 Cymru i'r ddym worthless reform cwmité forenig 2015. Rydyn ni'n siwer i'r cymorth Caeneth Gibson, welir i'r ddwyledig i ddweud o Jordan McAlpine, a'r ddwyledig i Alex Johnston, welir i'r ddwyledig i Annabel Goldie, d через bod ni wedi'n ddydig i ddwyledig! Roedd a'r fformalau hi, yno yn ei gwybod i'r wych o'r ddweud, a'r ddweud i'r ddydd i ddafod yr athnebu i ddychleaeth. Maen nhw'n wedi gwelio gael unig ddargwyfydol yn mynd i'ch nhw i'n mynd i'ch ddaltu a oeddwn yn ôl frofiwn Gwyl Fawr? Mae Llywodraeth anodd, neu ddaeth i ddydd i'ch gael unig o'r ddwyddoedd, yn gyfm discrimination ac mae'n greaddau mewn gweld yn iawn. A yw'r sgwp yn ei bod yn credu ffosu sydd i'ch cerddau cyfathau. Felly, mae'n grannu'r gweld ddoddoddgwr ddafodol a chael ddoddodd ddoddoddoddd The committee has done a substantial amount of high profile work on the bedroom tax and its mitigation through discretionary housing payments. The aim of today's session is to take stock of how the mitigation is working in practice and whether it is having the desired effect on the ground. Today we are using a round table format for our discussions. This approach allows us to hear from a wider range of witnesses in a short space of time. It has worked well for us in the past and I hope that it will work again today. For the benefit of those in the public gallery or viewing online, I should point out that the round table format not only allows members to ask questions directly of those who have kindly given their time to come along this morning, but it encourages an interaction between everyone around the table. If witnesses want to ask questions themselves and make comments or bring points to the committee's attention, I welcome them doing so. We will keep the discussion as fluid as possible in the time that we have available. However, I ask that all contributions from members of the committee and witnesses be made one at a time and through me to ensure that everyone gets an opportunity to have their say. This will also allow our broadcasting and official report staff to record the discussion. We welcome, before the committee this morning, Alan Wiley. He is not with us yet, but we know that he is on his way. He is a previous petitioner to the committee as part of the no-to-bedroom tax campaign. Scott Wilson is again a previous your say witness to the committee who has been helpful to us in the past. Hannah McCulloch, policy and parliamentary officer at the Child Poverty Action Group. Jeremy Hew, policy adviser at the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations. Cliff Tribra, the Benefits Manager City of Edinburgh Council. Annette Finan, head of area services for housing in South Lanarkshire Council. Lorna Campbell, service manager of revenues and benefits at Dumfries and Galloway Council. Thank you very much to you all for giving your time this morning to get the ball rolling to get us into some of the issues. Yesterday, a few members of the committee attended an event in Community Centre in Nidry in Edinburgh. We were looking at a whole range of welfare issues. We were sitting at different tables. In the table that I was sitting at, two of the people who were there mentioned concerns around the way that the DHP was operating. The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations mentioned that same issue in their submission at point 215. Basically, what we were being told was that there appears to be a situation developing where DHP is being diverted away from people who might previously have received it because officials who are administering the process are so focused on getting it to people who have been affected by the bedroom tax. Can I come first of all to Jeremy? Is that your experience? How difficult a problem is this if it has become a problem if you could give us an idea of what that is? If anyone else who has experience of that could let us know from their perspective what the position is. We are getting one or two cases where the concern has been raised, whereas the SFHA welcomes and appreciates the intervention of the Scottish Government and local authorities in fully mitigating DHP. There are other areas of DHP that give rise for concern. To give some background, the DWP allocates a contribution towards discretionary housing payments and it does it under four headings. One is the traditional core issues for which DHP was always there for. One was for local housing allowance, one was for the benefit cap and one was for bedroom tax removal of the spare room subsidy. It maintained its notion of allocation for the spare room subsidy at £60 million, but it cut considerably the allocations in the other areas. Overall, what has been the 2014-15 budget of about £165 million was reduced nationally to £125 million. In addition to that, it recalculated the way that some of that allocation was distributed. A couple of authorities in Scotland did slightly better, but some authorities did worse and, most notably worse, was Glasgow that was hit by over £1 million reduction in the DWP contribution. The concern is obviously that the desire is to try and fully mitigate the bedroom tax, but those other areas that had traditionally been supported by DWP, particularly private sector tenants, to do with the local housing allowance, and the core issues may be losing out. The concern is that, as I said in our submission in the feedback that we got from the associations when we made inquiries, they said that there had been a couple of cases where the claimants who had been previously awarded a DHP had now either had their application for award turned down or reduced. Is there anyone else who has any experience of this? In terms of the claims and awards that were made at South Lanarkshire Council last year, we made over 5,000 awards of DHP for the underoccupant settlement, but we did also manage to make over 1,600 awards for other categories. There is a divide between the two elements that are having to be made and judged by benefit agencies and benefit departments within the councils, but there are still awards being made to that other group. In South Lanarkshire, we have streamlined the process in terms of DHP awards for underoccupancy, but we are still having to look at the criteria in terms of any other award, whether it be for benefit cap or other forms of hardship. There is almost a test in terms of criteria that we are having to apply, but we have managed to still make awards for the other categories this year. However, our DWP allowance in terms of DHP has gone down by over £100,000 at 16 per cent, and we will have to see how far that goes. Just a brief question for Mr Hewer, convener. I wonder if Mr Hewer can maybe give us an indication of where those housing associations that have experienced difficulty actually are, because it may be a difficulty in certain parts of the country and not in others, and I think it would be useful for us to know that. If my memory says me well, I think it was housing associations in the north. I cannot remember exactly, but I think it was either Aberdeen or Aberdeenshire. I think it would be useful for us, convener, if we wrote to local authorities to find out how that element is split, because I think it's useful here and from Ms Finan, but it would be much better if we heard from every authority to see what was happening in this regard. Absolutely. Without identifying anyone, because one of the commitments that we gave to people who attended yesterday was that they would remain anonymous, but I think it's safe to say that, given that we were based in the event at Edinburgh, we were talking about that. The issue is relating to Edinburgh, so I think it may be fair to come to Cliff to ask if he's got a take on this. I kind of echo what Annette is saying in South Lanarkshire. Certainly in 2014-15 we have seen no degradation in terms of numbers of awards for core DHP. In fact, if anything, it was up slightly on previous years. However, for 15-16, like South Lanarkshire, we have a cup of 165,000 around that core DHP. Our approach to it will be similar to Annette's and see how it goes. We are motoring through all the under-occupancy and the benefit cap awards at the moment. After that, we will probably be saying what we have left and we might have to do some policy tailoring depending on what we have left. However, as I say, 14-15, no, I didn't see any degradation in Edinburgh. It was just a quick question, because my understanding is that the bedroom tax has been completely mitigated and the payment is there. Is it people's understanding that the pressures and discretionary housing payments would have been there, regardless of the cuts from DWP? I'm afraid that it's a bit more complex, because although the DWP allocates a certain amount of discretion under various headings, there's no hard and fast rule that you've got to rigidly follow those headings at all. Obviously, one of the headings is the benefit cap, and in Scotland that isn't such a big issue as it is within the M25 circle, where well over half of all benefit cap cases are. I think that the real concern was the recalculation of the core element of discretionary housing payments. They've changed it to a fairly basic pro-rata per head basis. That's why authorities such as Glasgow lost out very, very badly. Is that going to happen anyway, whether the bedroom tax element of that has been mitigated or not by the Scottish Government? I couldn't say for certain. One of the arguments is that the Westminster Government was going to reduce its overall allocation for DHPs anyway. It was seen to be a transitional arrangement. Now, because of some of the cases that came up before the higher courts, where there was an argument that the bedroom tax was an infringement of human rights, a lot of the courts decisions paraphrasing was that it may have been discriminatory, but there was discretionary housing payments to mitigate for that. Therefore, if you like, the appellants lost and the Government won, but the quid pro quo of that was that the Government would have to maintain a higher allocation of DHPs than it originally perhaps wanted to in order to avoid the litigation side of it. Given the other welfare cuts that have come in the demand for DHPs, we've seen an increase, similar to some other colleagues from other local authorities. We have fully mitigated bedroom tax, and 97 per cent over 3 per cent would try to contact. It's a lack of contact. We've spent DHPs on another 1,000 tenants outwith the bedroom tax, but the demand is higher there. From Dumfries and Galloway, we had an uplift because of the rural element. We had a generous element of DHPs, but we've had sufficient DHPs to meet the demand for 2014 and 2013 going forward. I think that one of our two colleagues with the demand is still as high and likely to become higher with universal credit being implemented from April this year. The expectation for DHPs is going to remain high on local authorities and our ability to meet that with the reduced funds is going to come under pressure. One of the other issues that was raised yesterday, and again some of the submissions that we've already had from witnesses this morning, alluded to the fact that the cost of having taken through an application process can be problematic and is drawing resources away from other budgets. Could we get a sense of how that's happening and why it's happening? We certainly noted in the submission the impact that the processing of DHPs and the enhanced level of engagement and contact we're trying to make with our tenants affected has had on our budgets. The commitment to fully mitigate the bedroom tax through the additional funds from the Scottish Government certainly helped to streamline our processes. There's no doubt about that. We changed our policy, we changed our processes in how we administer DHPs, but we still have to process that massive increase in DHP claims as well as trying to contact almost 5,000 people who are affected. Again, we're being very proactive in terms of how we contact our tenants affected and we're working really closely with our housing association partners as well. We have brought on a team known as a benefits of changing team locally with 10 officers who have now been in post for almost a year and a half to two years. We increased our staff in processing DHPs by additional three staff. We've also provided additional staff to local housing officers in terms of trying to manage the rent arrears, which initially increased particularly. There has been a real burden placed on local authorities in trying to not only administer and process, but contact tenants and provide that very necessary help and support in terms of whether it's helped with welfare reform or other forms of hardship, so there is a pressure on budgets at a time when they're being cut. We obviously have some pressures, but we have the mitigation from the Scottish Government, which I think we're all grateful for. Having been running the doors quite a bit of late, I think that some families certainly would not have been able to cope without that. We're about to face a budget in July where a Government has said that it's looking for £12 billion worth of further welfare cuts. What would happen to you guys and to the folks out there if Westminster withdrew its payments towards DHP? What would the cost be if it was decided that their payment towards DHP was one of the cuts that took place in the £12 billion that we're going to see withdrawn? I think that one of the biggest impacts would be on people's ability to make that shortfall. The DHP is allowing that shortfall in housing benefit to be made up. If that finance isn't available, the burden will either fall back on the local authority to try and increase the budget and or have an increased bad debt provision in terms of potential rent arrears and people's inability to do that. Would it also have a detriment in terms of your council being able to invest in the housing stock and maybe build even more council houses? I think that we've articulated in our submission that the potential impact on council budgets will therefore impact on service provision, whether that be staffing, whether it be our ability to invest in repair or stock, or to have our capital programme, which our finance via our housing account in terms of new build and other major investments to meet the new housing standards in terms of each etc. That will have an impact if we are seeing further pressures placed on to councils, particularly the housing department's budget. It would be fair to say that if the UK Government chose to take that route, it wouldn't only have an effect on those folks who are currently in receipt of DHPs for various reasons. It would have an effect on everyone who is reliant on the services that the council provides. To add, we have articulated in our submission that we no doubt think that there would be an impact on council services. I wonder if Mr Heure could respond from a housing association. What is your point of view, Camila? Obviously, I think it would have a very detrimental impact on our tenants and I think the real concern, and I think it was highlighted in some of the submissions that were given to the committee prior to this meeting, is bedroom tax mitigation of 3 DHPs. It's a great expedient and it's done a lot, but there are a group of folk who, because they're not entitled to housing benefits, are not entitled to DHPs. One of the suggested cuts that the Westminster Government is thinking of is removing the entitlement to housing benefit to young people under the age of 25. Obviously, if they're not entitled to housing benefit, technically they wouldn't be entitled to discretionary housing payments, so obviously the impact on them would be even more acute. I wonder if Mr Drive could respond for Edinburgh too. I think it depends on the scale of the cut to the DHP pop. If I turn the clock back two years before we had the mitigation fundings and the top-ups back to, say, around 1 April 2013, I was sitting in Edinburgh with a pop from the DHP of around £1.3 million, £1.4 million, and our policy reflected that ability to spend. In other words, the council wasn't going to top up that pop, so that's all we had. Our policy included looking at luxuries. A DHP would have been awarded for six months through an income and expenditure statement and perhaps at the end of that six months under review, if certain standards of living hadn't changed within the income and expenditure statement, we may not have awarded any further DHP because we didn't have any further funds to award. That luxuries paragraph still says in our policy today, so if funds were cut back to a large extent, we may have to fall back to that policy in the first instance. As a way of saying, that's all the money that we have, therefore, if you don't reduce some of the luxuries, potentially, I'm not using this as a widespread thing, just saying this is where we were two years ago. That would be our first port of call. If it was bigger than that and the pop got absolutely decimated, then the council would have to have a hard think, does it have any funds at all, or what other services would suffer, infrastructure, staffing, any other services around filling that hole in DHP? Just to note really that even without further additional welfare cuts, welfare cuts are already happening in terms of changing the way family benefits are rated from year to year will have a cumulative effect, even though these aren't housing specific benefits, it will affect family budgets and, in turn, ability to cover housing costs, so it's not just additional cuts or changes to LHA or changes to non-dependent deductions, for instance. Housing really stood reforms. It's general fall in the value of benefits will affect low-income families and lead to more pressure on DHPs as people can't cover their housing costs. To follow up on the point that my colleague Kevin has said and some of the points that local authorities have said, but it will probably tie into what Hannah is going with in her submission as well. It was on this issue about the changes to support for people under 25. I know in my constituency a lot of people I know that are under 25 that are struggling to have young families as well, and that's that whole impact. Recently, I had a meeting with the Executive Director of Social Work in South Lanarkshire who said to me that there was a great worry about the consequential impact on other services, such as child protection, the child poverty strategy that they've got, housing allocation, the ability to pay your rent and all of that. I just wondered whether any of the local authorities had tentatively done any modelling on that in the early days and what that modelling was telling them. I know that the child poverty action group had done some work on that and whether they could enlighten us on what we would expect and then the consequential impact on any housing benefit payment or any universal credit or any benefit payments that goes to that family. If not, there are any specific modelling where a number simplifies. Obviously, we're aware of our housing benefit caseload at the moment and who in it be easy to extract that. You're obviously correct and we've had conversations with our social work services department who are already facing increased pressures with families who are feeling the impacts of the welfare cuts just now. We've also spoken to our RSLs as a stock transfer authority. We don't have our own housing stock, so our main RSL who is our stock transfer authority has already expressed concerns to us that they went to Rears for last year despite the increased DHP awards they had overall had gone up to £300,000 and that they are particularly vulnerable to changes in their debt. They are significantly concerned about their future if there is further impacts on welfare cuts. I would say that obviously if there was any reduction and there was a consequent increase in the Rears, it would create specific challenges for housing associations because if you like, the borrowing that they have acquired in order to invest in their housing and to build housing is based on assumptions of rental income streams. If they can't match those assumptions, the lenders will come back and say, well, sorry, I think we're going to have to renegotiate our covenant, which probably means an increased cost and that increased cost would obviously be reflected in the increased rents throughout the whole stock to not only those who are dependent on the housing benefit or the universal credit, but anyone who, any tenant of the association, would be adversely affected. It's moving on to that point, is that okay? We'll come back to something, Mr... Can you wait for the screen if I wanted to give in on something on that point first? From Jeremy, it was just through, I know, that it said that Lanarkshire near submission talked about, you know, they said, and I quote, the complex arrangements involved in identifying and managing rent arrears for households affected the under occupancy rules had also adversely impacted on rent arrears more generally. And I was just wondering if Jeremy, and indeed, you know, Annette could comment a wee bit more about that, about the general effect on rent arrears as we were just to touch on that issue. Certainly, initially, almost two years ago, the impact on rent arrears was significant. We saw an immediate rise in rent arrears of households affected by the welfare reform changes that were brought in. We have been able to reverse some of that trend. I think when I gave evidence in November 2013, over 70 per cent of our tenants who were affected by the bedroom tax had some form of arrear. That has significantly reduced now to just over 30 per cent. And those tenants who have arrears that are solely relating to the reduction in their housing benefit due to the bedroom tax is now at 7 per cent. We have seen a significant reduction in arrears that relate to that change. However, we have still experienced increased arrears overall as households are affected by other changes to their income, to their benefits and our experience in hardship. It remains a challenge, although probably only through the increased funding for DHP have we been able to reverse that significant trend in arrears. Again, that has been by putting the resources in to try and engage with the tenants affected to ensure that they are applying in our simplified way for DHP and that we are getting that into people's accounts. We are still awaiting the Scottish Housing Regulator data for the financial year just gone, but certainly there was an increase in rent arrears, a overall increase in rent arrears between 12.13 and 13.14, if you like, the year before the introduction of the bedroom tax. The year after, I think, it went up from 3.3 per cent overall to 4.3 per cent overall. The impression that we get from associations is that they have coped with the arrears situation, and certainly when the full mitigation came in in the financial year just gone, I think there was a collective sigh of relief. I think that it felt much more positive, but what perhaps we haven't really assessed is the increased resources that have gone in from landlords in rent connection in terms of other mitigation work. A number of associations have been very, very lucky to get money from the Making Advice work project that was administered by the Scottish Legal Aid Board, so in terms of improving the quality of advice and accessibility to advice that tenants could have and to help them through to make the best of the resources that they have has had a positive impact. However, you are always wondering, at the back of your mind, how long can that survive, how long can that last, that people are being stretched. If they have got into debt, they may have borrowed from friends and family, and those resources may no longer be there. If you like, you have reached the limit, and the real worry is that it is all going to come crashing down on a personal level. You wanted to come in on a point. Yes, it was around allocations. Christina just briefly touched on allocations. Well, since we already discussed them, we are bringing something different in from Claire, if you want to carry on with that point then. It was really just to ask what is happening in regards to allocations, because we have had evidence that housing providers are still reluctant to allocate properties where households are then going to be under occupying. I just wondered if there was any evidence around that from the local authorities or from SFHA, because we have had evidence, for example, from women's aid, that women are still being held longer in refuges because there are no one-bedroom properties to offer them. It is the shortage of one-bedroom properties that is causing a real problem. It would seem that some local authorities are using discretionary housing benefit to allow women to get two-bedroom properties and use the DHP, but that is not consistent across all local authorities. It was really just to get some feedback on that, Jeremy. We have had anecdotal evidence back that, if you like, the turnover of properties is not necessarily because the housing association has been saying, no, we don't want to let this do you because you may be liable for the bedroom tax. It is more the tenant of the applicant saying, I would prefer not to have such a larger property in case I am hit with a bedroom tax in the future, so there has been, if you like, a slowing down of throughput and some associations have reported that they have found it more difficult. It has taken a bit more time to allocate and let their larger properties. Are there void figures that have gone up? I am not sure whether they are going up, but the turnover time is lengthening on those larger properties. There is an overall shortfall in housing, but people are being much more thoughtful about the commitments that they have taken. Is that the same for local authorities? Certainly, in South Lanarkshire, we have not made any change to our allocation policy in terms of the occupancy standard that applicants can apply for, and it is their choice. Single people and couples can apply for and wait for a one- or a two-bedroom property, and we have not changed that due to the bedroom tax. We see applicants choosing to wait for the property size that best matches their household in terms of what benefit they will qualify for. I could not say how many, but there is a trend in that happening. We have not seen any detrimental effect on our void management processes on how long it takes to allocate a property, but what we have seen is real pressure for the smaller properties that we do have. We experienced an 18 per cent drop in turnover generally in the last 12 months, and when only 25 per cent of our stock is one-bedroom anyway, that makes a big cut. That particular size of house to meet those who are on our waiting list. Couples and single people form over 60 per cent of those on our housing list anyway, so it is a real pressure for smaller properties. However, we have not changed our policy, and couples and single people can still access a one- or a two-bedroom property. Our four main RSLs have a common allocations policy, and it has been adapted to reflect size and need for the family. The RSLs are still reporting that they will allocate a property larger than that. That is what the tenant is looking for, and we are covering it with EHP, if there is a shortfall. However, a main RSL is reporting back to us that they have a build-up of large three-bedroom properties, especially in the remote rural areas that they are finding very difficult to let as people are weary of taking properties larger because of the potential of being hit with a bedroom tax on their down the line. It is beginning to cause a problem in some other areas. It might be prudent to include that in the letter that we are going to write to all the authorities. That is your point, Margaret. The effect is on our allocations. In Edinburgh, around the things that are going on to try and make people move to mainly smaller properties, there is a council tenant incentive scheme package there to try and incentivise people down, but also conversely it can work up the way that is required. There is a housing exchange policy there that includes council or housing associations. The housing layout plans are being amended in the build programme going forward to include more one-bedroom properties, but also with the flexibility of making them convertible to two-bedroom if required now. I am guessing that that is not very much different from what a lot of the other local authorities are doing to try and gain more flexibility in the whole piece. You just saw a particular point in the next submission that you touched on, something very similar. I am just wondering what numbers are we talking about. South Lanarkshire, for example, has talked about very similar things such as a latent initiative to help tenants move to smaller properties, promotion of online mutual exchange service and inclusion of one-bedroom properties in the new house building programme. What scale are we talking about and what has been the impact relative to the number of households affected by the bedroom tax in each of your local authorities? We referenced in our submission that we introduced a latent initiative to help to support anyone who was wishing to move to a smaller property. Whether it be from a three-bedroom or two-bedroom or one-bedroom, it does not matter. We have afforded that priority to applicants who apply. At the end of December last year, we only had 50 applicants on our priority list wishing to move to a smaller property for this reason. Of those offered properties, smaller properties last year, only nine accepted an offer to a smaller property. Although we have almost 5,000 people affected, there is a very small number chosen to move, probably because costs have been met through DHP. Of those who are on the list as a safeguard, there is a small number chosen to make that move at a time when they can. DHP is certainly helping households to remain in their home and is not forcing them to move. However, we have that in place, if anyone does want to. Cliff, is that experience in Edinburgh as well? I do not have any exact numbers with me, but given my submission, I said that our spend on the under-occupancy element had gone up in 14-15. Clearly, there is not a significant downshift that is identifiable from those schemes, probably as Annette said, because the costs are being met. Was there anything different before the costs were being fully met? Was there more interest before there was full mitigation in terms of moving, or was it similar that many people just did not want to move? Clearly, the majority of cases are in the council stock. I could not honestly comment back to the previous. Clare, do you want to introduce a new subject? It was just a comment on something that Mr Driver has said earlier, and I suppose that it is a language that can jump out and concern me quite a bit. My eight years as an elected representative, the idea of luxury for people that are repealing discretionary housing payments is that they live far away from luxury, as I could. I just wondered if we could get in records examples of some of the things that are subjectively being looked at for families. I think that what I tried to say was that we are not at that point at the moment, but we might have to be at that point in the future if DHP allocations were cut either by 50 per cent or 100 per cent. That is what we would have to look at if the council could not find the money to top up. There basically was no money left, that is what we would have to do. We have not had to do that until now. Could I have some examples of folk? Would that be things like if somebody had to pay, for instance? I am just trying to get to the bottom of what we would be… As I said, it is an income and expenditure statement that we would be looking at. Perhaps, as an example, you might be looking at the television provision around Sky or something like that, or any aspect of an income and expenditure statement, lifestyle statements. I just thought that it was worth highlighting in our evidence. It is a benefit cap case where a family with four children had been moved to temporary accommodation because they were fleeing domestic violence. They had hit the benefit cap, and their housing benefit had been reduced substantially. Looking at their application for discretionary housing payment, they were given a word for three months, but they were told that it was unlikely to be extended because their spending on electricity was larger than average, but bearing in mind that it was a family with four children, and that one of the children was being counseled as a result of the experience of fleeing violence in that as well was seen as excessive. That is a one-off case, but there are some worrying implications of that. Can I just ask for Hannah to clarify there? Somebody being counseled because they have seen domestic violence and been part of a situation that has involved domestic violence. Where does that come into play? Surely that is a necessity. Were they paying for that counselling because they could not get it from the local authority or others? I just do not understand that. It is absolutely ridiculous if that counselling was seen as a luxury in any way, shape or form. I can send—I only have a small note of the case that is in the written submission, but I can look into that and get further details. As far as I remember, it was that she was paying privately for counselling for her child. That was certainly being taken into account, although as I said, the DHP was awarded for three months. I can send further details. Hannah nodded to the fact that their submission gave us some cases that we could look at. We actually have a life case with us, Scott Wilson, who has been through the process. Do you want to give us your experience and tell us how you feel about the process? My name is Scott Wilson. I gave evidence to the welfare reform committee back in September 2013 in relation to the bedroom tax. I was diagnosed with younger onset Parsons disease eight years ago. As most of you know, it is a degenerative disease, so I am never going to get better, but I am only going to get worse. My very uncomfortable, sometimes painful symptoms are aggravated by stress and anxiety, etc. If I have got to worry about trying to pay £40.76 every four weeks from my benefits just now, I take to think how it would be health-wise it would affect me. Since I last gave evidence, I contacted South Latchers Council regarding help with DHP, and I have nothing but praised for them in the way their staff handled my queries of the DHP. They dealt with it all, and I was awarded the £10.19 per week of DHP. I would like to see the Government take notice of the needy, poor and disabled people that this medieval-style tax is enforced on and see it abolished before the Scottish Government can no longer afford to subsidise it and put people into debt through no fault of their own. A very strong comment, and it certainly reflects what we heard yesterday when we were taking evidence at Nidry. I am just wondering, one of the people who spoke to us yesterday is someone else who had gone through the process, and what they were concerned about was that although again they had nothing but praised for the local authority that had supported them, they were still in arrears and having to work with the local authority to try and resolve it. Is that your experience, if you are aware of other people that you have spoken to who might be in that subject, then opening it up to others? How wide a problem is residual arrears from the first year when the mitigation was in place? Personally, I think that there will be a lot of people who have had to deal with arrears regarding it until they got DHP sorted out, because my experience to start off with, I did not really know much about DHP until I came here and gave evidence, so it was not really out there for the public knowledge, it was more or less in the background, if you did not ask for it, you did not get it, you did not get the help for it. Do you still deal with arrears? Is that still an on-going problem, and how are you dealing with it? Since the funding for DHP was increased last year and again for this year, we have fully mitigated the bedroom tax through DHP for all of our tenants who have engaged with us, so I think we reflected 99% of it has been mitigated. For the very small number who have not got a DHP, it is either because they are a relatively new applicant and we are trying to process applications as quickly as we can, we contact people affected within five working days is what we are aiming to do, or it is tenants who through multiple contacts, despite then we still haven't engaged with us. Very small numbers within South Lanarkshire have an arrear now that relates to the bedroom tax. We have households who have a small arrear that relates to the bedroom tax or none but have other arrears and we are managing them sensitively through our rent arrears processes. In terms of arrears that might have accrued prior to the increased funding, our local authority has effectively backdated DHP to cover any shortfall through the bedroom tax and mitigated fully any shortfall for those who have engaged with us. Is that being possible for a rather local authority or are there still sizeable numbers out there or is it a small number that just needs to be addressed? We are at about 97%. There are probably around 150 people there that have just not engaged, albeit we have tried all the different mediums of engagement, whether it be email, phones, visiting team and continue to try and call. We even engaged with the Lothian Anti-Bedroom Tax Federation. We had them in and spoke to them and encouraged them to make contact because we have said about widening the eligibility and speed of award. We have very much moved to an intent to apply. If somebody contacts and says that they would like to apply for DHP for under occupancy, that is all they have to do. We need at least that to be able to award. It is simply that one sentence. We put that message out quite often in my experience of local authorities getting in touch. Not everybody will respond because they might think that it is about rent arrears. By trying to engage a third party, third sector, we seem to get our percentage up a bit. Anecdotally, I have heard people saying that as well, but the fact that you are the landlord, people do not like to deal with their landlord when they are talking about arrears to their landlord. The situation has been kept well under control through strenuous efforts at engagement and ensuring that there is maximum take-up and maximisation. Some of the associations have reported that they were fortunate enough to get full mitigation in the previous financial year before the full mitigation. There were resources available with some local authorities, and some were not so lucky. As time goes on, the distinction between what were bedroom tax arrears and what were not other arrears has become blurred. It depends on how sophisticated the individual housing associations are. The housing management system is, because they were not originally designed to distinguish between one kind of arrear and another. I heard people mentioning it again yesterday, and I think that some of the submissions that we had this morning suggested that a non-application system would be more effective and would reduce some of the bureaucracy. Is there something about DHP that prevents there being a non-application system that you have to get through this bureaucracy and miss out on 150 or so people in order to use DHP? Is there another way that you can use DHP that is not requiring of an application? I have heard some associations say that if they apply for the DHP, the consideration, but technically it has to be the claimant that has to apply for it. There are some claimants who, even if told there is free money, are very reluctant to engage for one reason or other, whether it is fear, whether it is actually a principle stand against the actual idea of the bedroom tax in the first place or whatever, that they have not wanted to engage with the association. That is something that I have certainly brought up with the minister before, because it has been brought to me by local authorities who have said that they would prefer to have a system where you all know who is affected by the bedroom tax. There is 100 per cent knowledge of those who are impacted, but even at 99 per cent or 97 per cent of distribution of the funds to those who have applied, that still means that there are people missing out. Although you know who those people are, you have to get them to apply. We seriously need to look at a way of having a non-application system, so that if someone is identified as falling foul of the under occupancy rule, they receive the support, because the finances have been put there to cover that individual, but they are not receiving the money. It seems to be a bureaucratic obstacle that needs to be addressed. Do you have any views on how that can be done? Ideally, if discretionary housing payments were always seen as an expedient, it was if you like making the best of a bad job. Ideally, you would not have a system in that you didn't have the business of the removal of the sparing subsidy, or you would have a system where you could intervene. In fact, certainly with the roll-out of universal credit, it's going to be much, much more complicated, because at least at the moment, if you like, those who are calculating the housing benefit and those who are calculating the DHPs are one and the same organisation, and therefore it's relatively seamless. When we get universal credit in, obviously the challenge, certainly for housing associations, will be that they will have to deal with both the DWP in terms of, if you like, the core housing costs, and apply to the local authority for the discretionary housing payment, and apply to the tenant for any contribution that they have to make in their own right, which is going to be a crazy system, particularly in terms of, actually, reconciling it, because if local authorities may be, if I'm right, may be working on a fortnightly or four-weekly basis, the DWP will be working on a calendar monthly basis, and actually making sure that you've got, if you like, that all the rent is being paid and it's being reconciled, will be quite a headache. Also, the manual systems that are coming in with universal credit, and the infrastructure that the DWP are having to use gives very grave cause for concern. I mean, I don't know if you're able to see the report of the Public Accounts Committee that came out fairly recently, but if I may quote from it, it noted that it said, the department has used 100 per cent manual checking of live service payments at various points in the past, and it had to reintroduce 100 per cent checks in June 2014 because of problems created by a software update. The department told us that if it had to carry out full manual checking on every cases, live service expands across the country, the programme would be almost unaffordable. Now, to have 100 per cent live checking of that time was probably about 12,000 cases was a task. Now they're boasting that they've got well over 50,000 coming up to 60,000 cases, and probably if the national expansion completes April next year, I suppose nationally there may be a couple of hundred thousand people as single claimants on universal credit. If they've got to manually check all those, I really don't know what is going to happen, and obviously the knock-on effect in terms of housing costs, benefit delays and things like that is going to cause huge problems for local authorities, for landlords and indeed for the private rented sector. Alex Nantristina and I... Kevin, if there are people who haven't got the chance, I'll come back to you. Alex Nantristina and I... On the issue of non-engagement, there is, we're aware, a genuine problem with non-engagement with the benefits system across the board. Particular people will not engage and get into quite seriously areas of hardship as a result. Is the issue of non-engagement in relation to the under occupancy charge greater or is it simply the same proportion of non-engagement that we experience across the benefit system? I wouldn't have information on whether it's the same or different, but I would imagine it's on a similar scale. I think if you like non-engagement, is it a general issue rather than a DHP specific issue? Thank you very much, convener. To pick up a point that Jeremy made, Jeremy hit the nail on the head and Mr Wilson hammered at home. As much as we appreciate the mitigation that's put into place, the actual system doesn't work, it doesn't support people in need. Although you've had a great experience at South Lanarkshire Council, which I can say the recent cases I've had worked very closely with the Executive Director, they've worked very, very well. The need to abolish is much, much more pertinent than the need to mitigate and work with an already damaged and non-functioning system. The Smith Commission has offered us some way out for that. The Devolution and Further Powers Committee last week published a report that suggested that that didn't go far enough and it wasn't beholding to the spirit. My question is how would the professionals in the field who are doing the great work to support people like Mr Wilson, what kind of system would you like to see? Does Smith go far enough? What would you like to see in this Scotland bill that's coming forward in a few weeks time to address all of these issues? We agree that the system doesn't work. We either replace the system with something that works or try and fix the system that we've got now. We've been tinkering it, fixing it for years with all sorts of mitigation schemes that are very, very welcome, as I said, but don't address the underlying problem here of helping people in need. For my perspective, working at the professional end of it, DHP was always intended, and the legislation was written, that it was a temporary measure to sort a temporary problem. It was never intended as a long-term solution, so using it as a solution to mitigate the impacts of bedroom tax, it just means it's administration and it's not just the application, it's the changes and the maintenance of that. I probably agree to some degree that if to mitigate it, it's get rid of it at legislation level and then we don't need this administration on top of it and trying to get in contact with tenants or trying to get people to participate or contact local authorities, you would just remove that altogether if that was the desired outcome. I'm interested in the letter that the chief executive of the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations received from Neil Cooley, the director general of universal credit, who this committee is aware of. In his letter, he says that we believe that the system is safe and secure. Do our witnesses today believe that that system is safe and secure, as you'd asked Mr Hewer first since the letter was addressed to the Federation? I think our reaction to reading that letter was, I write. No, I don't think it's safe and secure. I think there are serious doubts, certainly about the system, if you like, the dual approach that the DWP are taking to the introduction of universal credit with a digital system that is being trialled at the moment in Sutton, which I think is going to be expanded to Croydon very shortly, has yet to be proven. The existing system certainly seems to be flaky and ever so dependent on manual recalculations, so safe and secure. For bearing in mind that they're just doing the most straightforward cases at the moment that they think they can do, you might get away with it, but certainly when you're having more complex cases come through, when you're starting to introduce it for couples and for families, I think you're going to have problems. I mean, I think in some ways there may have been some benefits. I mean, there is some indication that certainly perhaps those in work who are on universal credit, who are eligible for universal credit, it may be beneficial to them compared to the existing legacy systems. But I can't honestly put my hand on that. From what I have seen and what I have read, I do not think it's a robust and resilient system. So, this doesn't really directly to universal credit, but I just had one out on the clock. One of the things that came up when I was looking to submit this evidence was that there seems to be a group of people for whom the impacts of the bedroom tax is not being mitigated at all. And those are people who, once the bedroom tax is applied to their eligible rent, their rent for the purpose of the housing benefit calculation is reduced and is therefore seen as being affordable, they're therefore not eligible for housing benefit as a result of that being applied and as a result of not being eligible for housing benefit are not eligible to apply for discretionary housing payments. And we have a few cases like these, and it's not miniscule amounts of money. It can be £10 or £15 a week that people are having to cover out of their own pocket. And as I say, we only have one or two cases, but I was just keen to draw it to the committee's attention and find out from others whether that's a significant problem. Is there any evidence or local authority colleagues aware of that? We are certainly in our area, but it's not a significant problem, or it's certainly brought to my attention, I'm aware of at least two or three cases in our local area, but that has been an impact, but it's not huge as far as in the way. Margaret, you wanted to come in with a point? Yes, it was around that issue, and Christina brought up the issue around the devolved powers, because in CPAC's submission they say that draft clause nine currently states that the power can only be used for providing financial assistance to individuals who are entitled to housing benefit or any other reserve benefit people in respect of a liability to make money. However, unless that clause is changed, the Scottish Government will be unable to fully mitigate the impact of bedroom tax until the roll-out of universal credit is complete. That could take up to four years, which is 2019. The other issue is how long the actual devolved powers will take, that whole process, so no one really knows that. There is a real concern there, and as Hannah has rightly pointed out, we need to be able to help those people who now find themselves in the position where they don't qualify for housing benefit because it has been lowered. We need to be able to do something about that, but currently the devolved powers are mentioned, but they are not actually going to be able to implement them because of the other issues around universal credit. You have a point on that. You have had a look at this type of issue that allows for benefit impact. Do you want to give us a view from your groups? First of all, from the view of medication, from the tenants point of view, by and large it worked, the faster the tenants are getting the help that they need. I think that medication is only a short-term stop cap rather than a long-term solution. We may be looking at a situation in which housing benefit is getting devolved to this Parliament, but if that is the case, I would argue that it is not who controls housing benefit that really matters. It is what we do with it. I think that housing benefit was introduced in 1982 primarily for two reasons, because there were variations in rent in the Fowler houses. I needed to bring rent relief into the welfare state, and we had the logical decision that it was brought under control to partner working pensions. That was like 30 years ago, and I would argue that the housing benefit experiment has failed. It is not meeting the objectives that it should have been. I would like to see, according to the Smith report, it looks like housing benefit is going to be devolved, and I support that transfer policy. I do not think that there is much merit in the argument that it is devolved under the control of the Scottish welfare minister. I think that it does make more sense for it to be seen not as a benefit per se, but as a state subsidy on the demand side of the housing system to ensure fairness, and instead of being under the control of the Department of Work and Pension, we are being under the control of the housing minister. I think that this would have too many effects. It would transform how we feed housing benefit. It would no longer be seen as a subsidy for households on the incomes. It would be seen as a political and economic tool to ensure fairness in our housing system. It would also make good practice in government sense, because 95 per cent of the subsidies in housing is on demand side, yet the housing minister has no control over that. I think that we need to look at maybe a little bit long term, just find out a long term solution to the bed and tax, and I think that that would be an option for us to change how we feed and how we work with housing benefit when it comes up here. That is an interesting contribution. We are starting to take up against the clock, but if people want to comment on the wider aspect that Mr Wiley has spoken about, or to respond to any of the points that colleagues made over the past two or three months, we have three or four MSPs raising points, so if anybody wants to come back on any of those. The point that has been made in terms of the timescale until there is a longer term solution, whatever that may be, to some of the challenges that we are seeing in our communities and our tenants are facing in terms of meeting housing costs, whether it be through the development of powers and changes to our housing benefit system or a welfare reform system. I think that we need some shorter term assurities around the mitigation being in place so that for next year we can be planning and giving some certainty and some assurity to our tenants who are obviously concerned about what that might do to them in terms of the shortfall for next year, but also look at whether we can lessen the burden that has been placed on local authorities in terms of the administration process. We can make the system no simpler than we already have. We feel that we have regulations that we are having to work to in terms of yes, someone must qualify for housing benefit, which is the first hurdle, and secondly, they have to apply or even give, as Cliff says, an intent to apply. That places an administrative burden upon the councils and local authorities who are dealing with this issue. In the short term, there are some things that are needed in terms of confirmation if it can be given about mitigation going forward in the short term, but also looking at the regulations and the administration process. I promised someone who was at the meeting yesterday that I would ask this question, but it might not be an answer to it. It might be that we could write to local authorities to establish just how much this would cost, but the point that was made to me yesterday was that the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament has written off the debts of those who refuse to pay the poll tax. If there are any outstanding debts for those who cannot pay the bedroom tax, how much of an impact would that be on local authority budgets if there were to be a write-off of existing debts? Has that been considered? Would you have an idea of the number of people that would have an impact on and how much it would cost to do that? I think that we have to write to local authorities to get that figure, but I have fulfilled my commitment to ask that question, which I promised I would do yesterday. Does anyone have any final comments that they want to make, something that they think should be addressed before we finish up? One of the things that came out from the ridgery meeting yesterday, quite vociferously, was people's concerns about aim digital inclusion. There was one lady who was only contacted with the DWP to say that there was money coming, was by text message to her mobile phone, and she's yet to understand exactly what payment she's getting and why. I think that going forward, as more and more pressure is put on it, that digital inclusion has to be seen as a social right for people and a lifeline in not maybe pushed into the luxury part of things, because it's absolutely vital for people that have access to broadband and mobile phones in the current climate, especially the DWP who pushed it. Anyone else got a comment on what to finish with? It's just talking about the Smith Commission. I think there was a general agreement about the shift of administrative powers to Holyrood. Obviously, ideally we would like that done sooner rather than later, and if it can be done ahead of any primary legislation on the devolution through your section 38 approval, that obviously we would welcome that. Everybody would welcome it if we could just get on and do it. It would ease the transition. I just wanted to raise the point that of the 900 cases that we've collected, looking at the impact of welfare reform on children and families, almost 50 per cent of them, there's an issue with either misinformation or poor communication or mal-administration more broadly. It's a massive issue and I think it needs to remain in the focus of the welfare reform committee and also investment in information and advice to ensure that when there is miscommunication or mal-administration that people are aware of it and can challenge DWP or local authority decisions. Can I thank everyone who's come before us this morning? Again, this is an issue that we have paid close attention to in the past. We'll continue to monitor how the process goes forward and we'll look forward to the Smith Commission impact. We'll keep a close eye on it and take on board all the points that have been raised in the questions that have been asked of us this morning. I think throughout this morning there were two or three issues that came up that would require us to contact local authorities and get more information that would be helpful if we get that, so that the clearer picture we have of what's happening out there can be discussed as we look at the issues we move forward. I think that it's been useful to have this session to update ourselves on how things are moving forward in terms of mitigation and what remains to be done to address some of the problems that still exist, whether they're bureaucratic administrative resource or whatever. Those are things that we need to be aware of and we need to keep an eye on, so thanks very much to you all for your contributions and I'll suspend the meeting before we have our next panel. Our second item of business today is our first oral evidence session as part of our women's and welfare inquiry. I'd like to welcome our first panel on this subject. We have Howard Reid, the director of landmint economics, previously chief economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, Morag Gillespie, senior research fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University, Dr Helen Graham, research fellow at Edinburgh Napier University and Professor Diane Ellison, chair of the women's budget group and emeritus professor at the University of Essex. Perhaps I could just say one or two things. First, in terms of thinking about women and welfare and why you've got a committee on women and welfare, I think, two issues I'd like to bring out. One is the issue of the unpaid work of caring for families and communities, which both men and women participate in, but women do more of it and have more responsibility of it than men. And this makes a difference in the way that women interact with the welfare system. The other is what I call the wallet and the purse issue, which is the issue that it matters whether it's to the wallet or to the purse that the payments actually go. So, although within the family, the money may be redistributed, whose hands it comes through, does it come to the wallet for men or the purse for women, makes a big difference to bargaining relationships within households. And I think the third thing I'd like to say is I'd really encourage this committee and the Scottish Parliament, I think, has a wonderful opportunity to reframe how we think about these issues. And I'd like to see this issue framed in terms of social security, social security that everybody needs at some phases in their lives, because I think we've had a very divisive kind of discourse building up about those on welfare and those who are taxpayers. Actually, we're all taxpayers and we all have welfare benefits at some phases in our lives. So anything you can do to think of things in terms of developing a vision for social security is part of a decent society where everybody can live with dignity and where we can all contribute in different ways, whether it's through paid work, through unpaid caring work for our families and communities and through volunteering work. So a system that encompasses all of that, I think you would be doing a great service for people in Scotland and for the people in the UK in general. Can I take off by making a comment? You'll be aware that this committee has commissioned research in the past. Now, as someone who's studied sociology, I'm aware of the phrase and I've used it before that sociology is a complex explanation of the patently obvious. We sort of suspected that the research would show us where rich areas or better off areas would sit in relation to more deprived areas as welfare rolls out. I suppose there were no surprises there. What did, I think, impact on the committee was the scale of the impact, how much it was going to impact on individual people and hence the reason why we're looking specifically at women. In the submissions, I saw the phrase used a helicopter view, which I suppose is that sort of same idea as the complex explanations of the patently obvious. I suppose we know that if we had a helicopter view of this issue there would already be things that we would expect to see. Can you all give us, from your own perspective, what specifically we have to look at if we do take that helicopter view? Morag, do you want to have a go at that? I was a bit worried when I looked back with retrospect at my submission that it was really mostly about the helicopter view, but it seems to me that I find the term welfare not only unhelpful because of its pejorative meaning, particularly when you look at countries like the USA, but also because it's confusing. We all, every one of us, benefit hugely from the welfare state. The welfare state includes all manner of different things that are often universal services such as education, health and child benefits, getting our streets cleaned and public planning. All of those things are all part of the welfare state. Social security is one of the things that is part of the welfare state, so what I'm interested to see is how we can improve people's social security. For me, I'd sometimes feel like I'm in a minority of one because everyone talks about welfare, but for me that's what we should be aspiring to do, is seek to underpin people's lives with some social security when they need it. In order to do that, I think we need to look at the trade-offs, for example, between taxes and benefits. You will be aware from the submissions that when you have a recession you can respond in two ways to the recession. You can bring in more money or you can cut benefits and services or you can do a mixture of the two, which is the more common thing, and it's the balance between those that determines who gains and who loses. What we've seen in this process in the UK is men gaining and women losing because men gain more from gifts through the taxation system and women lose because of the cuts in benefits and they don't gain so much from the tax gains. Other people can say much more about that. The point is that that principle is there. For me, the other problem that exists in a system that has been tinkered with for 60 years is that there are two areas for sure that I can think of where benefits are part of the problem. What I mean by that is maybe more in the UK but also in Scotland, we've used housing benefit as our response to unaffordable housing for people. Unfortunately for too many people in working and ordinary jobs, housing is unaffordable. It seems to me, as one of your witnesses we heard in the previous session, that you need to look at the supply side of housing and whether tackling the cost of housing can be addressed. Either that or you need to have an economic strategy which doesn't create jobs, which are minimum wage jobs, which is a high wage economy. You need to deal with one of those problems, not through the benefits system, to make housing affordable for ordinary people. It's not sustainable to be in a country where housing is not affordable for ordinary working people. Paying benefits is simply going to potentially stoke the flames of that. I'm not suggesting for a second that you stop paying those benefits but that you actually work towards a different balance again in the system between support and supply and demand side. There are similar issues for childcare in looking at whether support for the supply side, for example the case in Sweden, would be more beneficial in the long run. All those things, such as tax, other social services, childcare training, minimum wage protection, all those things need to be part of the context in which social security decisions are made. I guess the thing about a helicopter view that is, although you missed some of the detail by taking an overall view of the cumulative impact of the cuts to benefits and tax credits over the 2010-15 Parliament, it's quite important to measure the relative impact of each of the different reforms. Llanman Economics, in conjunction with National Institute for Economic and Social Research, did a big project for the Equality and Human Rights Commission looking at the cumulative impact of all the changes to benefits over the 2010-15 period. I mean it's about 21-22 billion of cuts. Now there's been a lot of focus on bedroom tax and I saw your previous item as bedroom tax and that's important to focus on that because it's a very, very damaging cut for people at impacts as are things like the benefit cap, restricting benefits to £500 a week maximum for families. But some of the nasty cuts, but some of the biggest impact, some of the things that have had the least attention like changes to uprating, for example going from retail price index to consumer price index, which on average takes cuts benefits by 0.7% a year doing that year on year. And so the cumulative impact of that is massive as are all the big cuts to tax credits that kind of came through in 2011, 2012, 2013. And also even before universal credit has been rolled out there's been quite big cuts to some elements of that. Some of which were meant to improve working centres like the disregards that people can, the amount people can earn before they've gone to the taper has been kind of cut several times before it's mainly been rolled out. So the nice thing about taking a kind of overall view is that you can assess all the benefit changes and tax credit changes that you're able to. You can't quite do everything because the data isn't very good. Some of the disability things like personal independence payment is quite hard to actually model with the data we've got because we don't have enough information on how disabled people actually are. But the stuff you can do shows that there's really big impacts and that it's women who are kind of bearing the brunt of this depending on the precise definitions you use. It's either kind of two thirds hitting women, one third hitting men or I've seen analyses showing 85% of the cuts are hitting women. So whichever particular methodology you use, it certainly disproportionately impacts in women. Not surprisingly because women receive the bulk of benefits and kind of family related benefits and tax credits. So my specialism is the kind of helicoptor view but within that there's a whole host of things going on so I think it's important to have both really. I think if you look at welfare states across Europe, the most successful in terms of gender equality and also more broadly in terms of poverty alleviation and quality of life more generally, they either support women's caring role or they take on some of that responsibility and facilitate their role as workers, as autonomous adults. The problem with the UK welfare system is that it doesn't really do either very effectively. It places quite strong expectations on people to work, even people with quite intense caring responsibilities. But it doesn't really do enough to facilitate that participation in terms of childcare and active labour market policies. So I think you could maybe look to countries that do this more successfully to kind of maybe see where the UK is lacking. Professor Ellison, do you want to comment on that specifically? I mean just to say that my support, the points that have been made, we both need the broad overview where we recognise the distinctive positioning of women and men because of their distinctive responsibilities in relation to care and the way that men and women are raised still with sterile care. There are various types which affect the kind of work that they go into in the labour market and we also need the detail about the individual benefits, how they interact with one another and how they differentially impact on different groups. And here we are particularly thinking about how they differentially impact on women and men. OK, that's an indication yet from colleagues. I'll ask a specific question. The contributions we had in writing referred to a greater attention being paid to employment support specifically. Taking account of gender barriers, it would appear from reading more into those contributions that zero-hour contracts are one of those gender barriers. How big is the differential in terms of women affected by zero-hour contracts? Is there any analysis of that, Dr Graham? 55 per cent of zero-hour contracts are held by women. I suppose an argument, and I'm trying to be as fair as I can in terms of hearing it from the other side. We don't often do that in this committee, but I'm trying to be as fair as I possibly can. Women predominantly prefer to have the flexibility of zero-hour contracts. I can see Morag's way to come right out and top it right away. Even in trying to be fair, the answer is already coming towards me Morag. Do you want to respond to that point? As with many of those things, it's about balance because nobody, man or woman, wants to be sitting at home waiting to find out if they're going to get any work in order to pay the rent and the electricity bill this week. The point about zero-hours contract is that it needs to work with a degree of flexibility on both sides. There is an accumulation of problems around insecure employment. The TUC recently produced some information that pointed out that women are also disproportionately likely to be affected by short-hours contracts. Zero-hours contracts only guarantee very small numbers of hours. One of the sectors where that is really getting quite predominant is the retail sector. It's not just zero-hours contracts. You almost need to see as a symbol of insecure employment rather than the whole problem of insecure employment. It's about balance. It's about employees and employers having some balance and having some rights to be able to earn a wage, because when people try to claim benefits when they have zero-hours contracts, they face a real problem. That is really the ultimate route for exploitation if an employer chooses to deal with it that way. Yes, people do fine with zero-hours contracts in some conditions, but that's only because employers behave in a reasonable way and we really can't make that assumption that employers will always behave in a reasonable and measured way. I think that's why it's a problem, but women are disproportionately affected by that and also insecure self-employment, because there's been a huge rise in self-employment in Scotland, there's been a huge rise in self-employment among women and there's been a fall in income from self-employment. I don't think that those things are unassociated, although I haven't actually seen something that draws those together in a full and coherent way, but I suspect that increasingly people are doing the jobs that they used to do, but in a self-employed contractual basis, possibly for local authorities or health services or delivering canteen services where they used to be employees, etc. Just a couple of points on zero-hours contracts. There is an additional problem for people on zero-hours contracts claiming universal credit coming down the line, which is the start of what's called in-work conditionality, where people who are working low numbers of hours, most people claiming universal credit will be required to look for work at least 30 hours a week or 35 on a regular basis, or they could face sanctions for not doing enough hours. Now, obviously, if you're on a zero-hours contract, it might be very difficult to guarantee yourself 30 hours a week, it might be impossible in some circumstances. For self-employed people, it could be even worse because of the minimum income floor provision in universal credit, whereby you will be assessed as if your income is equal to 35 hours a week at minimum wage, even if you're earning way less than that. There are some exemptions for people in the first year of running a business and things like that, but these are two of the most problematic aspects of the new system, I think. And DWP hasn't really addressed how it's going to actually implement these, but we're probably going to find that out in the next year or two, I should think. Professor? The issue of flexibility is very important, but I think we have to distinguish between the flexibility for people to combine earning a living with caring for their family, and the flexibility that some employers want to vary the size of their labour force, are calling to hourly fluctuations in demand, daily fluctuations in demand, and I think those are two very different kinds of flexibility. And I think the flexibility we want for a decent society where we have men and women living in equality and people living less stressed lives is the kind of flexibility that allows people, both men and women, to combine earning a living with taking care of their families. A good example would be what my son and his partner enjoy. My son works for a big NGO that has parental leave and allowed him to reduce his working days to four a week when he became a father. My daughter works for a parliamentary committee in Westminster, which meant she, as a researcher, so she had a long maternity leave paid, and then the possibility of taking further unpaid leave without loss of seniority, and she will recommence her employment at the beginning of June. I mean, I think that's the decent kind of flexibility that we want, the kind of flexibility that's beneficial both to employer and to employee, and creates the kind of society that we want where people can combine caring for their families and earning a living. But the kind of flexibilisation we're seeing in much of the labour market, as I think Howard and Merug have pointed out, is the kind of flexibility which actually makes it so difficult to do that. Because if you don't know what hours of work you're working a week, how can you organise your childcare or your care for your elderly, frail parents? It assumes, though, zero hours contracts, that you have no other responsibilities. And maybe this works for some people, young people who may not have any other responsibilities to caring responsibilities, but for anybody with caring responsibilities, I think zero hours contracts is a disaster. I might also add that the way that childcare is subsidised for a lot of working parents in this country is also problematic if you have irregular employment. So you organise your childcare, you pay for it and then you get the tax credits back to subsidise up to a certain proportion of that, which is fine if you have a steady job, a steady income, but if your hours and your income is changing a lot, that's more problematic, and the tax credit system is not very responsive to changes in people's circumstances, it's quite cumbersome. So a universal model of childcare that's available to all would accommodate that better than the system that we have at the moment through the tax credit system. OK, I'll open up to the committee members a little bit, Kenneth, to be followed by Claire. It's actually a follow-on from the area in which you yourself began to explore. In their reports, I mean, in gender and Barnardo said that innovation is needed to divert from existing employability models that replicate gender segregation in the labour market. I'm just wondering how you feel that that could be done. Do anyone who wishes to answer? Yeah, yeah, sorry, I'm happy to say something. I mean, I know a bit more about modern apprenticeship schemes and a little bit about employability services, and I think one of the difficulties with those schemes is the complexity of provision, even who's even got responsibility for making that decision can be a bit of a challenge to see, particularly in terms of apprenticeships. Because one of the things that we see about modern apprenticeships, for example, is that they tend to reinforce existing occupational gender segregation within the labour market. So there is work to be done, though, at different levels to try and tackle that both with employers, but also with careers guidance for young people at school. That's even raising young children's expectations about what they might do in later life. With an employability service, the issues are the same. The inevitable journey that people seem to be on is not being challenged. But coming back to the points that Diane made about lack of flexibility with care, what women can often be left with is very little choice about where they work, because they have to do what will accommodate their often more complicated lives because of the care responsibilities that they have. So, as Helen says, a different approach to childcare has the potential to ease those pressures so that women can make choices in the more free way that men often do, because men are much less often burdened with some unpaid caring roles. As with many of those problems, there is more than one place where the problem needs to be tackled. It includes education, it includes schools, it certainly includes careers, it includes skills development in Scotland, but also in employability services. Two things briefly. One is that we seem to have less specialist support for lone parents, and Helen might want to say more about that. For example, women survivors of domestic abuse who want to move towards work at some stage afterwards will probably need a lot more support than is available in the standard package of support. The system has to be able to accommodate those kind of things to help people move forward and not simply work with the target numbers, which means you work with the people who are closest to the labour market. It is really important. Even financially for the country, for the public purse, it is important that those folk are helped to move forward even when they need extra support. It is really a point that Professor Ellison mentioned in an opening statement. I just wondered if the panel had a feel of what effect the single household payments could have for women and families. You mean as in the universal credit system. This has been an area of concern for us in the women's budget group in London, submitting a lot of evidence to the parliamentary committees in Westminster that are considered the various stages of the welfare reform bill introducing universal credit. I think many others, I could see from the submissions, share the same concern that if you concentrate, what is it, six benefits are going to be concentrated into universal credit. At the moment, their pay can be paid to different people in a couple household, but universal credit is going to be one person in a couple household. So there's a lot of concern about that. I mean particularly concern about how that's going to affect, if that's primarily going to go to men, how that's going to affect women in abusive relationships who are going to find it harder to leave those relationships. But also what it does in general to the caring, sharing and bargaining that goes on within households because although when money comes in to men's hands and to women's hands, the wallet and the purse, as I said, there is of course sharing that goes on within households. But there's also bargaining in different senses of entitlement and there's often a sense of entitlement. Well, the money came in through me, so I have more say on how to spend it. So I think there's a lot of concern about this concentration into one payment. Once a month as well is another problem. And if not sure that we were discussing exactly what the devolution responsibilities and powers are going to be, but if there's any devolution of how universal credit can be administered in Scotland, I think that would be a number one thing to look at. Can you have a system where you don't make all the payments to one person once a month? Can there be some possibility, as there is with some of the tax credits, of designating who in the household, so maybe some of it can go to the main carer, some of it can go to another person in the household, so some kind of splitting. And if there's no splitting possible, then designating it for the main carer. So if you could do something different in terms of the way that universal credit is rolled out in terms of its administration on that point, I think that would be very valuable. The only thing I'd underline is that the monthly payment in some cases may be a big problem in terms of some people's actual ability to manage money over that longer time. The stated reason for doing it was that it matches up with the way most people are paid in the labour market. But for people on zero hours contracts, that may not be the case. They may well be being paid week to week. It would be better probably to have a flexibility where the claimant can choose how often they want the money paid. I don't see why that would be a bad thing. Also for lots of people in low incomes, the way you pay for things is weekly. People are on a few card meter card, they're going to have to pay for that as and when. That's where the strategies don't join up well. On the one hand, we're looking for people to live quite hand to mouth, if you like, and lots of people do actually get paid weekly, still, or fortnightly. On the other hand, we then want to pretend that they're white-collar workers on their monthly salary. Lots of people's lives aren't quite that tidy. I think that we need to accommodate the differences there. There are other problems with the way that Universal Credit has been designed, and Howard has mentioned a couple of them, but the disregards for second earners and the way that the tapers have been designed means actually, for all the rhetoric about Universal Credit is supposed to encourage people into employment, paid employment. For second earners in couple households, many of whom will be women and given the kind of low pay that many women are likely to get. They actually won't be worth a while to financially to take on a job because of the last sale again. I think that this is completely at odds with the idea that we want everybody to be in the labour market and contrast a lot with the regime for lone parents, women who were lone parents, 95% or so of lone parents, women. There's every pressure now from the age when the children are quite young for them to take paid employment, but if you're a woman in a couple household under the Universal Credit system, actually the pressures may be in the opposite direction for you to not to take on paid work because there won't be a financial gain to speak of. That again could be something if you have some kind of control over the details of the administration and design of Universal Credit in Scotland, that issue of the disregards for second earners and the extent to which there's a cutback on the Universal Credit as a second earner earns more, you could perhaps make a difference there for people in Scotland. I can maybe start with a point that I brought up with a previous panel and then a letter to the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, Neil Cooleyng, the director general of Universal Credit said that we believe the system is safe and secure. Do you think that Universal Credit is going to be safe and secure for women? Yes, I shake my head because I think there are so many question marks about that. It's clearly not going to be safe and secure for women who are at risk of abusive relationships. I think it's not going to be secure for many women even if they're not in abusive relationships as money moves that they were getting in their hands moves away from them. There's going to have to be more bargaining within households about how that money is spent. It's going to be so much harder to budget as Morag was pointing out, the point that Howard was making about the women who are self-employed and we know that the low-hour self-employment on very low earnings is disproportionately women. I don't think that Universal Credit is going to be safe and secure for them. Morag? I would agree. I think that everything we've all been saying suggests that there's lots. In essence, the principles of Universal Credit is not a completely bad thing. The notion of how it works, if you want to have a system of means-tested benefits, there are principles that underpin Universal Credit that aren't necessarily bad. But then, like anything like this, the devil's in the detail, the taper rates, the specific rules that apply, how benefits are treated, what you disregard, what you don't disregard, all of that then becomes the detail that makes it problematic, I think. As it is just now, I think that it's fraught with sort of bear traps for women, but one of the other things that worries me, as well as the housing issues, which I think you were maybe discussing, the housing benefit issues, which you were discussing in the long tail before Scotland is going to actually be able to have more control over the housing benefit element of Universal Credit is a problem because it delays the time before you can deal with that. It would be wiser for us to control all elements of welfare here so that we can tailor them to our needs and maybe get them a little bit better than the so-called safe and secure Universal Credit, which seems to me not to be safe and secure anymore. Well, certainly I suppose when you sit down and look at what's being devolved and the limits of the responsibilities, not the limits of the responsibilities, the limits of the powers to vary and change what's there, it seems to me to be very limited. Yes, I would feel that there's much more scope for us to do more because Scotland has the powers over other aspects that are crucial to a good integrated system that connects the different parts of people's lives. The housing, the childcare, the economic strategy, the kind of jobs that are being created and joining those up along with tax powers and the benefit system. It makes much more sense if they can integrate in an effective way that benefits women because that in many senses is the problem, that benefits changes are happening in a silo which is not taking account of the wider context in which people live their lives. There's at least the potential then to do that. On safety, if the guy who said that Universal Credit was safe and secure, if by safety meant that it provided an adequate safety net in terms of minimum income that people couldn't fall below, then I think that's completely wrong for two reasons. One is that as the amounts of benefit in the existing system and also transferring over to Universal Credit are being cut in real terms with the 1% up rating and now there's going to be another two year freeze on working age benefits, it's becoming increasingly impossible for people in receipt of benefits and tax credits to make ends meet because the amounts are just too low that they're receiving. And also there's a growing number of people falling through the system due to sanctioning. We know from statistics on job seekers allowance and employment support allowance that the number of sanctions being given out per month has rocketed up since the rules revised in 2012. I've done some work for Oxfam which kind of looks at the effectiveness of sanctions and shows that they have no impact really in encouraging, in reducing unemployment. In fact if anything they increase the level of inactivity for the claimant groups. But the Universal Credit is going to have an even more draconian sanctions regime than the existing JSA ESA system. So we're going to get I think more, I fear more and more people simply falling through the cracks and just disappearing off the radar official statistics potentially. So it is very worrying. Doctor Cairn. I can't comment on the cyber security of the computer system at the moment obviously but my understanding is that the IT system on which Universal Credit is based is pretty much in disarray and what it's trying to do is extremely complicated to bring in all kinds of real time information from different sources. I'd say maybe if the Scottish Government wants to take that on maybe they should be careful what they wish for. I don't think it was just the IT systems that Mr Cooling was suggesting were safe and secure. I don't know if you've come across Mr Cooling but previously I said he lived in Clyde Cuckoo land and I think this is another example of the strangeness of his opinions. You don't have to. It was more rhetorical. I wonder if I could change tack ever so slightly. We've got situations where many women have got caring responsibilities which involve young folk and old folk at the same time and it's been referred to as sandwich carers by a number of people. I know some folks in that position who have employment where they've got a fixed amount of hours and their employers are flexible in terms of when they work that hours so basically the employer fits in with the needs of the employee. I recognise that that's extremely rare but has there been any analysis done on the benefits to employers to allow that level of flexibility so that all of these responsibilities can be done at the same time? The kinds of benefits that there are to employers are things certainly like retention of staff in which an employer has invested training and time and so forth. The retention of staff who've got firm specific skills who know about that particular business. So retention of skilled staff is a very important benefit I think. Staff who are more enthusiastic, who are more committed, who when they are at the workplace can concentrate on the work because they know that they've been able to have that flexibility in terms of hours for dealing with their care commitments. I think that kind of strategy of employers is really part of a way of looking at an economy in terms of creating a high skilled, high productivity economy that believes in investing in your employees and I see that kind of flexible hours arrangement that you mentioned as another kind of investment in employees and in their productivity, their retention, their enthusiasm. Has there been any major analysis done on that at all to look at the entire benefit to the individuals and to society as a whole allowing that flexibility? I'm not aware of any, it's possible that there has been some research on that. I'm currently engaged in building a model of the English social care system. We did one for Wales a few years back which looks at the impact of, this is a slightly different area, but it looks at the impact of different funding packages for social care, domiciliary and residential on the income distribution and employment level. In terms of people going into work when they're also trying to care for relatives, there's a little bit of that in there, but it's not as specifically targeted at that specific question you had as would be most useful. It would be good to see more work on that kind of area, I agree. What I would suggest though is that what to look at is the wider implications of that issue and tackling it and I think it's Norway which actually delivers sandwich care services, so there are facilities which have both elder and childcare facilities in recognition of those issues as well as other wider good sociological reasons for having those issues. I would look at the wider implications and look, Nordic, for some ideas of what practice might actually make a difference. It was just a quick question in relation to the push and pull effect of certain benefits on women depending on the circumstances. I wondered if you thought that carers allowance should be raised to the same level as jobseekers allowance and if that would help. I think that that's pretty fundamental. It shows how little the system values care that it's the lowest of any income replacement benefit. In effect, those who are claiming care is allowance because they're caring at least 35 hours a week, so they are effectively unable to work because of a disability. It's not their disability, but it's someone's disability. If anything, from a sort of valuing care perspective, it should be set at similar levels to employment support allowance. I was reading one of the papers about the Devolution for the Powers Bill, a submission from the CPAG to the committee. I think that it raises it and I think that gender submission also raises a concern that it would look as if the limits on what can be done about carers allowance would appear as if they're going to prevent from giving people carers allowance who are maybe in part-time work or part-time study, which I think is a bit disappointing as well because the notion that you're either a carer or you're in full-time work or you're in full-time education again doesn't reflect the reality of people's lives even if it is administratively convenient. It would be disappointing if we're not able to accommodate some flexibility there. That variation of the 35 hours a week rule would be important if you can possibly do that because there are people who are providing care to people who need care, not for a part of a care package who may be a student or who may have a part-time job and they can't get carers allowance under the current rules. Thank you very much, convener. I just wanted to pick up some of the points that you've all raised this morning and there's a number of things. I wanted to go back to the issue about loan parents and one of the other things that I wanted to get some of your thoughts on is this preponderance that the welfare system has got on putting people into silos and like you're a loan parent or you're fleeing domestic violence or you're a carer. I've got somebody on my caseload right now who is a loan parent fleeing domestic violence, has a disability and has a caring responsibility for a child. All of them. To try and deal with that whole complicated, my asthma of benefits entitlement and everything has been very, very difficult. Indeed, the impact that that person has had has a sanction and I wanted to get some of your thoughts on sanctions and the impact of sanctions because it seemed to me a few years ago the benefits agency DWP were less likely to apply sanctions to loan parents and that seems to have reversed now that you're getting many, many more loan parents who are facing sanctions and the impact that's then having on them. But also alongside that is the increasing children and young people and the parents of those children accessing food banks. You can't separate any of this at all and I wondered whether Professor Elsin Ew produced a very supportive of it, a very interesting document called Plan F, which was a budget for a feminist budget for looking at all of these things and whether you can give us some insight into how you think, you know, we should be applying some of these very intuitive ideas to again create a welfare system, as I said in the last panel, a welfare system that actually meets the need of the individual who are accessing it. Well, thank you for mentioning this plan. We called it Plan F because people are talking about Plan A, which is the government's plan and then some people on the opposition were talking about Plan B and we said Plan F, a feminist plan. And it was developed jointly, the Scottish Women's Budget Group, Moragyn, her colleagues, and the UK Women's Budget Group in London. And I think the main thing that's relevant for this committee is we wanted to position social security as part of this broader plan for investment in a caring and a sustainable economy. And to see the money that's spent on social security and on education and on health and on social housing and so forth as an investment in our people and in our future. And I think the kind of joined up thinking about that is part and parcel of what we'd like to see and the case you've given us shows us where there isn't joined up thinking. Where, because, and I'm sure other people want to comment on this, because of the sanctions regime driven by the wish to reduce the numbers on the books getting job seekers allowance and the money that's spent on job seekers allowance. So that drive for sanctions actually drives people to food banks. I mean the impact this is having on the health and wellbeing of children, on the health and wellbeing of the lone parents, mainly mothers who are in that situation isn't factored in at all. But of course this is going to create costs for the health service, for the education service, maybe for the crime prevention and justice systems. Would you then suggest that the UK government should apply an accumulative impact assessment on all of these changes to the welfare system? Is that something you would support? Yes. I think it's something that Howard has been one of the pioneers of doing, of factoring in all of these different changes so you can see what they all add up to. Yeah, I mean in as much as we're able to with the data, one of the problems with sanctions is that it's quite using the kind of techniques that lamb and economics use to model the cumulative impact of changes to benefit rates and tax cuts, etc. It's quite hard to apply that approach to sanctions because you don't have information in the kind of survey data that we use to model those changes doesn't show you whether people have been sanctioned or not. In fact the statistics and sanctions, there's fairly good statistics on the number of sanctions being given out and broken down by lone parents, childless people and by age, etc. And by whether it's JSA or ESA. But the statistics on what happens to people after their sanctions are almost non-existent. The statistics on the implications of sanctions for people's spending, use of food banks and sanctions, there just aren't any really. The coalition government, as was, didn't really seem to be interested in producing that kind of data. And so I think that is a huge problem and we're kind of, we're rather fine of flying blind at the moment. I mean we know there's going to be adverse impacts of the increased use of sanctions but we don't know the real magnitude of that. And as I say, it's a problem that's only going to get worse as universal credit is rolled out under the current rules. So would you think that given there's a new government in place and you know the Prime Minister yesterday did say that you know he was going to be an open government, he's going to work very hard for everybody in the UK. Do you think that then an immediate review of the conditionality aspects of universal credit and the whole system needs pressure applied to it and is that something you know that we can do from here and you can do from all of your respective organisations? I would say definitely, I think that's a really good idea. And also getting more clarification on how aspects of this are actually going to work. Like how is in work conditionality actually going to work in practice? How is the self-employment, how are the self-employed rules going to work in practice? Because a lot of this has just been kind of kicked down the road at the moment. And when universal credit, when they started putting people onto it in I think 2013 or 2014, it was only the easiest cases in inverted commas that were put on and a lot of the self-employed weren't moved over. So now the government's in a position where it's going to have to confront these operational issues, if it's going to be able to roll out the benefit on masks. So I absolutely, I think that would be a really good idea according for review at this stage. Would that be something this committee could take forward, convener? We have many pictures of the report, I think that might be something we could look at. In relation to women, in reference to this, because even if there are marginally more sanctions against men than women, I think it's marginal but there are marginally more against men. What we do know over the years from studies that one or two have been done here but work done by people like Jan Pal is that about how people spend their money, how people use their money, suggests that women, even if they're not the people being sanctioned, may end up paying for those sanctions because everyone who's sanctioned, who's not moving into a job, you know, as Howard has already identified, is kind of almost more likely to happen than in areas where sanctions aren't applied so heavily. They are then being supported by other people. Who are those other people? We may need more research to, but my guess from existing research is that it will be mums and siblings and aunties and people like that who are giving up their own resources. The wider implications, the deepening of poverty from sanctions is actually going to be spread through communities and not just affect the individuals immediately affected. Understanding those wider implications will be important. It goes hand in hand with that wider point that Dan was making about the costs, the implications for public services for the welfare state more widely, which people like the equality trust have highlighted quite effectively as well, although not in a very gender-specific way, but they've highlighted the costs to public services of inequality. You know, this is a good example. One further point about the conditionality. I think I'm right on this, other people correct me if I'm not, but I think under universal credit, one payment to one bank account in the household per month, the conditionality that the male partner fails to comply with will result in the withdrawal of that benefit and it will impact on the living conditions of the women even though it's not her that's not complying with the conditionality. So I think that's also a problem with the design of universal credit and it's not impossible to revise these things. I mean these are things about how the system is being designed in terms of conditionality, sanctions, how the payments are made to who they're made, how they treat self-employed people. They're all things that could be revised and reformed without denying the basic principle which I think is a good one of trying to simplify the benefits system. So I think pressing on and those problems will become more apparent as the system starts to roll out. So Howard's point about actually that there is no follow-up data about what happens to people who've been sanctioned. I mean maybe this is something you could do here in Scotland, you Scottish Government could set up a system of tracking people who have been sanctioned and denied their benefits to find out what happens to them and who's bearing the costs of that, how it's spilling over on to other relatives, on to children, on to other public services. So that you can then show very clearly all the negative externalities as economists will call it of this kind of very narrowly focused sanctions regime with one aim in mind really, which is to reduce the numbers getting these benefits on the benefit bill. That's a poverty ripple effect then. Thanks. Thanks, convener. Margaret. Just staying on sanctions, has there any research been done just to establish how many women have been sanctioned because they were kept late from attending an appointment because of care responsibilities and because very often you may have your appointment when the child's in school or whatever but then the child could be sick and you can't keep that appointment. I just wonder if there's any information on that. The statistics that the UK Government puts out on sanctions give some information on the reason why people in different groups were sanctioned. But I don't think the information in those statistics is detailed enough to enable you to identify specifically people who didn't attend the appointment because of caring responsibilities and because the UK household data sets like family resources survey or the labour force survey don't have information on who's being sanctioned, you can't use those as an alternative source of data to answer the question that you've just put. I think there's some qualitative research with specific individuals who've been sanctioned but there's very little information on how big a problem that is in the whole UK or in Scotland, how many people that specific sanctioning problem relates to. So I think that is a gap in the empirical evidence because we just don't have the data at the moment. But we do have studies from the four set societies recent study on job seekers allowance and sanctions and its impact on women. And I think some of the groups that work particularly with lone parents, single parent action network and probably one parent family in Scotland and so forth who've done quite a bit of work on the impact of the sanctions regime on lone parents. And I think there are quite a lot of examples of this problem that the way that the system is set up just takes no account at all of the caring responsibilities of lone parents. What we lack is what Howard mentioned is the overall big data set for the UK as a whole to be able to say these aren't just isolated cases, this is a quite typical thing that happens. So I think again pressing for more information on these dimensions of sanctions regime is important. Advice agencies are also a good source of information about that as well because child poverty action group are running a sort of early warning system where they are picking up in case studies. But also the Citizens Advice Network record data about their enquiries relating to benefits fairly systematically so they may have the potential to gather more specific information. I don't know, you might need to ask them but these are sources of information which are more, you know, it's terribly easy for when you mention a case study for that to be dismissed as an anomaly or something that's unusual or rare. But, you know, when significant numbers of people are needing advice with the same problems it does start to be evidence that's given more weight. As a qualitative researcher I don't think it necessarily needs to be large numbers to give weight but unfortunately that's often the way people look at it so advice services might be a good source of information. I think one of the wider impacts of the sanctions regime as well is that it potentially affects a lot of people through the fear of sanction. So even if lone parents are not actually receiving a sanction it's the threat every time that they go to the job centre, am I going to be sanctioned this time that potentially affects all lone parents. So in that sense that's a wide impact of the sanctions regime that maybe isn't widely thought about when we think about the impact of sanctions. I wanted to ask about the universal credits and I can remember when it was at the sort of roll out stage and there was still consultation going on. I'm sure there was discussion around and recommendations made that if there was domestic abuse in a household the universal credit would be paid differently or to the women or a different split. And also on the timing of it as well if there were extenuating circumstances instead of it being paid monthly it could be paid two weekly. Is that actually happening? I don't think we know yet because the system has only been rolled out largely for single adults without children and I think there's a worry that although there are these phrases about extenuating circumstances and ability to make claims for changes the people who might want to claim or these extenuating circumstances are in a very vulnerable situation and are not best placed to deal with the complexities of bureaucracy. And especially if they've got to fill in what you've got to go online and fill in a long form about their change circumstances. So I think there's a lot of worry that this won't be actually proved to be either feasible or adequate. And around a domestic abuse then there's no evidence of that yet then because it's... I think because we haven't seen a roll out for many people yet and it's mainly been single people without children so all the difficulties we've been many of the difficulties we've been talking about are ones that will occur in the future if they don't make any... If no change is made in the design of the system but not ones that we can say is happening right now because they haven't rolled it out to most people, it's only a minority of people, the easiest cases. If we just go on to care allowance as has been mentioned now and certainly I was at Nidry yesterday as well and what did come up was if for example the Scottish Government was to increase a benefit that has devolved powers over care allowance for example, that would then mean that the universal credit would be reduced by that amount? Is that... So you're not actually going to gain anything? That's an interesting question because depending on what exactly it is that's done, that yes, as with those divisions of benefits yes, I think there are potentially some areas of difficulty with that. It seems to me though that's one of the reasons you need to take the helicopter view a bit more and not just operate within a benefit system where the UK Government is making all the rules and potentially benefiting from... Why would you invest in increasing a benefit for someone if the only benefit was that the universal credit payment reduced and you saved the UK Treasury some money? So to me it seems that you need to start thinking about strategically about this and that. One of the things I thought was that it would be important that this committee is also talking to the committee that's looking at the devolved powers bill so that it's... Oh right now, I thought you would be but I just thought I'd mention it just in case. I think you need to be talking there and it seems to me that housing benefit is one of the areas where okay not immediately but in the long run you can actually do something different but it seems to me that you also want to look at whether you can reduce the cost of housing in the first place for people to make them affordable for ordinary people because we just have a huge problem until we solve that. We have to be able to have a society where people can afford to live in a home. That's becoming increasingly questionable. I would have to say though that one of the first things I did in the early days of being director of the Scottish low pay unit in the 1990s campaign for the national minimum wage, one of the first things I did was wrote an article for housing monitor for the Federation of Housing Associations about the seemingly intractable problem of low pay and affordable housing and we've never moved on a jot in tackling that problem in the last 30 years, which is really depressing. I think you have to be smart about where you act so as not to have that effect so that people actually get the benefit and the money doesn't just get swallowed up by the UK Government. I think you identified a particular issue of a broader problem that we'd actually been discussing as we waited which is in the complexity of the devolved system and its interaction with the UK wide system that seems to be emerging, you're going to have to look at the impact of any particular measure both on the Scottish budget and the UK budget on things like another example we had was well maybe you know one problem we say there's a lot of in work poverty and couldn't this be. Reduced and indeed the bill for tax credits and then universal credit if people paid a living wage and if you had a policy in Scotland of introducing living wage in all of the public sector and in public sector procurement that would be good for people in Scotland but the benefits bill that it would be reduced was not your benefits bill for the Scottish Government but the benefits bill for the UK Government as things seem to stand at the moment. So it does look as if you will need to look at those issues on whose budgets will the costs and savings fall of any particular measure which is a problem because some of the things you might want to do would be very beneficial for the Scottish people about that issue of is it the Scottish budget or the UK budget that gets the costs or the savings is going to be one to consider. It's moved on a wee bit. It was actually back to the discussion about sanctions and excuse me if I have picked you up wrong Professor Ellison but you were suggesting that we all know that the sanctions regime is about reducing the benefits payments cost and that that was a general understanding however what we're told officially by the UK Government is it's nothing to do with targets it's nothing to do with reducing that benefit bill. It's absolutely about a mechanism to move people into employment and I just wondered what you if you knew of any research or was there anything there that showed that it did anything to improve people's employment. I've actually undertaken research on that particular point. I did some research last year for Oxfam trying to test what we're trying to do is looking at the UK across job centre plus districts and there's about 45 districts. Looking at whether there's a relationship between the proportion of JSA claimants in each district who were subject to sanctions in a given period and whether the employment rate within that job centre plus district increased just after the sanctions were applied or whether unemployment failed or whether something happened to inactivity you know people who were neither employed nor unemployed but aren't even in the labour market. What the research found was that there was no relationship between employment rate or unemployment rate and sanctions so areas where sanctions were applied with more gusto shall we say seemed to experience no benefit in terms of lower unemployment rates I think were if anything slightly lower in those areas and inactivity rates were slightly higher that was the main finding so it seems that if anything more kind of wider application of sanctions is actually kind of driving people out of the system entirely. Now it wasn't a very strong correlation so I wouldn't want to put all my eggs in that basket but certainly there was no evidence for government's attention that this is a kind of measure that's helping people into work. I'd like as I say that the lack of good individual data on what happens to people after their sanctions is what stopped me from doing a more detailed analysis at the individual level which I'd ideally like to do if the data were there. So this was the best I could do at kind of area level but as far as I was able to tell there's no kind of beneficial impact of a more draconian sanctions regime. And would you agree that any saving in terms of benefit and to the DWP from a sanction just pushes the societal responsibility on to the third sector and to local authorities in terms of hardship payments when that happens? Yeah I think that's true and I think to the extent there is some research on this that has tried to look at, I'm pretty sure I read something from one of the, I can't remember what it was but there was something that one, the Scottish Parliament had actually had commissioned some research on this or something like that and they found there was a kind of knock-on impact on things like health and social care services and other aspects of kind of the hardship payments et cetera and what greater use of food banks. So I think it does, you know, whilst you may see reduction in the overall upfront benefits bill you're kind of pushing, you're pushing the problem into other areas which may mean that it increases expenditure and increases need overall. It's also pushing the costs out to a wider network of people. I suspect that the thing that's happening is that extended families or other friends, people within communities are helping to bear the cost of that and certainly the whole burgeoning of food banks and the connection with maladministration of benefits and sanctions means that the community is trying to pick up the pieces if you like of what's going wrong for people either through sanctions or through poor, you know, lack of benefits payments and so on. So the wider community is paying for that and in the long run I think there's a knock-on effect of that and services as well and wider population health is what we can't tell until the damage is done almost is what it really is in any detail is the implications for health of all of this. And just to pick up that important point you made about fear, I think we've now, people are afraid of the job centre. They don't see job seekers allowance as a right because they're not encouraged to see it as a right. They're not treated with dignity and I just see the contrast between when I was young and unemployed for a period and the way I was treated for dole as we used to call it and the office you went to. And they were very supportive and helpful and there was no sense in which it was a shameful thing to go there and the utter change in that notion of benefits for people who are unemployed as something which should treat people as having rights and treat them with dignity to something which stigmatises them and puts them in fear. It's a very bad change and if there's anything you can do in Scotland in terms of the way that things like job seekers allowance or universal credit in future are administered to make it a less fearful, less shaming, less rights and dignity denying process. Again, I think that even if there's no change in the money, that human dimension of the way that people interact with the social security system, if you can do anything to change that would be really good. We have heard evidence before from people who have come to tell us about their experiences of the system who have confirmed exactly what you said that they feel as though by going for an interview that the persons trying to trip them up, catch them out, get them off the benefit rather than actually support them back into work or give them the support that they need in the circumstances that they find themselves. That triumphs exactly with the evidence that we've heard and we've included that type of stuff in the reports that we've done previously and we'll continue to press that issue because it is a major concern. There's a wider sense that the system is no longer there to support people, it's there to catch people out and to prevent them from getting the support that they're looking for and I think that's a material shift in the whole process which is just unacceptable to this committee. We've exhausted questions from members if our witnesses want to conclude by just commenting generally on the situation from their perspective or directives to where you think we should look further in relation to this issue that we're investigating. Currently that would be helpful and if there's anything when you leave here in terms of your own work or work that you know that's been undertaken that you could point us in the direction of, that would be most welcome but I'll allow you to make any final comments before we close the meeting. Can I speak as an English person who feels very privileged to have been allowed to come and give evidence to this committee and say if there's anything you and Scotland can do to show the way forward for a more humane social security system which actually recognises that under human rights treaties there's a right to social security and reverses these changes in terms of shaming people and denying their dignity. If there's anything you can do here that would be wonderful because we can then say as we struggle about this in England but look it's not impossible, look they've made these changes in Scotland and they can show that it doesn't have to be like that. That's my plea to members of the Scottish Parliament to try and point the way forward to a better system in which we think about this as a social security to which we all have a right and are all treated with dignity. I would agree that in Scotland we need to strive to do that as much as we can and I think what I would add to that is in whatever we do it's going to be really important that we do equality impact assessment of things before they're done so we think about it before we do it and then go oh do, we should have thought of that one, we should have seen that one coming, which happens to us all but if you systematically think about what are the implications of this for women, for disabled people, for people who don't have full citizenship status and all those kinds of things then you can start to understand what curveballs are going to come in and hit you very quickly in whatever it is you're going to do. As you're looking at women and social security, I would like people in Scotland to have social security. When you're looking at that, if you can encourage others to recognise the importance of understanding the gender implications for all the reasons that we've discussed here. Can I just give you a daft example of where I think people gather data and then don't look at it? There are Scottish welfare reform statistics, they don't say a lot, they don't tell us a lot about women and men, about gender, that could improve. The one area that there is information about gender is in relation to the age and sex of children in families who've got benefits. It would appear that the families getting financial support through the Scottish welfare fund are far more likely, are far more boy children than girl children. It's 56% or 57% compared to 40% girls. There's either something really weird going on in Scotland or there's something wrong with somebody's statistical gathering. My point is that that's been repeated through the quarterly statistics for a year and nobody's noticed. There are good reasons for gathering disaggregated information by sex, but it's actually to consider the gender implications of the issue that you're looking at, whatever that may be, but there's clearly something. I've only just noticed it in looking at the stats for coming here, but there's something weird going on there, but I suspect it's probably a statistical gathering problem. There are, yes, marginally more boys than girls in our society, but not many more. It's about gathering data, but it's about using it so that you can say, what are the implications of this and people need to stop and think, don't just gather the data, what is it telling us? Just one point, really, to underline Morag's point about equality impact assessment, which I think is, we haven't talked much about it today, but assessment of kind of putative reforms, as well as reforms that have recently been undertaken, kind of impact assessment, is really important. It's worth looking at the guidance that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has put out on this, and they've critiqued a lot of what the UK Treasury has done, or hasn't done, on gender impact assessment. They've got some really good material in it, which is certainly worth talking to people from EHRC about what the best practice is in this area and how to improve assessments, definitely. I'd just say that much of the way in which welfare has a differential impact on women comes through the way that care is unequally distributed among men and women, and I think in a system that's become very polarised between strivers and shirkers, there's a danger that those who are performing unpaid care work are starting to be lumped in with the latter category, starting to be considered not to be. They're striving in the same way as people in work, and I think that's quite dangerous, and I think that the system needs to recognise in value not just the intrinsic value of care, but also the instrumental value and the saving to effectively the Government of people performing care that they would otherwise have to pay for. Well, thank you very much to you all for your time and your contribution this morning, and we'll draw heavily on the suggestions that you've made as we move forward, and thank you very much for that. I'll close the meeting by pointing out that our next meeting will be on 2 June, where we'll continue to take evidence on our women and social security inquiry.