local geography of where all of these claimants are, and don't ask the question, well, why suddenly in these places did we get the emergence of large numbers of adults out of work on incapacity benefits now ESA? If we go back historically, we didn't have 2.5 million on these benefits. If we go back to the late 1970s, the beginning of the 1980s, we had about three quarters of a million out of work on the same sorts of benefits. It isn't that the population has got that much unhealthier, but what becomes transparent when you look down at the local data is that these claimants are concentrated in particular places and where they are concentrated in particular are Britain's older industrial areas. It's not a problem of prosperous southern England. Our research over many years has suggested that what happens to people with health problems and disabilities is that in the strong labour markets in the down south, or indeed even, let's say, in the Aberdeen area in Scotland, the more prosperous areas, that people with health problems and disabilities are able to find work. They're able to stay in work, if they lose their jobs, they can find another job. But in the weaker local labour markets of Britain, poor health or disability is one of the great discriminators that means that some individuals can't find and retain work and they become marginalised. What we would say is the fundamental solution to getting the numbers on ESA down is to rebuild the economies of the less prosperous parts of the United Kingdom, in particular the older industrial areas. That does not come through in the diagnosis that DWP and the Department of Health have of this problem. I think that they misunderstand the problem and I really don't say that lightly for us. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. You've finished exactly at 10 o'clock with your answer. I didn't know if you were watching the clock or not, but thank you very much. You said you wanted to listen to a little bit more than welcome. Can I just close the session just for a minute or so? To spend the session for a minute or so while there are witnesses there. Thank you so much. Welcome, everyone. Good morning to our next agenda item 3, basically. No, it's not agenda item 3. Sorry about that. It's agenda item 2. I just wanted to thank you all for coming along today. I know that there's been a bit of a problem with transport, etc. I thank you all for being able to make it here today. I also thank her earlier presentation from Professor Fortheringale, which was absolutely excellent. Actually, we are on agenda item 3. I'm reading it from the wrong end of it. The concluding session of our series of round tables. Obviously, it's to look at the Sheffield-Hallam report, which has been a springboard for our discussions. I welcome you all today to the panel of academics to be able to ask you questions. I can't really see you for the light shining on it, Professor. Can you just introduce yourself from Abigail Round and then I'll open it up to questions. I have two specific questions that I wanted to ask the panel. I'm Abigail Marks. I'm Professor of Work and Organization Studies at Harriet Wharton, Director of the Centre for Research on Work and Wellbeing. I'm Kirsten Rummery. I'm Professor of Social Policy at the University of Stirling and Co-Director of the Centre on Gender and Feminist Studies. My name is Ken Gibb. I'm Professor of Housing Economics at the University of Glasgow. I'm also the Director of Policy Scotland. I'm Sharon Wright. I'm a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Glasgow University. I lead the welfare reform network for Policy Scotland and I'm also a co-investigator of the ESRC, the Welfare Conditionality Sanction Support and Behaviour Change project. I'm Paul Spicker. I'm an Emeritus Professor of Robert Godden University working as an independent writer and commentator. I'm Helen Graham. I'm a research fellow at the Employment Research Institute at Brinepere University. Thank you all very much. As I said previously, thank you for making it in today in such a miserable day and I know that we've had problems with traffic and transport as well. There are just two basic questions that I wanted to ask the panel. Perhaps give me an answer to them and then I'll open it up to questions from the members. First of all, I'm sure that you do have, but do you have any comments on the report and its findings and what do you think the priority should be for this committee over the next five years, the parliamentary session? I'll open it up to whoever wants to go first. I broadly agree with the findings of the report. From my research, I think that the priority of the committee has to be to try and stop people on ESA from getting into further trouble. As was mentioned, most people on ESA are in deprived pre-industrial areas and a great majority of those are on ESA because of mental health problems. The way that the system operates at the moment is taking people further away from the potential to work rather than towards it because the way the assessment system is, if the majority of those people are also on DLA or PIP, I think that is the only scope to try and facilitate a way of stabilising people's experiences within those communities. I wanted to comment on the report, particularly about the things that are not particularly, this is a bit unfair, the things that are not covered in the report but also have an impact on people's lives. We've talked a little bit about the transition from DLA to PIP and the reduction in the budget that will be coming. We do see an impact in health-related issues from the actual administration of that change. What we are seeing is targets to reduce spend targets to take people off DLA and to use the PIP assessment process to reduce expenditure, which is contrary to the formative aim of the initially of DLA, which was to give people income to offset the cost of disability. We see that particularly in areas where the process of going through the claim itself is deleterious to people's health, particularly their mental health and their physical health. In itself, reduction in things like mobility allowance leads to onset reductions. For example, the reduction to the ability to access mobility cars, which leads to problems accessing transport, is all linked to problems accessing the labour market. There's a huge knock-on effect that is not really recognised from the transition from DLA to PIP. You may say that we've only got the control of 15 per cent of the budget, but you actually have control of the administration of how that budget is actually spent and how it's delivered. That actually is potentially far more powerful than even this committee realitis, because it's actually the administration of the scheme that is causing the most damage to claimants. It's not actually the sums of money involved itself. If we look at, for example, the cost to claimants from benefit sanctions—which I think that my colleague will probably talk a little bit more about—and welfare conditionality, the actual cost of losing benefits and then coming back on benefits and the impact that it has particularly on low-income families, particularly on families that are also claiming DLA, PIP and have a disabled member or a carer in the family, is absolutely huge and significant, and the impact on child poverty is also huge and significant. You can change that by changing the way in which these benefits are administered. You can change that by looking at the cost of outsourcing it to companies like ATOS and assessment companies and bringing that back in-house or bringing that back in lower costs. There are substantial administrative savings that could be made by running things differently and more fairly in Scotland that would then release more money for front-line claimants. We mentioned the additional services, so health and social care services. You have to remember that people who are claiming DLA and PIP are probably also claiming self-directed support or social care support particularly. Cuts to those benefits have been absolutely substantial of predated welfare reform but are continuing. The shift from community care services to self-directed support is also happening at the same time in the shift to a sharp reduction in social care budgets that are available to local authorities. That is an issue that the Scottish Government and local authorities have always had complete control over. By joining up systems and reducing the administrative burden on the way in which systems work, particularly by reducing the impact of sanctions, which all the evidence that I have looked at and the evidence that we have gathered does not save money—in fact, it costs more than it does to save. If you look at the qualitative impact of sanctions on families at the front line, it does not help them into work. In fact, it acts as an additional barrier for those who are struggling to find work, particularly as the Professor said in those economies in which there is not a local labour market that can accommodate people with caring responsibilities that can accommodate people with disability issues. We do find that the evidence also suggests that building up those economies and getting the economic circumstances right so that employers can accommodate people who perhaps might need to work part-time, who perhaps might need to work with additional supports. All of that is again with it that you have some of the powers, not necessarily within Scotland. That would be my sense of the priorities that you need to look at. The actual functioning of the system and the way in which the system is operated in the administration of the system, and you have substantial powers to make changes there. Thank you so much. Mr Gibb, will we just go round as normal then? First of all, I think that it is a model of clarity. It is a really helpful contribution in that we do not really get that Scottish-level or local authority disaggregated kind of analysis, and it clearly builds on a body of work. I thought that one of the nice things about it was by being able to look at the pre-15 to the post-15 work and also to make comparisons with GGB as a whole, which was very helpful. I think that it also nicely sets out what it does not do and what it cannot do and suggests what the limitations of the data that they are working with are, and that is very helpful. It also poses questions for further research so that we can look at an individual and how an individual has different levels of benefit and how that impacts on, because we cannot get that from the data the way that it is presented. On the other hand, however, I think that there is a kind of imbalance in the report between this very thorough analysis of the benefit welfare changes and the much more less detailed account of the positive changes in terms of tax allowances and such like that. I know that some of that stuff is not available in the same format and detail, but I think that we could in balance have a bit more analysis of that because, again, there will be distributional profiles attached to that across space, which would be really interesting to see. I am just as a kind of minor quibble. I am not sure that it is safe to say that a proportion of the increase in the personal tax allowance would have happened anyway. Those things are incredibly uncertain and to push forward five years into the future. Given the history of the change in the personal tax allowance, which is highly variable and uncertain, I would be slightly more generous about the size and the scale of that impact increase, but it is a great piece of work. I would also like to congratulate Professor Fowler-Gill and his team for an excellent piece of research and excellent report. Generally, the impact of welfare reform in Scotland has got to be the business of this committee, so it is useful in lots of ways. I also agree on the importance of considering benefits and services for disabled people, particularly those that are in the remit of the Scottish Parliament. On priorities, I think that it would be useful for this committee to consider the impacts on people who are in work as well as those who are out of work, because that is going to be a growing area where welfare reforms hit. Also, the related politics of how that affects people is of great relevance. I picked up on a couple of points just when I came in. Sorry, I was late because of the train. There was a point about anger, and that was taken as a political criticism. Our research on welfare conditionality is a qualitative piece of research, so it can speak to that point in more depth. We asked people how they were affected by welfare reforms. Most people told us that the emotional effects were negative, so they included anxiety, depression, health effects and even suicide attempts. We picked up on anger, but we also picked up on a lot of different emotional responses that were affecting people in very deep ways in their lives. I think that, especially when welfare reform means that people living in poverty have their incomes reduced even further, that is an issue of great concern. I wanted to highlight how that will continue to impact on people who are in work, especially those who are out of work. I also agree with Professor Rumory's point about the importance of services. It would be good if the committee could look at different options for how services can be run in Scotland, including questioning the contract and output payment models that have been common in the rest of the UK. I must apologise. I did not know that. Did you want to come back in the second part of the question? Okay, that is absolutely fine. I would wish to separate out the contents of the report that you have just heard from the question of priorities. There is, I fear, a tendency very often to respond to the current set and diet of benefits as a laid table that always the terms on which benefits are delivered determine what it is possible to think about for the future. It becomes extremely difficult to adapt to change or to anticipate change because of the huge pressure to make up for what has just gone before. We have seen it in relation to the bedroom tax. I have been asked by politicians in the past, for example, what it might be possible to do in relation to tax credit cuts. I am afraid that it is not going to be possible to deal with most of the cuts. Quite simply, there is too much water coming through the dike. You do not have enough fingers. It cannot work this way. What it is important to do is to look to the future and future priorities about the ways in which benefits are to be delivered in Scotland. Here we have got some very large issues coming at Scotland at great speed of huge importance. The Scottish Government will be taking on responsibility for what is admittedly a minor part of the total social security system but which nevertheless represents a huge administrative, practical and financial challenge. That must be the priority for future work over the next five years. In some ways, it is a minefield that whatever happens, no matter how well the system is done, we all know that in a large system with multiple iterations dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of people, whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament will get the blame when it does. We have to accept that as being part of the enterprise that we are engaged in. Clearly, it is important to try as far as possible to promote the kind of agenda in which the Scottish Parliament has previously adopted, relating to respect, dignity and fairness, to ensure that the system works properly. It is tempting, I know, to focus on specific policies. That is because a committee like this may well feel—I should say that I have been a previous adviser to the Welfare Reform Committee and I was aware that this was a strong view held—that it can have far more effect by selecting a small number of topics, focusing on that small number, and seeking to have maximum impact in that way. You have a group of eight academics in front of you. I am fairly sure that each of us could come up with three priorities, and that, by the time you have finished with the lack of overlap, you would finish with about 30 ideas about what might be taken forward. I think more generally than that, though, we have got to understand that this process is already well underway, that it will begin with the smaller benefits, that maternity grant will almost certainly be high on the list. I was at a fascinating session yesterday about funeral poverty and the forthcoming patterns of funeral payments. Those are because they stand alone, because they are specific, will be developed in the very near future. The disability benefits are clearly the largest part of what is being done financially and in terms of the number of people affected, and that must be addressed in the not-too-distant future. What I would argue for rather than try to adapt specific policies on each and everything, is focusing on something that is fundamental to everything, and certainly fundamental to dignity and respect. That is developing a point that Custin Remory made, among many others, about the administration, about the mechanics of benefit delivery, because without that you cannot have the dignity, respect and the coverage, and ways to deal with the many pitfalls that you face in the near future. Thank you very much, Professor. I thank Professor Fothergill for a forensic analysis of the numbers. It is always nice when someone does the sums that nobody really wants to do. My own perspective on this comes from work, looking qualitatively at welfare reform and the impact that that has had on individuals and households. Time is really of the essence when it comes to PIP. I understand that there is a motion that has been lodged to delay the implementation of PIP in Scotland, which is all well and good, but this is a group of people on DLA who have really been in limbo for a long time now. People who were told that they would be entitled to DLA for the rest of their lives, who were then told that they would be subject to reassessment, not being sure what impact that would have, and the implementation has been pushed back and pushed back, so the period of uncertainty has lengthened for them. As Sharon mentioned, the emotional impact of that uncertainty is difficult to quantify in the same way as the financial impact, but it is undoubtedly having a huge impact. To agree really with what others have said, look at the savings that could be made from joining up some of those processes. Climants have said that they are expected to produce the same folder full of evidence for several different purposes and also considering whether it is really necessary to reassess people at all or certainly to reassess them at intervals when they have a condition that really is deteriorating. Thank you very much. I will open it up to members. It is a slight digression. I would be interested to get your thoughts initially on the why, in your view, the 15 per cent that has been selected and allocated for devolution was determined. Do you have any thoughts on the practicalities around that? We heard in private evidence session earlier in the week that there was an understanding that those might be the easiest sections of the social security system to devolve, but I would be interested in any thoughts that you might have around that specific point. I was involved in the Smith commission. In part, it reflects a very strong grassroots feeling from disability organisations in Scotland that they wanted to see disability living allowance and carers allowance and associated things devolved to Scotland. That was quite a clear message among all the very convoluted messages that were coming through the Smith commission. It was also something that was relatively easy to implement. In policy terms, that looked like a win-win for everyone. I think that the political nature of that is an opportunity for the Scottish Parliament no matter what it stands, because if it can prove that it can make these sections of benefits work more effectively, more efficiently and give people dignity and the right to an income and security, which we have heard across a lot of different evidence bases, is substantially part of the issue, then it is proving its competence. There are clear guidelines from whichever side of the political divide that you sit that would indicate that you could get some relatively early wins on that that would indicate that you are handling the budget in a clear and accountable and fair way. I am very sceptical of the view that the benefits which Scotland has been asked to replace are, in any sense, easy to administer. On the contrary, they seem to me to be deeply convoluted and often seriously problematic. I think that there is a common distortion of perspective about benefits, and one of those distortions irresistibly that people have is the idea that they are related to the world of work. Most benefits aren't. Most benefits relate to the situation of elderly people, and if we actually look at what's happened in relation to this, we see a complete reservation of the national insurance system, which is the least problematic part of the many systems that we have, but we've got things which where we know that there has been a substantial failure of benefit in the past, at point particularly to DLA. DLA is difficult and complex in its own right, but what DWP research on DLA has shown has been that claimants are generally baffled as to the terms on which the benefit is delivered don't understand why they should claim or why they should not claim. There is extremely poor take-up of the care component. I could go on with the problems, and effectively Scotland is being given as a test the task to try to find some way through despite all of those complexities for a system which I'm afraid the current reform to personal independence payment does almost nothing to resolve. Just on that point, do you share an agreement with the current approach that's been part of the Scottish Government's narrative about the fact that a safe and secure transition of these devolved benefits of paramount importance, given the complexity that you touched on there? I would certainly subscribe to the first part of what you said, which is safe and secure transition. That's clearly essential. It doesn't have to be these benefits. What Scotland has devolved are the powers to create benefits and to create benefits for certain purposes. It doesn't follow that the pattern and the structure of benefits must replicate the pattern and structure of the benefits which currently exist. There are ideas which could be considered. I note, for example, that we are inheriting basically not only what was DLA and what might be PIP along with attendance allowance. There's a very strong case for trying to rationalise the relationship between them. Personally, I think that there is a case to go back to mobility allowance, which we used to have as a separate benefit, that in addition to that, there are further complications in relation to severe dissimital allowance, where we've been handed a very small number of residual claims with the task of administering that as well. I think that there needs to be some form of rationalisation which will make it practical for a population which, amongst many other things, is highly dispersed and often very vulnerable. On that and actually add some evidence to the weight of Professor's because argument there, in that the devolution of these benefits to the Scottish context is in effect a lump sum that can be reorganised. This is an absolutely wonderful window of opportunity to do that. It's a wonderful opportunity to learn from the mistakes that have been made in setting up these benefits in the first place. If we focus on DLA and PIP because that's going to be one of the most difficult ones to tackle, we have to remember that new claimants in Scotland are already claiming PIP. It's not a case that we're inheriting DLA. They're already going through this assessment process that is highly flawed. One of the reasons that it's flawed is because it is based on a flawed theoretical understanding of what enables people to live independent lives. That flawed theoretical understanding can quite easily be addressed in terms of either redesigning the system or designing a new benefit system with a much more up-to-date theoretical understanding that reflects what academic evidence is saying, what people on the ground are saying, what grassroots movements are saying. There is quite a collaborative style of policy making already evident within the Scottish Parliament that distinguishes it from the Westminster approach. Whilst that is a difficult task, there is a window of opportunity here to create a benefit system, particularly for that group of people who are on DLA and PIP and are likely to be on ESA as well, to take a joined up approach to say, what is it that actually supports these people to live independently? What is it that actually supports them if they can to access the labour market and also not to forget the important things around carers and that associated thing? What is it that supports carers because we absolutely have to be able to rely on carers continuing to care within Scotland? The demographic tsunami that is coming upon us is coming whether we like it or not. What is it that actually supports carers to be able to continue to care but also to be able to access the labour market and to be able to work and do other things that enhance their independence but also lead to economic growth and prosperity? At the minute, the system is so complex and there are so many reasons why it acts as a disincentive and why it actually does not fulfil the aims of enabling people to live dignified lives. I was particularly interested in comments by Professor Spiker, but others may wish to contribute on this. If we take the basis of the approach to be the dignity and respect approach that is set out by the Scottish Government, there are a number of ways of effecting or implementing what is intended, whether it is guidelines or act of parliament or statutory instrument, subordinate legislation. As an advocate working in the courts and many of my colleagues in the legal profession over the years, I have dealt with people who had entitlement to benefits and who then had to come, unfortunately, to us to make good those entitlements or to take advice on it. Some of the comment that has been made about some of the acts of the Scottish Parliament is that they read like wishless because they are not specific and what we would call black litter law as lawyers. It is a bit like saying to a cabinet maker, build a table in this room or a desk but not giving the cabinet maker the dimensions or the size and then being disappointed with the result. Would you agree that we need whatever is implemented, anchored in clearly set out statute and subordinate legislation so that rights can be made effective when they are to be implemented and so that those who unfortunately don't receive their entitlement and therefore need some way of making it good as it were can do so? Whereas I would agree about the importance of specifying the terms and of getting regulations, there is something to make a reservation about which is that the approach to benefits which has seen its administration in terms of adversarial legal decisions has not been to the benefit of the organisation. I think we should want a Scottish Social Security Agency to be what we might call in the jargon a learning organisation, one where if there is a need for redress, which there will be, if there is a complaint, that it is possible to take back that information and to improve what the organisation does with it and regrettably the current state of the benefit system depending on an obstacle course of mandatory reconsideration and extremely difficult access to judicial review does not serve this purpose at all. Most local authorities now have complaints procedures where it is possible to get complaints fed back to the organisation, to review the operation, to see how it is done and it seems to me critically important that we do that if we do not want the system simply to replicate the visors of the systems that we are taking on. Professor Murdoff. I will point in this from both UK-based evidence and also international comparative evidence on the interface between, again, it is an area that I know about, so these are the examples that I am drawing on, disability allowance, carers allowance and care and support in the community and other services that are intended to support people. We know that what works best in supporting people but also in being relatively easy and fair to administrate is exactly what you have said, clear rights and entitlements that have a statutory basis, rather than discretionary entitlements, particularly entitlements that are perhaps administered at a local level and that kind of thing. If you just look at the examples within Scotland of the difference between having tribunals that can decide on welfare benefits and a really arcane and impenetrable system of appeals against community care assessments and self-directed support having sat on those tribunals myself, it is in terms of granting social rights and in terms of actually making the system easier and fairer, it is far better to have a system of nationally set criteria and benefits that is set out in statute. It is open to interpretation, obviously, in terms of, but, with all due respect, we don't really want to be funding lawyers when we really should be funding people who are living in poverty and struggling. In effect of having a fairer, more transparent system, a clear set of rights and entitlements that is not locally dependent so you don't get 32 different systems because you've got 32 different local authorities. Again, the Scottish Government has the power to create that, to join up budgets, to create clear sets of rights and entitlements, particularly around disability allowances and carers allowances etc. I keep coming back to this, this is a window of opportunity to do that and actually create a system that is clear, accountable and fair because that would be in the interests of everyone and eventually would actually save quite significant amounts of administrative money as well. I want to make a slightly different point, because back more to the previous question, but it is relevant, I think. The 15 per cent is, in a sense, what we know about. The thing that we don't know about, as Paul alluded to, was the capacity to create new benefits or top-up benefits or, I think, for me, the most interesting thing a lot is the discretion to amend the existing rules to things. It's very hard to put a number or a scale on that and obviously it's something that will evolve over time, but what I think is really interesting is that we will evolve over this Parliament to a situation where Scottish Parliament has much more responsibility for the tax revenue that's being raised. These new welfare powers would have of themselves direct financial implications on the Scottish Parliament budget, so it seems to me that this committee has an opportunity to think really hard about the fundamentals of the choices of what would be a priority given that there would be an opportunity cost on the Parliament for an additional benefit, something that you really wanted to do to make a change and it's a chance to have a proper debate about that and I think that that's a really exciting opportunity. Because of the discretion and the breadth of it, that could cover all manner of things. My area of interest is the housing cost elements in universal credit, the 18 to 21 housing benefit exemptions etc, but there are a whole range of things that could form part of that debate. It's a bit of a red herring to focus so much on 15 per cent because that's such an open part, but for a Government and a Parliament so interested in justice and respect etc, it seems to me that there's an opportunity to use some of our existing resources, indeed additional tax revenue if we're able to generate it to make some of those positive changes that we want to make. Thank you very much. Dr Wright. To that point about the legal aspects and the rights, my personal opinion is that clear rights are really valuable and that that would be a helpful way of organising things. My research, my on-going research on welfare conditionality has looked at processes of appeal and mandatory reconsideration and what we've mainly found is that people find it very difficult to navigate the existing systems, so if the Scottish Social Security Agency could have clear, transparent and independent appeals processes that would be really valuable, we found that people who were undergoing mandatory reconsideration were often mistaken, they thought that was an appeal when it wasn't and they thought that what they interpreted as a final decision was something that, in fact, had a right to appeal against, so a simpler system and a more independent system would be useful in that respect for any Scottish benefits. If something else is going to say, I forgot what it was. Can I just pick up on that? It's simpler. This is important, which is how does one provide a system which is practical, which meets needs. It's quite important that the system should be minimally intrusive. We do have, within current rules and regulations—I'm thinking here of community care legislation—specific reference to somebody's need to have help with having their teeth brushed. We need to think about whether we actually should ever be framing rules of this sort because rules of that sort require tests that are appropriate to the task. The more we do that, the more inclusive the system becomes, the more likely you are to have failures of take-up and further problems. It's really very important to be prepared to accept that you're going for a more widely spread, less closely specified base than has otherwise been in the case. Did you remember, Dr Wight? That's something else in response to this. Okay, on you go before I bring in Mr Tomkins. It was just on that point about how do you make the decisions without over-specifying, but we've got a lot of information. If we're talking here in terms of disability and health and personal services, there's a lot of information already in existence that's about health in people's health records and decisions could be made on existing evidence without asking for new tests and without asking people to undergo assessments that are actually blunter instruments than the more accurate specialist assessment that they've already had. Thank you very much, Adam Tomkins. Give me that. I'm sorry. Could I let in Professor Marks just for a second? The issue about assessment is absolutely key. My research is being on people with mental health problems and every time they go through assessment, their mental health deteriorates. The anticipation of the assessment, the actual assessment itself. I specialise on mental health and employment. People who are preparing to go back to work, go to assessment and their mental health deteriorates and they go so far away from work. It's been widely documented that the way that assessments carried out has led to suicides is absolutely key that we look at the assessment process. Thank you very much. Adam Tomkins. Thank you, convener. We've got two really clear proposals on the table from Kirstine and Paul, if you'll think of me using first names, that we should look hard, Paul says, at the redesign of disability benefits and the rolling together of DLA PIP and attendance allowance, and from Kirstine that we should look equally hard at the delivery and administration of disability benefits, because so much of what I'm going to call the respect agenda can be delivered through, not through entitlement, not through eligibility, but through the way in which the actual interface between the user and the system operates. I have a question, if I may, convener, for the other four witnesses, which is a two-fold question. One, is it possible and or desirable to disaggregate looking at questions of design from questions of delivery? Should we try and look at them serially, or should we try and look at them together? If we can't look at them together, if we have to look at, if it makes sense for this committee in your view for us to look at design on the one hand and delivery on the other rather than together, which should we look at first, just in terms of your advice about what you think this committee should do? Does that make sense? Dr Wright. Excellent question. I've done a lot of research on this myself, looking at the implementation of employment services for all sorts of groups, including disabled people, but also job seekers and including currently universal credit claimants. I think that it's really important to look at design first and then delivery, because those issues can be conflated, and then you get accusations, for example, that the problems are just located at implementation level, whereas, in fact, they are inherent in the design of the system. I think that the current debate about sanctions, for example, is a good example of that, where you hear criticism of job centre plus staff for being very harsh, but, in fact, they are actually just carrying out the system that's been pre-designed. I would answer your question to say, serially, start first with the design, but then look really carefully at how, I guess, something that's in between that, the governance of the delivery. It's easy for us in this UK context to think only in certain ways about how employment services can be delivered, and I would encourage us to look more widely to other countries to see what the different options are. We are very used to this policy pathway in which we contract out, which we use private companies on a for-profit basis, and which we are really concerned with outputs and outcomes in terms of job outcomes. In order, especially for people with health problems, capability issues and lone parents, it's much more important to take into consideration the journey to work, rather than just the output. There's a lot of scope to save money, as Kirsten said really early on, and to have better services by giving attention to the governance of the design. I must remind the committee of my declared interests in the register. I'm a colleague at Policy Scotland of Ken Gibb and Sharon Wright. I should have declared that before I said anything, I apologise. That's quite all right. Anyone else want to give a comment before I bring in Alison Johnson? Housing benefits the benefit. I know best. I find it quite hard to completely disaggregate, because the sense of design determines the form of the delivery, but delivery is a necessary component to make the design work. In the same way that a lot of the benefits that we are talking about here are really in the world of work and others are in the world of healthcare and care, housing benefit has a massive impact on the way that the housing system works. It's really incumbent on designers and thinkers of benefits to be really careful about the spillovers and the unintended consequences. Housing landlords, social housing providers, their ability to generate their rental income depends on how their tenants interact with the benefits system, as Sharon knows very well. Equally, their ability to build the homes that the Government has set this target of 50,000 units for critically depends on how people at lenders think that the benefits system will work in the future, because they have to make their lending decisions and providers are borrowing decisions on where the streams of income will come from. It heavily relies on the housing benefit system, so there are all those overlying complexities that make it quite difficult to disentangle those things and suggest that maybe there is a third layer that is the broader world that the benefit operates in that also has to be understood. Thank you. Professor Maltz, you wanted to come in. Yeah, just a brief moment. I'm going back to a couple of things that Kirsten and Sharon have said about contracting out. Contracting out has been a disaster. It is really, really damaged the way that assessments are undertaken. If there is any scope to look at that, I think it's really, really important. Thank you. Just to say that the international evidence backs this up, that contracting out to third parties in terms of welfare delivery has been an unmitigated disaster internationally, and you have the opportunity to address that, so that would be one of your priorities, I would have said. Thank you very much. Sorry, Dr Graham, did you want to come in on that particular one? Alison Johnstone? Yeah, just a couple of specific questions on design and delivery and probably the first one to Professor Rumory and then to Professor Marks. On the second point, you spoke earlier about the importance of, well, and the fact that we have this opportunity to administer the system differently. Last week, we heard from Citizens Advice Bureau and then from those working within local job centres and the digital, the insistence on applying digitally seemed to be a major stumbling block for loads of people, and I think that we were all fairly horrified to learn that staff in Citizens Advice Bureau, who have great expertise, are having to spend their time giving people who would like to claim IT lessons in order to access the system. I would suggest that that is a priority, because that has to be fixed. We have the insistence on some people applying digitally, and then we have another insistence that some people have to attend unnecessary assessments in person when digitally or applying in paper or the telephone. I would suggest that that might be a means of communication that we might want to look at, so I would appreciate your views on that, particularly Professor Rumory in the first place. Then I have a question on employment programmes. It goes back to the idea of the system has to follow what the design is intending to achieve. If we are getting the basic theoretical approaches and the basic aims of the system right to start with, we look at the evidence from community care claimants, the fact that they have to go through all sorts of hoops and some of them have to apply digitally and some of them have to apply through social services assessments, etc. They did not understand the system, and the worst, the practitioners working in the system did not understand the system, so they were not in a place to support people through. Your example of citizens' advice is absolutely salient. We can get diverted from what we are trying to achieve by other conflicting priorities, so the digital economy moves towards everything being online, because that scene is being more administratively effective and efficient. That effectively cuts out a lot of people, and it does not necessarily simplify or make the system fairer. It is that fairness, simplicity and accountability that has to run the design of the system. In a sidebar to put a warning flag down about administrative savings, that effectively means job losses in, hopefully, people who are there to administer the complex system. As the system gets simpler and easier, there should be more resource made available, but that is, as a result, probably of job losses to front-line workers. In terms of unintended consequences, that needs to be taken into account. I know that Dr Graham wanted to come in. Professor Spicer. I think that that illustrates the importance of embedding user experience at every stage of the policy design and implementation process. If you had asked potential universal credit claimants about this before, the Government would have known that it was not going to be feasible for them to all be applying online. It illustrates the importance of involving the people who will be affected at all stages to get their perspective as well. I would like to emphasise the importance of flexibility and diversity of methods. One size never fits everyone. Regardless of whether it is going to be digital, whether it is going to be telephone or whether it is going to be face-to-face, there are people for whom it will not work. In Scotland, because of the peculiar geography that we have, there are people who live in extremely isolated locations who cannot practically get to certain centres for certain purposes. We have got to think about this flexibly. Flexibly may well be, for example, that we decide to deal with issues of identification or offering assistance through different routes. It is possible, we know from passports, for teachers, doctors, bankers and local shopkeepers to help with identification. We can do things differently. We do not have to do them the way that they are currently done by the Department for Work and Pensions. To reiterate Dr Wright's point about that, there is a substantial amount of information in the system already, particularly in the health system that we are not using. We are not using doctors effectively because we are wasting money going to third-party assessors who are just replicating what has already been done and probably done more effectively and more user-centredly than the work that is done by outsourcing. Any system design has got to use the expertise of the people in it and the people already in it who are already working with this group of people. To go back to the point about that, it has also got to be centred on the user experience. I am really welcome that the whole process of designing a potential bill is also drawing on users' experience. I think that that is absolutely key. They will tell you what works. They are an extremely efficient way of designing a system. Just to reiterate, as long as you get the theory and the intended aims right and you get the user perspective right and you get that governance level right, you are saving yourself a lot of hassle and you are being able to achieve your aims of independence and all of those things, dignity and respect for all citizens, not just benefit claimants, because that will have repercussions throughout the welfare system. If you can create something that is more accountable, more fair, it will have much more universal buy-in and it will move away from some of the really damaging distancing effects that we have had between this theoretical distance between people who pay into the system and people who pay out of the system and all of that, you would start to address some of those deep cultural issues as well. It is very important for both design and delivery, and it is a general point. There are two large failings that we have seen repeatedly in benefits over the last 40 years. The first has been the use of extensive portmanteau, unified benefits to cover everything. When they go wrong, it is catastrophic for claimants. There is an alternative, which is to go for smaller, better-defined benefits. What matters for benefits is what is called the income package. There is a substantial comparative literature on this, the way that benefits are put together. There are countries that offer lots of little benefits rather than one big benefit, which has been the great advice of the British system. Benefits are what in the technical term they are called fungible. They can be mixed together. Money is money, so money can be added to money. The important thing is that those benefits arrive on the same day, not that they are all administered to the same rules and the same terms. If you look, for example, at the French system, it is full of little benefits that get added together in different ways and which arrive in the same account on the same day. I would like to ask Professor Marks for her views on employability programmes. They are going to be devolved, in my view, with a monstrous, great cut, but we are going to be able to implement them in Scotland. I do not think that they are particularly successful. I realise that some are more successful than others, but your comments regarding those with mental health issues being pushed further away from work rather than towards it are quite pertinent. Could you perhaps just clarify what you think we could do here to make sure that the employability programmes are something that people want to attend? Thankfully, we are not going to have the option to not implement sanctions with regard to them, but how could they work better and who do you think should be delivering them? It should not be the people who are currently delivering them. Again, a contracting out issue. I can give you a slightly convoluted answer to this. I originally started a project looking at the experience of people with mental health problems who had had their benefits changed and were expected to start seeking work. I did a massive search and we found very few people because, as we showed from the evidence earlier, very few people actually ended up in that situation. Those people that we spoke to that had been on employment programmes or employability programmes didn't find them particularly useful. They were quite patronising, assuming that the assumptions made that people had never been in work or had little work experience, offering very basic skills that were not necessarily appropriate to people. I think that there is a lack of acknowledgement that people have been in work and have employability skills, or that the whole system works against employability. Do you think that there is more of a role for the voluntary sector? Absolutely. I spoke to people in one of the current providers of the work programme in terms of management and people who are delivering it. In terms of talking to them, it is not working. When you have such clear financial incentives for people delivering employability programmes, it is not going to work and it doesn't work. That is on the second stage. The first stage is getting the system right. People's employability is being damaged by the system. You have to get people in the right place so that they can go through those programmes. At the moment, those programmes are not going to work because the whole process is getting to that point. Gordon Dynter, do you want to come in at the back of that one? Professor Spiker, you talked about the French system and having a system where there are lots of little benefits added together. I am just wondering how that sits with your earlier comments that we need a simple system for people to access. I think that we have suffered from the delusion in Britain that if we stick together a number of benefits, for example sticking together for sake of argument tax credits, income support, housing benefit, job seekers allowance, employment and support allowance, that it will somehow be simpler. It won't be. What we will actually have are a number of benefits stuck together. We already have common terms across a large number of benefits. What you get by doing this, by putting it together in a package, is ending up with a very complicated package. Supplementary benefit was the same. Unified housing benefit was the same. We are not simplifying by pretending that the different elements of the benefits are the same. The same, I am afraid, is true in relation to something like DLA with care component and mobility component, which is why I suggested earlier that these might sensibly be separated out. The main difference is that, yes, you have a longer form for some people, but actually what we are doing at the moment is requiring everybody to fill in the longer form in case. There are a large number of people for whom it means that they get deeply inappropriate, intrusive personal questions being asked that do not belong to the circumstances that they are dealing with. Pauli McNeill. It has been extremely helpful so far and a lot to take in, but I have certainly helped to shape my mind in terms of what the committee could usefully do. I have two questions. One is a quick question to Kirsten about the question of assessment. I have been of the view for a long time that it should be run by the state, it should be run by the private sector. However, I just wanted to be clear that the targets that you talked about, which are set and the framework for assessment, is that one of the reasons why the assessments are going so badly wrong, so it is not just a question of who runs it, it is a question of what framework is around it too? Absolutely. If you have top-down targets about income, about reduction in spend, which is what has driven a lot of this, not just in benefits but also in community care and in other sectors, then you have frontline practitioners trying to square the circle of A reduction in resources and they are acting as rationing agents to access those resources, but at the same time they are trying to facilitate and help the people that they are actually there to help. I would take issue with it, it has to be the state. I think the voluntary sector would also play quite an important part in this, because we do know that a lot of user expertise is actually located in the voluntary sector. If we look at the example that I know a lot about, which is self-directed support, when you have advocacy agencies that are actually employing disabled people themselves, people who have used self-directed support, who understand the system and can help people, that would form an important part of the people that would be involved in administering these kinds of things. I wouldn't discount the voluntary sector, but what I would discount, but contracting in not in a for-profit basis, contracting to deliver a certain set of advocacy or support functions, etc., that are perhaps better delivered by the third sector than they are by the state, but I would not contract out with targets, particularly around income targets, because that is where it has gone wrong. That is where it has gone really, really badly wrong, even for-profit agencies who have the best will in the world to try and actually achieve the intended outcome for the people that they are assessing cannot operate if they are actually the overriding, what we would call in policy terms the deep normative core is actually about saving money, and this is why it's important to get the aim. That must be also the key proviso then, that you have to remove the target to just expenditure your assessing people. Or at least take it somewhere else in the system, so it's not driving the front line practitioners. Right, want you to give in that particular one? To the earlier question about employment services, the points are connected. So there are several countries that have contracted out employment services, mainly the US, Australia, Denmark, Germany to some extent, and then also the UK ourselves. We've got quite a history of that now, especially since the late 1990s, but if you look at each of those countries and the vast quantities of evidence that come from evaluation of the programmes, there's almost no evidence at all that that process has met the main aims, which are in all of those countries, to save money, to reduce bureaucracy, to have a simpler system, or to provide users with choice. So although there's a lot of political drive towards contracting out services, whoever they're contracted out to, and sometimes, for example, in Germany and Denmark, it could be contracted out to local municipalities, so it could be contracted to local forms of government rather than to private companies. There's very little evidence at all, there's a small amount of evidence in Australia, but very little evidence that has any of those desired effects. So if you're thinking about money and saving money, it could be that stopping contracting out saves the money, reduces bureaucracy and gives users more choice, or enhances the experience for users, but the picture is not that straightforward. So what we also know is that there are some qualitative benefits to contracting out, even in the use of the private sector. So although there are very big problems with output payments, also with transaction costs, the whole costly process of issuing the tender, all of the time and energy that each of those potential contractors puts into delivering those tenders, the time and energy to consider them all, all of those transaction costs are very important, but there is some evidence that private companies can engage with users in a more respectful way than, for example, Job Centre Plus. So the question here is, how will the Scottish Social Security Agency engage with people, and how would people delivering employability services ensure that they can be respectful? So it's one thing, saying we want dignity and respect in the system, I think, even in DWP, even in the private providers, INGIS, for example, and the other work programme providers, they don't set out to treat people disrespectfully, but it happens because of the framework, as you pointed out, the framework that people are operating within. So what does enhance a good experience? I did some research a few years ago, it was a small scale, but we asked people what was important to them, and they said it was about being listened to and being taken seriously. People said they wanted flexible appointments, long appointments, practical help, with things like form filling, the sorts of things that CABs are doing with online help. Now, in my current study, people want help with appeals and mandatory reconsiderations as well, so if there's some scope to include that, that would also enhance take-up, which would also bring more money into Scotland. So that level, that interface is really important, how people are treated and being listened to, and actually I would go beyond dignity and respect and say what we actually need is compassion and empathy to aim higher and then maybe actually achieve dignity and respect. Two things about contracting out. The first is it matters what you contract out. For example, the pension service contracts out to, I believe to Royal Mail, the process of opening the envelopes in the morning. That is not problematic in the way that many of the other arrangements have been. So that matters. The second thing that is deeply problematic is subcontracting, which has been used particularly in relation to employability. There have been a number of government reports on subcontracting, where basically the fundamental problem is that the departments that are responsible lose control at the point where it goes from a main contractor to a subcontractor. Thank you very much for that point, Parliamentary. My second question, and that's really helpful, but it does bring you back to the question that Adam Tomkins raised, which is about the detail of the design. This is my second question. I thought it was interesting that Christian described the powers that we're going to have as really just a lump sum that can be organised any way you want. You're the first person to put it like that, and I thought that was quite interesting. That means that it's quite a huge task if you're going to redesign something and treat it as if, well, there's a lump sum of money, let's decide what kind of benefits, whether they're smaller benefits, and a system that applies this whole question of dignity and so on in accessibility. My question is, where do we start with this? As Adam Tomkins says in his contribution, we have to deliver a service first. The Scottish Government have announced that they're not going to take the powers until 2020—we haven't examined that yet—but anything that you'd like to tell the committee about, where do you start then? You really have to start now, you would think, in terms of planning a new design to incorporate all the elements. Some of the elements that have been talked about, that Alison Johnstone talks about, but the way that people contact the service is important, the advocacy within the service is important—these are all going to be costly measures, ones that I would support, but I imagine that there are costs attached to that, although you can strip away some of that. Do you think that we've got the capacity to do it? Where is the capacity? Any thoughts at all that you have would be really helpful, because it seems to me, from what I've heard this morning, that's where we really need to get into the nitty-gritty of the detail of, if we were going to design a system, where do we start, who's going to help us to do that, how do we start to establish the cost to create something, and when can we think about saying, well, this is the point at which we can launch such a new system? Who wants to come in on that one? I must say that we have another question as well, so it would be quite brief answers, please, Dr Wright. I think that the first place to start would be to get advice from other countries that have had similar systems, so maybe not at such a dramatic juncture point, but there are other countries that are small countries like Scotland, even countries like Slovenia are much smaller, but after the end of socialism set up its own employment services, so those tensions will never disappear, but there are other countries that are doing a really good job of these things. I don't think that it's cheap, so there is the question of whether taxes are raised to help cover it, but a good analysis of the cost and benefits would be important at this stage, because there would be savings as well as extra costs. Thank you. Dr Speicher. Well, two immediate traps. One is the zero sum game. If you start off with a fixed budget, then I'm afraid you cannot make anybody better off in the system without making somebody else worse off. A simple matter of mathematics and almost every improvement will cost more. The second thing is that in terms of administrative capacity, we do have a large experience of moving benefits to new agencies, and the result has been a series of unqualified administrative fiascos. We've seen it, for example, in the transfer of responsibility from the Department for Social Security to local authorities for housing benefit. We saw it again in the transfer of responsibilities to HMRC. We're seeing it now with universal credit and the transfer of certain responsibilities back from HMRC to Job Center Plus, who have never dealt, for example, with housing queries for years, and the expertise has all been lost. We're going to hit the buffers one way or another, and I'm afraid what's necessary to do is to plan a certain amount of overcapacity in the confident expectation that it will not be enough. Thank you. Anyone else who wants to come in with observations? I know with McGuire who wants to come in the back. Oh, sorry, Professor, Gep, did you want to come in the back of that? It's a very quick supplementary, convener. Dr Wright, where else in the world is an example of a country that's taken 15% out of a system that's built up over decades and made it work, and how we can learn from that? I know that it's a tricky position, but there are other countries that have had a big role in deciding their own employability services in Europe and Central and Eastern Europe. I think that the thing that we have to remember is that a lot of the people that are going to use our social security system are still going to be reliant on the DWP, so we can't, although we will do our very best to make it very different from that. It still has to talk to the other system. I know, it's a tricky business, but there is more experience of that than you think, because the UK has traditionally been much more centralised than almost any other country in the world, so most countries are far more familiar with dealing with multiple levels of Government. If you even look to Australia, for example, a lot more is decided at regional level. In Germany, a lot in the Scandinavian countries, there are a lot of things that are decided at municipal level, so a lot of countries have experience of operating national programmes alongside regional programmes. The Netherlands has just devolved a portion of its social security functions to the local level. I couldn't put a percentage on it for you right now, but that's something that the municipalities really have grasped with both hands. Now you've got, for example, the city of Utrecht, which is running a basic income experiment, and other cities trying to do likewise. With the capacity to create discretionary benefits or something, there is the potential for innovation in that respect. It's maybe an example that you could look to. Thank you very much. George Asim, we've got roughly about six minutes. Thank you, convener. I'll try to use up all that time then. No, I won't. Basically, I would like to ask about DLA PIP and the fact that we've had evidence come to the committee, where, in fact, Disability Agenda Scotland and their written evidence said, improvements need to be made, but in a well-managed way, taking time to get things right, so there seems to be a belief out there that it's a case of getting the system correct, you know, making sure that we get it properly. When we're talking about, like my colleague Ben Macpherson said, about the secure transfer of powers, we have to make sure that there's no big red button that we're going to press and everything's going to magically happen and money will appear in our bank accounts overnight, you know, so I think, is it not the case that this is the biggest challenge, but at the same time, it's probably one of the most important things is to make sure that we get the system work, because you've already said how flawed various things have been over the years, because there's been need-up reactions or policy decisions by, but in government, so is it not just the case that it's the biggest challenge, but we need to take the time to get it right? Who wants to go first on that particular one? Dresdenham. Yes, it's the biggest challenge. You can approach it in an incremental way. As you said, there's not a big button that has to go for them, and we suddenly have a massively wonderful, but completely different system, because we know from the experience of policy change that that doesn't work, that just creates an awful lot of instability in the system. You have new claimants. That would be where I would start, is radically change the PIP system to be fairer and more accountable and achieve what it wants to achieve, what you want it to achieve, not the floor theoretical basis that it's been set up on, and then you can transfer old DLA claimants onto the new system, bearing in mind that you don't want people who've got lifetime awards to have to go through reassessment, but you've got a relatively smallish population in which to start piloting that new system and redesigning it so that it's fairer before you transfer people along, and it can be done in an incremental way, but I would also reiterate that looks not just widely in terms of international evidence, but also within evidence that looks at systematic change, because getting the values right and getting the aims right for the systematic change enables all of the components to actually come together. That's what you actually have to spend the next really, really focus on, that because the design will follow, and there are examples internationally that you can draw on of complex systems of multi-level governance, so you could be involving local authorities in some of this. I would hesitate to say that and don't introduce inequities into the system, because you don't want claimants in black manager being entitled to a completely different set of welfare benefits than claimants in sterling, because that's already one of the problems inherent, but you can pilot things and you can test things and you can draw on academic evidence. You've got 16 world-class universities in Scotland that use us to help you design the system. Dr Wright, you wanted to come in on this particular line? I just wanted to make a bit of a facetious comment, and that was that in terms of the employability programmes, there's so much that's been done either very poorly or not done at all because the system's more or less a self-help system now. People find themselves jobs, whether they're attached to Job Center Plus at the time or whether they're attached to a provider of an employment programme, that it's almost impossible for you to go wrong in some respects because whatever you do has got to be better. Did you want to go back in? It's another very practical question in so much as we all know the system itself. Again, the big red button's not there, and the system itself is made up of numerous computer systems that don't talk to one another. Governments are great at dealing with computer systems, as we all know. We also have, in some cases, its manual archive of individuals now. If I was a minister, I would be able to go down and pick up every single bit of that paperwork to make sure that nobody gets lost while we're going out. That's time consuming in itself. That's difficult. What would your advice be on trying to traverse that landscape? Who would like to come in on that one? Precious Baker, did you want to come in on that? It's hard to resist the invitation to come in about information technology. It's been one of the curses of the benefit system as being the idea that somewhere there is an all-singing, all-dancing computer programme which will solve all of our problems and be able to respond to everything and return information. It has never worked. It's never been possible to do it. Rather what we need to do with computers is to use them with what they're good at, which is the routine iteration of functions which can be dealt with automatically. Even now, within universal credit, they're using four computer systems and they're relying a lot on manual work rounds, if truth be known. We have to accept that the only way to deal with this is to make sure that there is some process whereby all the information can be reviewed. That usually means somewhere there has to be a human being. I think that human beings are a very fine way to finish this session as it is about people not about computers, academics or even politicians. It's about the people who, you mentioned the word welfare a lot because it comes up, but I prefer social security because it is something to secure people's lives rather than wanting welfare, which is a word that we're trying not to use in the Scottish Parliament, but we have to do, obviously, with the powers that are coming forward. Hopefully, when the new social security bill comes in, that will be embedded in people's minds. Thank you very much for coming up and coming along today. The evidence session has been really, really good. I think that we've picked up a lot from it. We may call on your services again. I hope that you'll be free to come along. I close this meeting. We have agreed to take the next item in private, so I formally close the meeting and thank you once again for coming along.