 Unrhyw ddifen ffawr yw'r Opym Cymru? I'm happy to be temporary convener until the committee appointments a convener. Okay, can I welcome everyone to the 17th meeting of 2018 of the Social Security Committee and ond yn ymddych chi'n amgarsofiad arall o'i gweithio a'r gwybod言hau yn bïddo, fel ddoddi oherwydd i gael'r gweithio. Fy ent yn adrwgol i chi-ddur� i Mark Griffin a Pauline McNeill i ei bod yn gweithio i gael lleasion a gyda yn ddannu gwellch i ni. Felly, rwy'n cael ei fod i'ch gael i agendaeth, ymgymellol ei tîm 1, ddaw neston o'r amgarsofiadau. I wnaeth i gael i gael'i helpu gweithio ar y bob Doris yn cymdeithasol Clare Adamson, Shona Robson yn gweithio Ben MacPherson ac Alastair Allen yn cymdeithasol Ruth Maguire. Felly, rydw i'n gweithio'n cymdeithasol. Felly, rydw i'n gweithio'n cymdeithasol Clare Adamson, rydw i'n gweithio'n cymdeithasol. Rhaid? Fawr, escaped ar gyfer, golydoedd yn gweithio'n cymdeithasol. Felly, rydw i'n gweithio'n cymdeithasol. Waith sydd studi!? Okay, so back to item 2, the choice of a convener. So the Parliament has decided that members of the Scottish national party are eligible to be chosen as convener. So I'd like to invite a nomination for convener. Bob Doris. Thank you Mr Adam. So Bob Doris is our nomination. Does the Committee confirm that Bob Doris is chosen as convener? Congratulations. You are now convener. I feel a bit isolated here. He's been welcome to have sat beside me. I hope that's not a sign of things to come. Bear with me one moment. Okay, so I think it's only reasonable. I promise you we'll get to our witnesses in a second, but I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I didn't thank George and the committee for nominating to be an agreement to be convener of this committee. I very much look forward to it, but also to pay tribute to the work of Lear Adamson, who did a sterling job here with some really pretty important legislation going through this committee over the previous few months. Of course, to congratulate Ben Macpherson, who has been elevated to ministerial level, and Ruth Maguire who has moved on to be a committee convener also. So I just put on my record my thanks to the three outgoing members of the committee who have, along with the rest of the members, laid pretty good groundwork for where we are as a committee, and I'm delighted to take over as a convener. So we'll now move to agenda item 3, and the committee is asked to agree that item 5, consideration of evidence, is taken in private. Can I ask if the committee is agreeable to that? So we now move to agenda item 4, social security and in-work poverty. Agenda item 4 is the first evidence session of this inquiry into social security and in-work poverty. This session will consider some of the published research in poverty and low pay. Can I welcome the first witnesses for our inquiry, who are David Finch, Senior Research Fellow Resolution Foundation, Russell Gunson, Director Institute for Public Policy Research Scotland, and Robert Joyce, Associate Director Institute of Fiscal Studies. I don't have a note here saying if there's any opening statement, so are we going straight to questions? I know a lot of members, including myself, are keen to ask about in-work conditionality in relation to universal credit, but I suppose before we ask specific questions on that, universal credit, one of the policy intents behind it was to tackle in-work poverty and the data that we have from submissions and published information out there is that 64 per cent of those living in poverty are in households where there is employment, there is work. I don't know if that's a reflection on universal credit itself or whether it's truly to say that there's a link between that or those figures going up or down. I'd be interested to know in terms of the current levels of households where people are in employment but are still in-work poverty and where we are with universal credit, so some observations on that would be quite helpful before we start looking at in-work conditionality. I think that the place to start from our point of view is that you can't divorce the economy from in-work poverty, so yes, universal credit and social security more generally have a big role to play in reducing and tackling poverty and in-work poverty. The economy, the income structure in Scotland and across the UK will be as much, if not more, of an issue in terms of tackling in-work poverty. Over the last 10 years, we have had some pretty unprecedented economic circumstances. We continue to have unprecedented circumstances, 150 years since we've seen living standards stagnate like they have over that period. Of course, low pay has been a big feature of the labour market and the economy over that time, just under a fifth in Scotland on wages beneath the living wage, the real living wage, should I say. On to universal credit, I think that where we stand is that it has an idea, it's got some merit, bringing six means-tested benefits into one on a taper, a single taper, is a good positive idea, but the funding levels that were originally promised have dropped significantly. We've seen about £3 billion taken out of the budget per year. Of course, we've got the ethos, almost the implementation of it, which to us looks particularly pernicious around in-work conditionality, work requirements, sanctions, etc. Whether universal credit will work or not has to relate to the three, the structure of it, the funding of it and the way it's implemented. The structure has some merits, but the way it's been funded and the way it's been implemented will make it firstly very difficult to know if it makes a difference or not, and secondly, I think that there's some headwinds that it's almost created for itself. Thank you. Others want to comment on that, Mr Joyce. I'll come in there. I guess just to start with the overall trends in in-work poverty, the big picture background. Broadly speaking, the overall rise over time in the proportion of people in poverty who are in a working household, that's been going on for some time, so that's not itself a universal credit-related phenomenon. You can break that down into having three different causes, actually, very broadly. One is that employment has risen a lot, so less of the poverty problem is about worklessness than it used to be, so that's the good side. The other is that, and this is particularly a story of the last decade or so, although it actually predates the crisis a little bit as well, is low earnings growth, and if anything, that's been particularly the case for households at the bottom end of the earnings distribution. The third is the big decline in pensioner poverty. All of those things combined mean that a much bigger fraction of our poverty problem than it used to be is about people who are in work not earning enough to take them above the poverty line and less about the things that more drove it in the past, which were worklessness and poverty and old age. Of course, those problems are still there, but just as a proportion of the total, they are smaller. I think that's how I would see the big picture context for some of what you said. In terms of how universal credit will affect inward poverty, I guess I'll break that down into at least two different categories as well. First of all, there's what are the direct impacts that it will have on household incomes and of working household incomes, given that it changes what different people are entitled to. There, it's definitely a mixed bag. There are a significant group of working households who will keep more benefits under universal credit than they would have kept under the old system. In that direct sense, that will increase their incomes or top up their incomes and tend to act to reduce inward poverty. In particular, inward renters tend to do relatively well in terms of entitlements to benefits under universal credit. One way of thinking about that is that it's basically because they're the people who, under the current system, are typically losing both housing benefits and tax credits as they increase their earnings. Whereas now, those two things are combined, there's only one tapering rather than two going on, and so they essentially lose their benefits overall at a slower rate because they're only subject to one means test at any one time, not two. On the other hand, there are plenty of working households who lose, and particularly those who own their home, but many others as well lose. The other aspect of universal credit, of course, or the other several aspects of universal credit are the non-financial ones, so perhaps we'll come on to conditionality in more detail later, but those are all going to be really important as well. I think it's definitely too early to say that universal credit is really having an impact on those poverty figures at the moment, partly because especially when the survey would have been done, universal credit really wasn't getting anywhere near being rolled out to anybody, and a minute still isn't, so I think we will take time before we see that. Just to add a little bit to some of those longer term trends, I think there's definitely been the reduction in worklessness, so more families being in work, but what we haven't seen at the same time is any real reduction in the proportion of people in low pay, and we know that if you are stuck in low pay, then only a small proportion of those people will escape, so different pieces of research we've done in the past suggest that it's something between only a quarter or a sixth that she managed to escape from low pay within 10 years period, and so I think the combination of those two things are partly driving this increase in the proportion of people in poverty who are in work. I think there's something else that has happened especially with relevance to universal credit is the importance of the in-work support that people get to whether or not they'll be in poverty or just in general to their incomes, and that's partly the increase in generosity to the system through the kind of 2000s, and it's also the increase in renters as well, so more families are getting support through the housing benefit system, so the amount of support within the system for those lower income working families is playing a bigger role in whether or not they're in poverty essentially, and some work we've done recently looking at underreporting of benefits within the kind of survey data suggests actually it's played a bigger role than the kind of surveys pick up, so I think that just kind of underlies the importance of universal credit in the future. I think the one other financial gain that I don't think Rob picked up on is the gains from take-up, so because it's the single benefit more families will get everything that they're entitled to, and actually that's probably going to benefit some of the lowest income households the most, so there are some positives to universal credit even though overall we think it's going to make families overall worse off. Thank you, that's helpful. I might start off with some questions around conditionality and then open up to other members. Clearly, this committee will want to scrutinise where potential weaknesses could be because we'd like to see the situation improved, and a certain constituents of mine who have not had to previously engage with the, if you like, the benefits system in this way because working tax credits didn't quite work like that, it was a different beast if you like, have concerns about that engagement when you use expressions of the conditionality, people get very nervous to hear conditionality, sometimes they think sanction is what they think, so my understanding from looking at my notes is that the intention is that it won't be ours based in terms of getting universal credit in relation to those that are in work, it will be income based, so the hope will be that those individuals will qualify if they manage to get the monthly income based on a 35 hour week at the minimum wage over that month and all the fluctuations that they can be there in. Now, I understand whether that's right or wrong is another matter, but I understand that. I also understand that there's been a light touch approach to those on universal credit at the moment in relation to conditionality and requirements that could be placed upon them. There's a residual sanction rate of 2 per cent for my notes in relation to that, and the UKig of the DWP was doing a randomised control trial for those moving on to the system. Helpfully or unhelpfully, I believe, that report is out this morning, so you may not have the time to look at it. I have a very brief opportunity to look at it, and if I could read out one paragraph from that, it says that the evaluation explored the link between sanctions and outcomes amongst frequent and moderate support participants by asking whether their universal credit payments had been stopped or reduced around one in five participants in both groups supported that this had been the case. Whilst looking at changes in hours worked and earnings between wave 1 and wave 2, there was no difference between participants who said their universal credit had stopped or reduced and other participants. What was unclear about that one in five statistic, whether that meant that there was the potential for conditionality leading to sanction or benefit withdrawal? I suppose that that's a long lead-in, and I apologise for that, but what concerns would witnesses hear this morning have if one in five fell foul of, if you like, not the light touch system of conditionality but the fully-fledged system of conditionality? What are the concerns more generally in relation to conditionality for those in work receiving universal credit? Mr Finch? I suppose that I'll start a bit where you did with them, who will the in-work conditionality apply to. You've right that it's based around earnings, and at the moment the aim is to capture people who aren't earning up to the equivalent of a full-time job at the minimum wage. There's also exceptions within that if people have things like caring responsibilities. In theory, at least, the work coach and the job centre will be able to determine a suitable amount of work that you should be able to do to fit around your other responsibilities. The trial that DWP have done so far, I think it's very good that they have been testing out this type of support. Like you said, the trial itself was quite light touch. They had a range of different types of intervention that ranged from a phone call every two months to bringing people into the job centre every two weeks, which is pretty much in line with the kind of approach that you'd get under JSA. My general expectation of that was that you wouldn't find out a huge amount because it was quite limited in what they were testing. What they have found is that the more intense types of conditionality—by conditionality, I mean the expectation that the people will come in every two weeks, not the sanctioning part of it—did have a bigger effect on people's earnings. They were more likely to see a boost to their earnings than the group who only had a phone call every two months. In that sense, it's quite encouraging. The scheme itself does have potential to help to support people to increase their earnings. It's the natural progression for the benefit system to take, given how well we're doing on employment and how badly we're doing on low pay. The real concern is just exactly how strong that conditionality is and the fact that you're dealing with a very different group of people because these are people who are already in work. Finding time to go to the job centre is going to be very different. If there is very strong conditionality applied to the group that this won't work as well as it could do, the potential is in finding people that need support and then giving them the right support that they need and doing that potentially in quite an intensive way. The one thing to remember with this trial so far is that it's very early days, and I think that potentially the people who are on universal credit were probably—it could well have been the harder cases because they're people coming from unemployment into work to be on universal credit in the first place, whereas in the long term you will have people who maybe have been in low pay and in work for a longer period of time, and so they're already established in the labour market. I think that that's one group that would be really good to focus on in future. The final question around the work conditionality is the extent to which DWP are doing the support or whether other agencies are doing that support. I think that the main advantage universal credit has is that it has the information about people's earnings and so you can find the people who have been stuck in low pay, but whether or not the job centre is the right body to administer that support is, I think, a potentially different question. I think that it really should be working with a wider skills body that will help support people to progress, and that's partly because not everyone in low pay is going to be on universal credit, so you need the two interacting well together. With universal credit it is still very early days. The out-of-work conditionality has taken a couple of decades to get to this stage, so I don't think that you can expect to see amazing results overnight with this, but I think that it's worth kind of persisting with. Place to start. The conditionality within universal credit includes, of course, in work requirements, so the onus on the claimant to increase earnings or hours. There's also other forms that you could describe as conditionality too, so work requirements for those that are out of work, and even the minimum income floor, you can argue that it's a form of conditionality for those in self-employment. You can argue whether any conditionality or not is right. I think that where we would be is that you need to have some form of conditionality, even a means test would be part of a system, but whether the conditions are right to achieve the outcomes that you wish, I think that's the first question. Then secondly, what happens if those conditions are not met? Are the sanctions correct or not? On that first one, are the conditions right to achieve the outcomes that you wish? I think that the Resolution Foundation has done a lot on this, and the IPPR has done a lot on this, but career progression has to be to us the sort of overriding principle, not just within universal credit, but more generally for your interventions into the labour market, because career progression is at the heart of in-work poverty. If you can drive people up into higher pay or promotions or better terms and conditions, you can begin to tackle some of the economic and social problems that we have. The conditions do not seem to us to be particularly focused on that progression. It still seems to be focused as if we are in a high unemployment scenario context, and that any job is the aim. To us, we have to aim a bit higher than that. Equally, the problems with the conditions as far as we are concerned, conditionality as far as we are concerned, is that it puts the full onus on to the claimant. The idea that it is the claimant's sole responsibility to increase their hours or increase their earnings to the point that it satisfies the universal credit system just bears no relation to reality—it is your employer, it is the economy more generally—as well as the claimant that will have an onus or responsibility to deliver that. Moving on to the sanctions, are the sanctions right? They seem incredibly extreme as far as we are concerned, so whether they are being applied like touch or not, the possibility of 13 weeks of a sanction after a few sanctions prior to that for not meeting those conditions is almost building destitution in as a policy tool, which we can see whether you are looking at this from an economic point of view or a fair and ascetics point of view, we can see no argument for. Our committee is not trying to work to establish why one in five participants in the randomised control trial have had universal credit reduced, or indeed there are a variety of reasons for that, of course, but that just jumped out with an initial glance. Mr Joyce will move to other questions from committee members. Just a couple of small things to add to what has already been said. I guess in general when we are thinking about the extension of conditionality to people in work, which is a really radical move by the way in some ways, there is very little, if any, real precedent for this from other countries, which is one of the reasons why the evidence on what kind of effects it might have is so sparse and why actually I think these kinds of trials are really welcome. It is great that for once the Government is trying to trial things in a way that allows them to be evaluated and their effects to be estimated, but I guess I am thinking of two things here when I am thinking about what effects will this conditionality have. First of all, is it going to bring the benefits that are desired from it, which is essentially about stimulating more pay progression? As I say, we basically do not know the answer to that question. It is a really key thing for the Government to one way or another try to be focused on because, as has been mentioned, pay progression is a really, really key issue. A lot of low pay in general is really about a lack of pay progression. For example, if you compare the earnings of lower-educated versus higher-educated people, you tend to find that a lot of the differences come about because of a lack of progression. They end up with much more different earnings and they start to be at the start of their careers and they diverge thereafter because of a lack of progression. A lot of low pay is about a lack of progression. That is a really key issue, but we do not know what effects it is going to have on that. It may well be that to have a big effect on someone's earnings progression and career progression through this kind of means is a very, very resource-intensive exercise, of course. That is, I think, one point. I guess the other question is, will it have negative effects that we do not want? Will we, for example, be sanctioning the wrong people? Are there going to be people who are losing out from the sanctioning regime who we do not think should be losing out? Do we think, for example, that the discretion of people in the job centres can always adequately distinguish between cases where someone is not securing higher-paying work because the labour demand in their area is not there from cases where they are not trying? That is the obvious distinction that you might be trying to make and it is not clear that that will be made perfectly in all cases and that could lead to people being sanctioned who no-one is really intending to be sanctioned. I think that those are the two sides of the coin that are key. I have not had a chance to digest yesterday's report. Particularly given that, I do not think that I am in a position to say much about what the evidence tells me about either of those things at this stage. I think that's fair enough. I move to open questions to Alison Jackson. Thank you very much for your evidence so far. Mr Gunson and I actually shared a—we were on a panel at Edinburgh University on Friday working with young researchers who were looking at the need for good evidence to inform decision making. We could perhaps argue that we don't have sufficient evidence at the moment to really understand the impacts of in-work conditionality. However, I do have a concern that this group of people are being used as guinea pigs in what could be a disastrous experiment. However, I would just like to ask a couple of questions. This idea of in-work conditionality, I do find it quite hard to get my head round. When is it ever enough? When are people ever making enough effort? I am entirely unconvinced that this is a sound principle. However, is there a possibility? In very general terms, we are told in our briefing that a person on universal credit can be subject to conditionality if they are earning below a certain threshold. As we have heard, that is assumed to be 35 hours' work at the national minimum wage. Could people work more hours than that simply to reach this income threshold? Could we be looking at people who are working six hours a week in two jobs? I am just trying to understand what it is that we are trying to achieve here. What are the impacts? The reason for tying it to the minimum wage is that, as long as the minimum wage is being enforced properly, there is a guarantee in a sense that, if you are working that number of hours, you will be taken out of the conditionality regime. That is the logic for tying the level below which conditionality applies to some number times the minimum wage. As long as it is being enforced at the minimum wage, we would not necessarily see 60-hour weeks as a consequence of in-work conditionality. What you may see, though, is whether it is lone parents, whether it is second earners in a household that are working less than full-time, being, again, if the judgments are incorrect at the discretion of the DWP or Job Center Plus, being pushed out either to work more hours than suitable for their circumstances or to see a reduction in their entitlement to universal credit. That relies on the discretion and the judgment of people within the system that may or may not be correct. If it is incorrect, we could be causing a lot of harm, whether that be through either. You could be increasing hours inappropriately or you could face a cut to your entitlement. I think that the discretion point is really important. Work coaches are being expected to determine the perfect number of hours for someone with caring responsibilities. Getting that right is going to be really hard. People will have to know a lot about not just the job market but the childcare market to make sure that you are getting the right balance. There is a lot of pressure on advisers for that. I suppose that this is where you have a balance between having a set hours rule that is within the tax credit system and trying to provide something more tailored, but it all depends on how good your decision is. What is a bit of a shame is that the new area of reform is very much coming at a time when we have had such a long period of conditionality, getting a bad reputation and being tarnished by a heavy sanctioning regime. If you look back to the 2000s, you had things like the ERA trials, which were employment retention and advance, I think that they stood for, but they were basically an early form of trying this and saying that you can do things to boost earnings progression. There is evidence there that there was one pilot where single parents were given a time-limited payment if they could sustain full-time hours. They got an extra payment for a year if they stayed in full-time employment for so many months. That was shown to boost the number of single parents hitting that number of hours. What was very important was the support that they got alongside it, so it was not just the incentive, but the support. That would fall within what you would call a conditionality ratio, because there are conditions attached. That seemed to have a positive outcome, but it came at a time when there was less negative perception of that type of intervention. Another question, convener. Mr Gunson spoke of the link between the minimum income floor as a type of in-work conditionality for self-employed people. I am struck by the idea that you are assumed to have a certain income whether or not you actually have that income. How can that be workable? It seems to be based on the principle that—maybe this is unfair—the universal credit system assumes away the complication of claimants in order to make it much more, I suppose, not easy but less difficult to run the system. With self-employment, we had a big expansion in self-employment post-crash. It has settled down a bit since. Those same people in self-employed employment are now being asked to get themselves up to at least minimum wage, and if not, they will assume that they have it and will cut their universal credit accordingly. That seems completely divorced from their needs. It might help the system to be delivered more easily, but it will not help the claimant in that case, particularly after the whole thrust of policy has been deliberately or otherwise to get people into self-employment as an alternative to unemployment. There is a 12-month transition period before the minimum income floor kicks in. Some people have argued that that should be longer, but the old system, if you like, took the risk of very high fluctuating income or low self-employment income. This one almost devolves the risk down on to the claimant. Is there any hope at all of that being halted, looked at, revised? There has been, I think, a resolution foundation that has made strong representations to the Government to another CPag and, I think, to the GLAF who you will hear from in the next panel, likewise. So far, there has not been any sign that the UK Government is going to move on that. I am interested in some of what the resolution foundation has had to say about the whole issue of incentive for work. One of the claims that was made originally for changes to the benefit system, specifically around universal credit, was the idea that there would be an increased incentive to work. That risk of puth on words in your mouth does not seem to be what you have found, but are you keen to hear what you have to say about that? The big thing here is that, since universal credit was first introduced, you have had these large cuts to the work allowances that were announced in the budget in 2015. They are very core to the kind of strength of the incentives within universal credit. That, I think, is one key thing to hold in your mind as I start to talk through more of the detail of this. The one place where universal credit introduces something called a work allowance, which means that you keep all of your benefit income up until a certain level of earnings, whereas in the current system you have had those benefits withdrawn pound for pound. There is currently no financial incentive to work very short hours in the current system, so universal credit improves those incentives. I think that that could be good for people like people with quite significant barriers to working more hours, so that might help single parents with very young children or more disabled people. As you start to move up the number of hours that people are working, you start to see the impact of the cuts that have happened. What that means is that, essentially, you will start to get less in-work support for some people at the kind of 16-hour threshold of moving up into full-time work, and that creates a weaker incentive for some. It is quite hard to make a very broad statement, although we did try to make one, but because of the complexities of how the support has changed for different types of families, so, as I think Rob was saying earlier, for renters the overall taper is lower, so some people with a higher amount of rent would be keeping potentially more of their support when they get up towards higher hours. It is also the shape of incentives that is very important, and for us the two groups that we are quite worried about are first single parents who start to have the taper applied to their earnings at a relatively low rate, and that is much less generous than it was at a relatively low point of their earnings, and that is a much lower point in their earnings than it was in the original design of UC, so they will get to maybe eight to ten hours and start to have their benefits withdrawn. The risk there is that they do not see an incentive to progress beyond that point and get stuck at quite low levels of earnings. I think that you would expect them to maybe spread out their earnings a bit, but the sweet spot of incentive, if you like, is now lower than the 16 hours that was in the tax credit system, and we definitely saw a spike of lone parents around that 16 hours. For second earners, because UC is very much incentivising kind of a person in the household to get into work, it is more generous towards a single earning family, so in a couple that makes the incentive for the second earner to enter work less generous and they also will see around 63 per cent taper will apply to everything that they earn, so if they move into work they are standing to lose up to around two thirds of their earnings, so they have quite a weak incentive as well. In a world in which you want to boost people's earnings to potentially tackle in work poverty, these incentives are going against that. Overall, you can say that some groups will have gained and some are losing, the overall shift is probably not that big and certainly not the big gain that you are expecting that would have justified making such a big change to the benefit system, but the real risk is those groups, so you would actually want the benefit system to earn more and are now facing weaker incentives. Is there anything to add to that or does that just put some up? We can let Mr Allen back in for a further question. Mr Joyce? A couple of short points here. One, so I definitely agree with all that, that is a really good summary and it is a very mixed picture, I guess one additional thing to add would be that one feature of universal credit, which is a positive one, which has survived the cuts as well, the reason being that it is a kind of fundamental feature of the nature of integrating benefits, which is what UC is doing, is that it does have a pretty strong effect in making incentives a little stronger for the people who under the current system have really, really, really weak incentives, so under the current system the people who are working incentives are incredibly severely weak, are people who are subject to the loss of multiple benefits at the same time when they increase their earnings, and because UC replaces multiple benefits with one, those cases their incentives do get improved, and I think that that is a positive that is worth keeping in mind, but it is also the case that there are many other groups who don't have quite such weak incentives now, although still pretty weak in many cases, who actually see things get a little bit worse under UC, and that is why, on average, there is not much effect overall on working incentives, as David mentioned. The other point, which was at least implicit in what David said, but perhaps is worth just bringing out, is that when we are thinking about how incentives are changing for different groups, we probably care more in cases where we know that groups respond to those incentives a lot, so there is a lot of evidence from how people make choices and how that relates to their incentives that groups like single parents and second earners tend to respond more to financial incentives when deciding how much to work, and those are actually both groups who do less work out of universal credit in terms of incentives, so that is a reason why we might be a little bit more worried about them. You mentioned in your earlier remarks about the fact that there are large groups of people who appear to be trapped in relatively low wages for long periods of time. You also, from what you just said, described incentives in some circumstances incentive to work, but are we talking here about incentive to work in what may become a situation where they are trapped in low pay, and are there any incentives that you could envisage being built into the system which might actually be better at encouraging people to leave that trap and to work in the way towards better paid work? When it comes to the low pay trap, that goes beyond universal credit and goes beyond social security for us. David referred to this earlier. You have to look at your skills system, you have to look at the interventions that you can make to the side of whether it be sanctions or carats or sticks through the universal credit system. There is a risk that, without that, as you describe, we are pushing claimants out of work into poor quality work, or pushing claimants that are in low hours of poor quality work into higher hours of poor quality work. There is a risk of that. From our point of view, the conditions, the support around claimants for universal credit is not sufficient to allow people to escape from that. Those trials will see, as it rolls out, will see, but there are certainly risks that we see. The national audit office report into the universal credit also identified a good few risks, not just in that regard, but, for example, it finds that the system is very poor at the moment at identifying vulnerable claimants and tracking them and providing them with the support that they need. That may include some of those loan parents and second earners that we wish to see incentives for. Last thing, I might be referring to your previous question, but work incentives are one thing, of course, and they are very important. It is a huge part of in-work poverty, but the levels of support are also very important. Whilst work incentives may or may not have been improved and you have heard the complicated picture, what we do know is that, for lots of people in the universal credit system, they will be receiving less than under the previous system, despite working. Work incentives are just to be clear, of course, different from the amount of support that people receive. I think that Mr Joyce wanted to come in, and then we will move to the next question. You did not, Mr Joyce? Are you okay? I will make one more point. In general, it is worth noting that there is something of a trade-off between, for a given budget, for a given amount of spending that you are going to do on universal credit or any other means-tested benefit, there is going to tend to be a trade-off between focusing on encouraging people to do some work rather than none and focusing on, once they are in work, encouraging them to do more, because if you think of it as a set amount of money, if you allow people to keep hold of more of that when they start doing some work, then, for a set amount of money, you are going to have to withdraw it more aggressively from other people, higher up the earning distribution when they are doing more work and vice versa. So, there is, in general, a trade-off there. It is the case that the problem we have in general with poverty now is more about a lack of pay progression and less about a lack of employment. Nevertheless, if you want to change the structure of universal credit such as, so as to focus more on encouraging progression, there would still be a risk that you would, therefore, discourage employment for a given budget unless you are willing to spend more. Thank you, convener. Just a couple of questions. I was interested in the open station by Mr Gunson about the roll-out of it. Just before the summer recess, the committee took evidence from Highland Islands Council, who were very positive about the roll-out and how it was working, and because they had done the appropriate work, they were saying that there was very little problem with the transfer happening. Certainly, having spoken to muscle work, which was one of the early trial pirates and having visited them on a couple of occasions, they too have not raised those issues. I am just wondering where that evidence is coming from and why is it working in Highlands and Islands and maybe not working in other parts? Is it down more to do with the administration of the local authority rather than necessarily the concept? The second question might be more aimed at Mr Joyce or anyone else who can jump in. I have been interested to know about people who are self-employed, because, obviously, their income can vary dramatically from one week, one month, even one year. Will they be affected negatively differently from those who are in employment? Do we need to treat them differently from those who have a permanent 36-hour-week job? On the roll-out, bearing in mind the client group that has been rolled out so it is predominantly, as David was saying, longer-term but also fewer children, fewer families in the client group so far. That will change as we progress with the roll-out. The second thing is that there is evidence not from IPPR Scotland directly but through trussel trust and food bank use, through housing associations and renter rears, through more reported from claimants themselves, financial difficulties. There is evidence to suggest that, where UC has been rolled out, the indicators don't point in a positive direction, but you are also right to suggest that that will vary on how it is rolled out. Some of that is structural, some of that is the change in amounts, and you have heard some of this evidence already, but some of that will be about how it is implemented. I think that this is happening, but DWP needs to learn from where it is rolled out relatively smoothly and where it hasn't, particularly over this next, well, four-year period, as it rolls out fully. In terms of self-employment, I will leave Robert and David to talk more about it, but in terms of self-employment, those that are self-employed claimants are treated slightly differently from those that are in work themselves. One of the key things that we mentioned already is the minimum income floor. The quite short 12-month transition, imagine setting up a business and within 12 months being asked to at least get to full-time minimum wage profits, that's quite a tall order. Beyond that, there's also how the income or profits is counted, whereas for tax purposes, and again I think that the resolution has done a lot on this, tax purposes, it's an annual return on your profits. For universal credit, it's a month to month, which doesn't seem to seem too flexible to that cohort. I'll leave Robert and David to talk more about the self-employment aspect of it, rather than the local authority in the roll-out stuff. David Finch, do you want to? I will very quickly pick up on the roll-out part, which I think is it's very hard to know how badly or how well people are being affected by the practical administration of UCS as it's coming out. I think that a lot of the very bad stories are from much earlier parts of the implementation, where they literally didn't really have a full IT system built and things were going, and they had problems in that initial kind of IT system design. Since then, they've shifted to a new IT system. There are still some issues with that and that still isn't fully built, but the rate at which people's first claims paid in full and on time has improved. It was around 50-60 per cent, so half of people weren't getting paid in full on time, and now that's up to about 80 per cent. There hasn't been a big improvement from that 80 per cent so far, and some of that is about the additional information that the system needs to process the claim, so maybe your housing costs or your childcare costs. Again, something that Russell mentioned is that UC very much makes its own system simple but puts all the burden of finding information on the claimant, and so I think that's partly why it's hard for people to get the right information to the system to get their claim processed on time. There's definitely room for improvement there, but it has improved, and I think that there are signs that the core of what is now of the UC IT system has improved and is improving over time, so I think that hopefully we will see less of those problems as we go forward. That is quite important because there's a very negative perception associated with universal credit, and the one gain that you still get from it is this gain in take-up where people will get more of their benefits by claiming, and if people are put off by the negative perception, that can start to move in the other direction, so I think that there is something about trying to find the positives in universal credit, and that's partly on DWP to make that more public as to what is actually happening, so that wasn't quick, was it? On self-employment... Over to Mr Joyce for self-employment, and that will give other members a chance to get in the last equation. I apologise, Mr Joyce for self-employment. There is a serious aspect to how the minimum income for the self-employed affects those with volatile incomes within the year, and of course in self-employment that's pretty common to have a constant stream of income or indeed expenses through the year, so basically what can happen is that if you take an extreme example to make it really easy to see, if you get all of your income in one month, then you in that month are entitled to no universal credit. In the other months though you have no income, but because of the minimum income floor you still don't get, you either get very little universal credit or still nothing, whereas if that income had been spread evenly through the year you may well have been entitled to a bit of universal credit throughout the year, and so you can have people, and it's not just a self-employed versus non-self-employed issue, it's also a volatile self-employed income versus non-volatile self-employed income issue, that you compare those two cases, you can have people who over the year make the same earnings, but one of them can get a lot more universal credit than the other, and so that is a pretty big discrepancy. One thing that it seems to me could in principle be done, I still haven't heard a good reason why the Department for Work and Pensions couldn't do this, is to decide whether to apply them in an income floor based on your previous 12 months of earnings rather than just the current snapshot, which would help to ameliorate that problem, but at the moment it seems to suggest that that's infeasible, I can't see why, but that is a big issue in terms of discrepancy between how volatile incomes are treated and how non-volatile incomes are treated for the self-employed. Pick up something that was mentioned earlier about the discretion of work coaches and your understanding and what evidence and assessment has been made around how that works in practice, so discretion of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but it could be if it is applied unfairly. Is there any evidence of a particular geographical variation, for example, in the application of that discretion? What is the guidance that work coaches are working to try to keep some kind of consistency? I would be concerned that there are very subjective decisions therefore being made in individual cases that could vary widely depending on the discussion of work coaches, so I am interested in just a bit more on what evidence is being gathered, what your understanding is and whether or not there is that variation being picked up. I think that this is probably a quick answer. I don't think that there is any great evidence to show that kind of variation at the moment. What is worth thinking about is that the role of the work coach is much expanded beyond what is currently expected of the traditional Job Centre Plus adviser. There is a lot more information that they need to be able to understand and apply appropriately. DWP has a training scheme to make sure that people go through it and have a qualification to say that they are at work coach status, but there is still a huge burden on them. The pay is not exceptional for what is expected of them, particularly when you think that if the decision goes wrong, it will have a really big impact on someone's life. I guess that it would be good to see some more detailed information on how that is being applied. The anecdotal stuff that you hear is that it is not those difficult decisions about how many hours they think someone should be working that they get wrong. Sometimes things like is someone's self-employed or not is being got wrong as well. That is very much the anecdotal thing that you hear through the child poverty action group cases where areas have occurred. To back up, there is very little evidence just now, and the National Order Office report would suggest that we may never know in many respects how universal credit is performing. I think that this is one of those. How would we be able to tell, maybe comparing across local authorities, but even then the economies are very different in some respects? How would we know whether those decisions are being gotten right or not? I am not clear that DWP has the processes in place to allow us to know that in the future. You would certainly recommend that they should have, presumably, and that they should be gathering that as part of the roll-out process. Yes, as best as possible. The only very brief thing to add is that, as well as relatively low pay, as well as a huge demand in terms of the breadth of the roll, there will be a huge demand in terms of the number of claimants per coach in the future, hundreds, I think. It looks at a big risk, particularly given, as we just discussed, the in-work conditionality aspect. Michelle Ballantyne. I want to talk a bit about fluctuating income levels and how people are affected, obviously, with universal credit. Calculating the rears on a monthly basis, and DWP has said that it is really the individual's responsibility to budget. I would like to ask your view on that. Obviously, with the thresholds changing as well in terms of surplus income, what your view on that is, and how you think it affects people, and what, from each of your organisations, what your view is on how you see should handle that whole element of budgeting and fluctuating incomes and thresholds? It seems to be blunt not good enough to suggest that people on the lowest incomes fluctuate incomes potentially insecure work, whether they are self-employed or otherwise. It is not good enough to suggest that they need to just budget better. We know that this certainly has been at least a temporary trend in the economy over the past 10 years, and it could be with automation, with lots of changes that we see coming our way, a bigger part of the economy. To have primary, out-of-and-in-work poverty benefits or social security payments that cannot really handle fluctuating incomes very well seems to me to be an absolute miss. What should they do? I think that it is £2,500 just now before you start to carry over the income to the future months, that is reducing to £300. That seems awfully low. We have discussed self-employment too in terms of the minimum income floor, whether you do that months a month or whether you do that over 12 months. That is tweaking. Those tweaks would be important, but more fundamentally you need a universal credit system that can better handle fluctuating incomes and self-employment, because that might be a part of our labour market that is here to stay. Given that comment, what would be your solution in terms of it? Everybody says that, but I suppose that it is more about what should we do then? We touched on some of those things. The minimum income floor in and of itself is that even the right principle to have. Why not, as David was saying, base it on last year's earnings? Discuss there the idea of having a much higher threshold before you carry over, which again would even outfluttration in incomes. That is another. The annual rather than monthly self-employment check of income is another. Beyond that, I think—oh, sorry. It is not just to self-employ the supplies to employed people as well. Are you looking for parity across those two things? It is more to do with being able to iron out those fluctuations. To be honest, the trade-off here is that you will be paying out benefits to people through universal credit that may be having a good months in the vertical commas or a good quarter, but the trade-off is that if you do not do that, you will not be paying benefits to people who desperately need them. Again, building in destitution into the system as a design. I hope that that is clear in terms of some of the things that we could do. Beyond that, again, the direction of travel has to be about catering to that cohort in a much better way than UC does just now. There are a few things within that question. I will try to do them quickly. In principle, universal credit could smooth someone's income out month to month because you have your month of earnings and then you get your payment three or four days later if everything is going nice and smoothly. That will reflect what you were in the previous period, so that could actually smooth things. The potential problem is that people may not be able to understand what that amount will be. It is a change in the current system where you just get paid a flat monthly payment, which at least, if you know what the money is, you can try and budget around that because you will also know what you have earned. Actually, UC can support some people with fluctuating earnings because if you are taking earnings over a month, then if you have different amounts of work week to week, it is already doing some averaging within that, so it does smooth a little bit. The big picture thing here is that universal credit is going at one end of the spectrum where it is assessing income on a monthly basis and trying to get that payment accurate to that amount of income, whereas the tax credit system went completely the other direction and tried to ignore any change in circumstance at all because it simply could not handle them. It had the big disregard on income change. So, really, what you are trying to get to is a trade-off between do you have some form of averaging or against having a more timely system? I think that where you go with that, you could have a three-monthly system, but you are always going to have a trade-off between either your spending more out in the benefits will be inaccurate and that might lead to over and under payments, which does not really get reflected when you talk about universal credit, but that causes a lot of hassle for people as well, so you probably want to avoid that. Then, when you have a very tight monthly assessment period, because of the way in which the earnings come in are counted within that month, it is when they are actually paid to you rather than the way you may think that the month of work that that income actually applies to, that causes people to potentially move out of the system, so you could get two pay packets in one month and that means you have earned so much that you have moved out of the system altogether. You could go to an actual average of your earnings over the period for the work that you did, but then how are you going to measure that? There are lots of trade-offs there, and I am not offering a great solution to that. The surplus earnings thing is a very specific, complicated rule. I do not know anyone from some of the accountants that look at the low-income tax reform group, but I think that they very much understand all the technical detail. They think that it is far too complicated. I do not think that anyone really understands them, but from what I understand, the purpose of it is to stop people colluding with employers so that they get paid in periods to maximise their UC. The likelihood of that happening is quite slim, and if you are worried about that, you can probably do it through enforcement arrangements elsewhere where you actually target employers who are suddenly coming out with odd pay arrangements rather than doing this very complicated work around on top of UC. It is very much for people who you think might be moving out of UC. The real risk there is that, if they lower the threshold back to £300, you could have someone who takes on some seasonal work. Their earnings accounted against their UC for the next six months, though they are not getting any, so they drop out of work and get no income at all. That is not really the incentive that you want to create. I would suggest that they are scrapped entirely. I do not think that they are really complicated and they potentially create some perverse incentives. If there is something about the other end of it, maybe you said at the beginning of your introductions that we could not look at a lot of this in isolation, that we needed to look at it in terms of the job market, in terms of the economy as a whole, and maybe there is something at the other end about the rules about how you pay people, whether we have a fixed day for paying people so that it aligns with how we also do benefits. I suppose that it is the extent to which UC is trying to mirror the world of work, as it says. I suppose that it is hard to say that the number of people in universal credit probably does not justify all employers moving. I would think that it is for DWP to move a bit, and I do think that this is something that will eventually, as more people get on the system, and you have many more working families on the system, they will have to move on it in some way. Do you see more of the DWP to move the pay date of UC to match the pay date of somebody's employment, so if it is the last Friday of the month or the last day of the month? Have you had those conversations? At the moment, you get a set entitlement period from the day you claim. What DWP probably does not want is that if everyone is paid at the end of the month, everyone claims at that point so that they get the same assessment period, because it just means that lots of people are claiming on the same day, essentially. I think that the problem, though, is that even if you have a set pay day, your employer probably does not always pay you on that day, because you have things like bank holidays, they just get the payroll wrong, or you might be paid for something in a rears for some reason, so it is just very hard to get that perfect. I think that you probably end up somewhere in the world of averaging things out, but your trade-off then will be inaccuracy. To come in, I will let you in briefly before we move to George Adam for the next question. What is he saying is that some of this has to change. Russell Gunstan suggested a number of ways some of these matters could change. Mr Finch said that we could just stop some of it altogether, but just Mr Joyce, it would be quite good if we got a unanimity or otherwise amongst the panel some of the other questions that Michelle Ballantyne was raising. Does the system have to change and take account of some of the suggestions that Mr Gunstan was making, and Mr Finch said that we should just scrap some of that on the income floor? I find it hard to be totally categorical, because I am not being a tax administration expert, I do not really know. I do not feel too confident knowing exactly how severe those concerns are that the Government clearly has about manipulation of the timing of earnings and whether there are better ways of trying to get at that than what the Government is proposing. I definitely think that the surplus earnings rules in trying to tackle that problem are clearly having negative effects as a side effect, so at the very least there is a trade-off here. The way I think about this is that basically in general the Government is always having to make a choice between is it trying to alleviate short-term hardship, which points to having short assessment periods, or is it trying to focus resources on people who are in a longer-run sense of the worst-off, which points to having longer assessment periods? Under the previous system we had for the out-of-work benefits, which are basically the safety net benefits, it took the former approach, which you might think makes sense. These are there to alleviate short-term hardship. It had short assessment periods, and for tax credits we took the other approach where we had longer assessment periods. Under UC it has to unify those rules and it shows in a shorter assessment period, but then it started worrying for some of these in-work claimants about the possibility then of manipulation of the timing of income. As a fudge to try to deal with that, it has brought in these surplus earnings rules, which effectively move you back towards something closer to an annual assessment period or a six-monthly one. By doing that, because that is then affecting all UC claimants, not just the equivalent of the old tax credit claimants, it is affecting the out-of-work safety net too, then you get these situations where someone can be earning a decent income, but perhaps expecting to continue doing that, spending it, not making provisions and you might not think totally unreasonably, they just then suffer a big shock. They fall out of work and they have to wait quite a while to get UC because of these surplus earnings rules. That seems like a pretty severe characteristic for a so-called safety net to have where you have to wait a long time when you suffer a big shock like that. I don't have a magic answer. I think the key question I would want to know more on is how much more can the government do to try to distinguish the genuine manipulation that it is worried about from other cases and also how important anyway is that genuine manipulation, how common is that as David was pointing to? In some ways, it is bringing in local discretion, but that is back to Shona's point around how we manage that local discretion. George Adam. Good morning. I would just want to ask—it is about fluctuating and self-employed incomes and self-employed again. As David Finch already said, universal credit is meant to mirror the world of work, but if you are a self-employed person and over the year you get by, you manage to get by, but there are peaks and troughs all the way, I know because I come from a self-employed family. If that happens over that period, then surely it is a disincentive to the individuals to get involved in the system, because you have got to report monthly as opposed to annually under the previous system. Effectively, you are sitting there month after month, another kind of burden on you, you are getting on with your business, dealing with your family life and at the same time, you have got universal credit as a DWP, the dark cloud over your shoulder and you do not know if it is actually going to—you are going to have the support there that you need that might put bread on the table. Surely that is a disincentive to self-employed people? I suppose that, in theory, it could be. If you are having to interact in the benefit system in the way that you are not used to as a self-employed person, that might add red tape and disincentivise you to get the support that you need. The thing to bear in mind when it comes to self-employed work these days—IFS has done a good amount of work on it—is that a lot of the self-employment that we see in the economy across the UK is very low-paid, so I think that 4 per cent of self-employed people earn more than £40,000, and the average is that profits have dropped from about £15,000 to about £12,000 between 2007 and 2012. Those are self-employed in name, but they are in many ways low-income, low-paid—the distinction between self-employment and insecure work, for example, is quite blurry at points, if not legally, in terms of the experience. I suppose what do we do about it? If it is a disincentive, then what we need to do is make sure that we have, firstly, all the outreach support that can be Scottish Government as much as UK Government, to say that there are benefits here and you need to claim them if you need them. I will not repeat, but we have touched on some of the things that we could do to reduce the red tape for self-employed people but also improve the system for self-employed people. To me, that seems to be the major issue and the major problem over everything—the whole of universal credit, whether it is said that you are working a normal job and the monthly reporting, especially if you are working in a job in which your salary fluctuates as well. You could be in a low income but you could have a couple of good months in between because of bonuses and everything else or overtime and things like that. Those are the kind of things that I am saying. The monthly reporting seems to me to be the complete madness of the whole situation. There must be a better way of doing that, which would be longer term. The red tape argument, but the previous question—the response there was not just red tape, but also around that fluctuation in income. If tax is calculated on an annual basis, then shouldn't we move to an annual basis for self-employed people through universal credit? Russell is the regulatory government that says that it is going to cut red tape that just keeps creating more red tape. Is that what you are saying, or am I paraphrasing you? I cannot possibly comment on that. You are allowed to address the point, if you want, Mr Gunson. Any further questions, Mr Adam? That is the end of this particular session. That was the first cut at this new inquiry. We thank all three of you for your time. We will shortly be going to another panel, but can we suspend briefly for a moment? Thank you very much. Members, we have had a comfort break that we have had to start again because of time constraints. My apologies for that, but I welcome the next set of witnesses, Deborah Hays, Scotland Policy Officer, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Paulie Jones, project manager at a menu for change, Oxfam Scotland. Thank you both of you, and thank you for your patience and waiting there during that last evidence session. I will move straight to questions. I will move to our deputy Mayor, Pauline McNeill. I would like to ask you some questions about your excellent paper. I am interested in the changes to the design of universal credit, which means that more children will end up in poverty. I think that it would be helpful to have more information about that transition for families who were in receipt of working families' tax credit and child tax credit. We know that those particular tax credits have lifted literally thousands of children out of poverty, and it would be a tragedy if the transition into universal credit means that we are going to lose the progress that was made. Obviously, the committee was instrumental in the child poverty act, and there are a few things in that that have been highlighted, for example, the issue of single parents and the tendency for them to be in poverty. Can I just draw the committee's attention for the record? A couple of things that I thought was interesting that I was unaware of. In your paper, you say that there is extremely slow growth in men's pay levels over the last two decades. On the other hand, faster growth in female earnings drive to large increases in the rates of employment paid among women, but that was an interesting point in the paper. I am interested in the answer of anything that can guide the committee about the impact of universal credit on child tax credit and families' tax credit. Debra Johnson, off debra. Thank you. As some of the evidence that you have heard, and as in the written submission, we are all worried about certain groups moving into universal credit. As you have heard from the previous witnesses, at the moment most of the move on to universal credit has been for single households without children. There has been quite a lot of modelling that has been done to look at what the differences in universal credit are. Those differences come on top of other changes, for example the benefit freeze and so on. You have got those changes being grafted on to what has already been a difficult transition for the last couple of years. As the previous witnesses said, the big challenge is for certain kinds of household types, particularly with, as you say, children, so families. Loan parent families and couples where only one works are particularly at risk of poverty. JRF has been doing some work recently and will be publishing a report in October. I think that what is emerging out of that evidence, although obviously it is not out yet, is that those are very significant parts of the groups of households who are in poverty and many of them are working. You will know that the organisational position is that work allowance is a key to that. So, if we could restore work allowances to the original design of universal credit, you would enable those hard-pressed families to keep more of what they earn and, in effect, that would help enormously. We have done a lot of modelling to suggest that that is the single most important thing that could change the prospects for those families. One of the figures that you have given the committee is that a loan parent with two children working 16 hours at average housing costs with no childcare costs would be 11 per cent worse off. There are other figures that you have given us where there is no childcare to children 4 per cent worse off. That modelling that you talked about of the working allowance, would those figures disappear or would they still show that there would be a reduction? If you improve the work allowances, it makes an enormous difference improving the work allowance in both of those circumstances. I can provide additional modelling after the committee if there are particular things that you want to talk about. JRF is full of very brainy economists and modellers and, unfortunately, I am not one of those. I know most of the headlines, but a lot of the detail will probably be best given to you by the analysts who do that work. So, if you have specific questions, I would be very happy to follow them up. I do not know if you can answer this, but in the transition for families that are in the constituency of child tax credit, at the moment, how does that transition over into universal credit? What is the calculator for that? How are we getting to those figures where some families are 11 per cent worse off? Will you be able to answer that? Most of those families will be moved over and managed migration. It is new claims that will be first touched by universal credit when it is rolled out. There is a process up to 2023 to moving all of the people who are currently on what is called the legacy benefits over into UC. Obviously, there are some concerns about that. People who are only in receipt of working tax credits, which are tax credits, unless they are in a full service area, are not currently on the system. Is that your understanding also? That relates to a question that was asked earlier about how the Highland and Islands councils were reporting that everything had been fine. Many for changes working on the ground across areas of Scotland, working with people who are turning to food banks who have no money left for food. Our information about universal credit is really about that very lowest income group and what their experiences have been. In undertaking that work, we have been in contact with a lot of councils who are at different stages of experiencing universal credit roll-out, full service roll-out. Although others have also reported that things have gone slightly better than maybe they were expecting, the big concern is what happens with the managed migration for the many more complex cases. Individuals who are in receipt of exactly the kind of credits that you talk about when they are forcibly moved on to the universal credit system and how that interacts because so far the majority of people who are on universal credit have individuals or with much more straightforward experiences. I think that both of your submissions have picked up on the fact that most 64 per cent of adults in poverty now live in working households, which seems directly at odds with the intention of the much repeated rhetoric that we hear from the United Kingdom Government that the best way out of poverty is to be in work. Clearly, something is going horribly wrong. I am just wanting to get the fact that is universal credit the best benefit for people who are in work or should we be looking at something entirely different? I am not a fan of the word worklessness, which is used in the information that we have today. We are getting more people into work, but they are still being paid too little, even with universal credit, to maintain the kind of life that we would want to see people enjoying. Do we have to look again at how this benefit is designed for those who are in work in particular? As you say, the majority experience of poverty now is from households who are in work. Universal credit is trying to provide a top-up to that, so my own organisation originally was supportive of the idea of a simplified system that was able to better respond to a whole host of different circumstances. The challenge, I guess, is whether the system, as it is currently configured, is doing enough to support the different kinds of families and the different kinds of constraints. What is behind the large prevalence of working poor are, as you say, low pay levels, insecure employment, cycling in and out of some temporary work. As the other witnesses have said, there are lots of issues about people getting into any job but not being able to progress on to a better job. Those issues probably require, I think, as some of the other witnesses have said, a wider response across the system, the skills system, the transport system, the housing system, childcare to actually be able to encourage families and create an environment for families where they can move on and they can improve their prospects. The work allowance is important because where families are working, it enables them to keep a little bit more of what they earn in order to progress. A simplified system, as universal credit, is trying to be, is fine in theory but it needs to be able to respond to the different constraints for different kinds of households. Loan parents, when only one parent is working, they do struggle to balance work and caring in a way that enables them to earn enough to work their way out of poverty. Two couple families where both parents work part-time again are very vulnerable to high levels of in-work poverty. We need to make sure that both wages and our strategies and policies around wage levels and work with employers and skills actually do at least as much of the heavy lifting as social security. You need both of those systems to be able to talk to each other and respond to the real-life circumstances in which different kinds of families are found. Just to add a little bit more about our experience of universal credit and the roll-out so far, I don't think it can be said often enough that evidence from the Trussell Trust, you'll know a UK-wide network of food banks, found that in areas of universal credit full service over a 12-month period, there was a 52% increase in the number of people who were turning to food banks. Now, that has to tell you that something is going wrong with the system when that many people can't feed themselves or their families, 52% increase. I think it would be worth discussing a bit more with the committee about and expanding on what was touched on earlier, not just about low pay but about the quality of work, the kind of jobs that people are doing, who are earning those very lowest levels. We have many, many testimonies and interviews from our research of people who are on temporary contracts. If you're in a temporary contract, we've talked about people who are self-employed, but if you're in a temporary contract, the universal credit system is not delivering at the moment. You come in and out of work and your universal credit, the amount that comes just does not reflect and does not see you through the gaps in the contracts that you would have. There are some interesting cases, most of our workers in Dundee, in East Ayrshire and in Fife, where there are big local employers who are well known for using temporary contracts all of the time. That has left many people and families without money for weeks on end, because their claim has been stopped and peaked at the amount that they earned in one assessment period. Their claim is closed and they've got to reapply and they've got an inbuilt waiting period before they get any more money. It's in that period that we find them turning to emergency food aid supplies just to try to make end meet. To what extent have those policies been, at this particular policy, universal credit, been equality impact assessed? It certainly seems to be hitting certain groups far harder than others. Clearly, there are winners and losers, but there seem to be a lot of losers here and they do seem to be quite focused. There have been a number of quite strong submissions to the UK Government about the impact and lances, particularly on women, people with long-term ill health and disabilities. That partly reflects women's gendered experience in the labour market, so it's an intersection between that equality issue. As Polly was talking about, the quality of work that people at the lower end of the income distribution tend to be exposed to. I imagine that it is probably for the UK Government to talk about the extent to which it has impact or quality impact assessed at its own work, but I'm aware that there have been quite strong representations to it. I'm happy to ask questions, but I'm looking at committee members. I'll let them come in at this point. Six per cent of workers are on temporary contracts. That was Oxfam's evidence. It would be helpful if you have some more detailed evidence, not necessarily here today, but as a follow-up of whether there are quite wide geographical variations there. Also, I suspect that we would assume that we have just been talking about the gender differentials. There would be a higher percentage of women on those temporary contracts, so it would be helpful to follow up with a little bit of the detail of any geographical variation, gender variation and evidence that you have around the impact of that group of the roll-out of universal credit. I am aware of some of the, certainly from my own, meal bag around some of the Dundee issues, but it would be helpful if we could get some more concrete evidence around that. From the data that we've got from the three areas that we've been working in, it's very consistent about who is turning up at a food bank with or is presenting at a job centre with no money for food and who has temporary, insecure work. A lot of men, actually, people talk about their partners and their brothers, and maybe that's because they're the ones, if we relate it to the evidence that we heard earlier, that the main earners and the women often are having the caring responsibilities and have become the second earners. Certainly, we've got a lot of data suggesting that lone mothers or single moms are very concerned about the expectation of them to be taking more hours and the anxiety that causes when it's them left to navigate how the kind of work they take on and the childcare system. Just as we touched on before in the earlier session, that you need a system that understands how all of these different areas interrelate, actually the experience of people that we've been working with across Scotland is that it's the system's not sorting that out, they're having to navigate that and making quite sophisticated choices about how they can manage to get this child in looked after at this time to pick up this temporary contract and then weave it all together in quite a complex arrangement that the end maybe doesn't even add up in terms of the numbers that people have to manage their accounts at the end. I don't think that J.R.F. has got some evidence to support some of that about who ends up in destitution and what some of those triggers are. It doesn't relate necessarily to temporary contracts but that's one element of that sort of shock that can plunge people into destitution to be happy to share that. Some of the gender data isn't as disaggregated to local areas as we might like so some of that stuff is quite difficult but I know our analyst colleagues have done some of that work so we're certainly happy to share that with you. I'm ffalupping a little bit of this story and I'll take you in next. I was just going to make the observation when my local job centre in Maryhill closed, one of the groups that was most impacted by it were lone parents, mostly single mums and two things emerged from that one. Some of them had dealt up a reasonable positive relationship with their work coach and actually because they were maybe changing that relationship was destroyed a bit but basic things about can they get a bus to get at their job centre one time, genuine concerns in relation to that. That's just to go to a job centre, that's not to get to a paid employment for 8am or 9am in the morning. Some of the barriers that my constituents would face out of work getting into work or actually being able to top up their hours in work are fairly basic things such as access to workable childcare solutions, public transport infrastructure and the affordability of work. Given the fact that universal credit was supposed to tackle in work poverty and give people pathways in career progression and you're obviously saying that there's genderised issues in relation to that, is there anything that universal credit is doing that addresses that in a positive way? I could sit here and ask all the negative questions and I'm happy to do that but is there anything that universal credit is doing in a positive fashion to deal with some of those barriers to work in the first place and then to making work pay for some of the most vulnerable people in my constituency? That the operation of universal credit has some of those things in its ambit but you're absolutely right that I suppose taking a more positive look at this, the sort of things that help people progress are dedicated advice and financial planning which they may or may not be supported to do through their job centre and other providers in the area. It is about planning being able to respond to the kind of travel to work areas that people might have when they're taking up new or additional hours. It is about the local strategic partners getting together and making sure that there is sufficient and accessible childcare that responds to the kind of jobs that people want to take up and you're right that the rapport and the relationship with work coaches or any other financial or other sort of expert advice is incredibly important to people who are in vulnerable circumstances, really understanding where they are now and what will help them move on. Those are the sort of magic things that will make a difference. Whether universal credit can be part of ensuring that those local systems work around people is another matter. I'd actually quite like to share with you a quote from somebody who we were interviewing, Steve from Fife, and he said, there's a gentleman in the job centre who's worked with me in the past and he knows that I'm computer illiterate. He says, anytime I go into the job centre, I don't ask for anyone else, I just say, can I speak to Alan? So we have got some good examples of work coaches who are clearly going beyond what they might be required to do to make sure that they can support people to fulfil the basic requirements and stuff. So there are definitely cases of that. We've also heard cases of very positive feedback about particular job centres around Scotland, which people have noted because it's not the experience that might have been used to in other job centres and they've said, oh, that one's a really good one and I get quite a lot of support there. So we know, I guess, those good examples show us that it can be done, that there can be improvements, which is a good thing, but overall, most of the feedback is that that isn't how, what people's experience has been. And I think it's also worth mentioning, we've worked quite closely with people from the DWP and people from job centres in the areas we're working in and not one of those people gets up in the morning to give people who come into their job centre a hard time. They are committed to trying to make it work and that's what they would say if they were here in front of you, but there's clearly a mismatch that a lot of individuals when the lowest incomes and their experience of the system is not an easy one. Somebody else said to us, and what they actually specifically gave us messages for people like you who have some role in decision making, they said, you know, I hope the government seemed to find a way to stop this universal credit. If not, then I don't know how everyone's going to get on. They're not going to manage. That is the general perception of people in the lowest income as they've tried to navigate their way through the system. And it's also the position of the organisations that run a menu for change that universal credit, the best thing at this stage is that it should be halted, the problems fixed before it continues. And it's worth not losing sight of that, I think, in the discussion about some of the detail. That's pretty clear. Can I just push a little bit more on how work coaches can or cannot support? Like work coaches like anyone else, they're MSPG, good, bad and indifferent ones. It's the structure of the system that they operate under as well. Just that idea, if they are to be supportive, I don't see how that can happen in an environment where they are more detached from the communities that they serve, they are in larger offices, they have a more varied client list in terms of the individuals that they're trying to support. I would expect that work coaches would need to know what a proper granular understanding of what local childcare provision looks like, a proper granular understanding of what local bus routes look like, of what local schools are, what the local economy looks like, because it's not good enough to say, there's a job three miles in that direction, why haven't you applied for it, because it just might not fly in terms of the individual experience of the constituents that I have? Others might not understand that. My feeling is that I'm not sure whether our work coach is getting enough training in that. Do they have enough time to do that even if they wanted to? Are they under pressures, which means that they can't deliver on the underlying principles in relation to universal credit themselves? That's probably a fair assessment. Russell mentioned the national audit office report, and certainly that was their concern. So whatever the report that's out today says about in-work support and its success or otherwise, the projection of the caseload that your average work coach will have, which has gone from being, as we've explained, quite simple cases to the whole spectrum of people, I can't see how you could give people the kind of granular or individualised or tailored support within that kind of context. I think that it's going to be extremely difficult, which is why I said earlier. I think that the whole system needs to come round that. If we were to make any success of it, the whole system needs to bend round that universal credit system and support, and we need to find ways of getting the most vulnerable claimants in touch with a kind of individualised and tailored support that will help them. We know from some of the work with some job centres that they have been developing quite detailed complex needs plans so that when people come in and they're not able to deal with everything that that person might raise in their session, they can refer them on to and link them up with other services that might be able to help them in the local area. However, the whole of our project of a menu for change is really focused on working with a range of local services in Fife and D and East Ayrshire, sitting at advice bureaus, job centres, emergency food aid suppliers, the Scottish welfare fund. The picture that we're getting very clearly in those three areas and anecdotal evidence suggests that it's the same across Scotland is that that whole safety net is full of people working really, really hard, but they don't feel that they've got a very simplified, co-ordinated, streamlined service, that many of those different services aren't aware of exactly what other local services are providing at what times for which client groups. There's duplication, there are services trying to manage cuts in their own budgets and Scotland's at a very great opportunity at the moment with the setting up of Social Security Scotland where you will have local delivery across the country. There seems to me quite an opportunity for some really exciting, strategic thinking about how you want all of those support services to support people in every local area, but in terms of easy access to be able to get all the advice and support that you might need because you're right at the moment, even for your constituents in the centre of Glasgow, you may well have bus journeys to get to different offices that you need to see to fill in particular forms to help you with different bits of support. They might have different opening times, that doesn't necessarily fit with your childcare or your work commitment, so there's a job to be done to really try and streamline and ensure that there's a safety net across all local areas in Scotland that works for people who are needing it and that isn't just designed around services that have developed over a number of years, maybe in isolation from each other. George Adam. Good morning. I just thought I would ask—we're already—just to go back to Shona's question when we talked about how universal credit impacts and barriers are faced by women, but also there's those with disabilities and carers as well. Do you have any information you can tell us today with regards to those impacts or can you get us that information as well? Possibly a combination of both. Certainly, we are worried in JRF about the impact on people with disabilities and more vulnerable clients generally. The experience to date has been quite challenging. It's a challenging system to interact with, so the more barriers or the more vulnerable your circumstances are, the more likely it is that it's going to be difficult for you. Certainly, there's a significant proportion of people who end up being destitute and who also have significant health concerns and that cycling in and out of poverty that we talked about is a specific concern for that group also. I'm certainly happy to follow up with more detailed information. That's obviously a difficult issue because there's a lot of carers out there that just look after the person and their family and don't see themselves as a carer. Is that an issue that we obviously need to have as a Scottish Government issue and Westminster, but is there not a way that we can... That's a serious issue from the fact that these people just go about their business day in, day out and how do we identify these individuals and how do the system get to them? That's lots of different questions. I think for this specific theme about in-work poverty carers are often in the background, as you say, just getting on with the job of caring, but they may also be a key feature of the kinds of households where one person is working, who are in poverty, who are unable to increase their hours or do more work, for whom work is an additional option for them and they are a specific group that are at risk of poverty, yes. There are lots that the Scottish Government has already committed to doing around supporting carers and bringing up the level of their financial support to that of JSA claimants, but there's probably more that we could do to identify hidden carers, yes. Specifically on people's experience of using or not having enough money for food and where they have disabilities, that has come out very clearly in our research and evidence that the most common source of income for households making applications, for example, for crisis grants to the Scottish welfare fund, are people who've got disabilities, so we know that they're more vulnerable, often more vulnerable to income crises and they're also way overrepresented amongst food bank users, people with disabilities. It's also worth drawing out that people experiencing problems with mental health comes up again and again in the group of people who are left with no money for food and who just seem to be falling through all of the cracks in the various safety nets that are meant to pick us all up. OK, Michelle Ballantyne. Those statements you've just made, are you referring to people who are on UC or people who are yet to go on to UC? I don't know. This is from wider food bank evidence that isn't specific to universal credit? I think that's the point, isn't it? A lot of these people are not on UC, they're on other forms of benefit or not on benefit, so that's a much bigger issue here than an impact of UC on these particular individuals. In terms of your food bank evidence, and I'm particularly interested in it, I'm the patron of a food bank and work very closely with them. One of the big problems is actually good evidence from food banks, because they're often not actually recording why people are coming, they don't have good evidence of what the reason is for being there, most of it's anecdotal. When we started looking at it and doing some work, there was quite a broad range. If we're going to tackle some of these problems, we really need to understand what the causes are and understand them properly. I agree. I don't think that you can fix a problem until you can measure it. But I mean, I don't work for the Trussell Trust, but the Trussell Trust who produced, I mean maybe the food bank you're a patron of is part of that network, so they do record in quite a lot of detail exactly who's coming, partly because for many of the Trussell Trust food banks, you're not entitled to a food parcel unless you've got a referral voucher from another agency. So there's quite a clear rigorous process for recording where someone's come from and what the reason was for them coming in order for them to be seen to be entitled to a food parcel. Just this week, actually, we've launched some research across Scotland for independent food banks, because that's over a third of emergency food providers in Scotland and to date hasn't been mapped. So, hopefully, the food bank that you're involved with will be able to participate in that and then we'll have very, very robust data. Thank you. On that point, I take Michelle Ballantyne's point, but I think earlier on in your evidence, Pauli, you said that in relation to the Trussell Trust, they had made a very direct link to where the universal credit roll-out was with an increase in the referrals to food banks. Presumably, then, the evidence from the research that you're talking about in terms of the independent food banks would potentially give us some of that information about whether or not the research from the Trussell Trust is in line with any research from the independent food banks, although I would find it hard to believe that food banks would operate in such a radically different way. It would be helpful, maybe, for the committee if we don't have it already, to get some of that detailed research from Trussell Trust about the links with universal credit. The 52 per cent increase was looking at what had happened in food banks where universal credit had been full service for 12 months, so it's not data from a month, it's 12 months of evidence, so that, I don't think, is disputable. They've also worked with a number of academics from the University of Oxford in particular, but lots of other universities that do leading work on food insecurity and who've done studies over a number of years to look at exactly what the relationship is between who is left with no money for food, who is turned to food banks, who actually has no money for food but doesn't go to food banks because that is probably the real tragedy that most people don't go to food banks. It's not a place that they would turn to, and, often, certainly in our evidence, we've got a lot of women again who feed the children and the partner, there's no food left and so they drink tea a weekend. We're really going to ask the same question that Shona Robison raised, but I want to pick up on the last point that you've made there about people who don't use food banks. Of course, it's valuable, as the work that food banks do is, we shouldn't regard them as part of the benefit system, and I hope that there's universal agreement on that. There is also, I am sure, replicated in other places compared to the place I live in. I'm sure it's not radically different in other places. The phenomenon where older people, particularly, would rather be hungry than claim food from a food bank in many cases. I'm not advocating that position, but culturally, for all sorts of reasons, there are people who prefer the sensation of hunger such as their dislike of having to be put in the position of claiming food on a charitable basis. As I said, I don't advocate that position, but how do we reach people who, for all those cultural reasons, simply will not go to a food bank? I think that the Scottish Government has really taken the lead on recognising why we want to build a robust safety net that catches everybody so nobody needs to turn to a food bank for the last few years. There was an independent working group that was set up to look particularly at food insecurity back in 2015, and they produced a report with a number of very clear recommendations, which the Scottish Government endorsed, and our project really came in on the back of that, looking at how to put some of those into practice. Most food bank volunteers would say themselves to you if they were here. We never set this up to be a long-term solution. We stepped in temporarily, and what on earth are we doing still here 10 years later. There is a lot of commitment in Scotland—it is slightly different to the rest of the UK—a lot of commitment in Scotland to try and build a system that supports everybody, with the focus being on income maximisation. The recent commitment to do the financial health checks for families on low income is fantastic. It is something that we would like to see rolled out for everybody, not just families, because it is certainly the case that many people presenting at food banks at the moment, but also many people who were in the first wave of universal credit were single men. We would want them to also be having a financial health check to make sure that they are not missing out on benefits. I think that as we see the increase of poverty for people in work, we know that most people in work maybe have not had an experience of using the social security system. Our systems are not set up with simple things like opening hours to make it easy for people to access that other support to make sure that they have everything that they are entitled to and that they are getting all the benefits and support that they are entitled to. I think that the focus for Scotland and for the rest of the UK should be about how do we make sure that we have not got a leaky safety net so that people have their income maximised, the people with lowest income have their income maximised, and they have everything that they are entitled to and do not need to turn to food banks at all. I am just interested in what the picture looks like if we do not fix that problem. Everyone has used examples. I am sure that other members have had people come to them. I have certainly had the numerous cases of single parents in particular with rising housing costs who have been working and who have not been on universal credit but have been in receipt of other tax credits. We will now be brought into the universal credit system that seems to me to be a bit crazy to upset that. However, life is not as simple for anyone, is it? A lot of these families increase the number of children with rising medical problems, the increase in inflammatory bowel disease, the increase in the diagnosis of Asperger's and other difficulties. I have had three families in the past two weeks come to me with children who have also got the added complication of managing that, and they are having to go to work full-time because the system is completely changed. It is important to highlight that we are dealing with in-work poverty for those who were previously in work and not on the benefit system trying to get into work. I think that that is an important aspect of it. I just wondered what you thought the picture looks like going forward. I think that it would be helpful for the committee to identify the groups that you think would be most at risk. I know that you have said some of it in your paper, but I just wanted to be clear, because I think that it is important to have that picture going forward. The Poverty and Inequality Commission has set out what they see on the basis of some of the evidence that former witnesses have been doing about the groups and the kinds of households that are most at risk. They are the ones that you would imagine. Loan parents, larger families, some BME and families where there is disability or long-term ill health are all vulnerable circumstances that mean that the roll-out of a less generous system, as it is in many cases, is going to be particularly difficult. Like Polly, our organisation will probably ask that universal credit at full service, at full roll-out, is just paused at the end of the year so that we get a sense of what that wider impact will be before we start the managed migration process and bringing in those groups that, as you say, have not yet been touched by the system, largely because of the sort of numbers and the complexities of those cases. It would make sense to let the system bed down first for all those new claimants and while full service kicks in. Your right individual households are often dealing with a multitude of challenges, whether that's housing or disabled child or what have you, and we do need a system that can be sufficiently responsive to all of those circumstances and make sure that families can move out of poverty. As you say, the majority of lone parents are already working, so JRF published a report recently that basically set out of the parents who are doing what the system universal credit requires of them. In terms of working hours, the majority of them are still in poverty. They are not actually being able to move out of poverty. I absolutely agree with Polly that we need the very least to make sure that the social security system that we design or the systems that we bring together create an effective safety net. We also want to pick up the issues from the first session and make sure that there's not just a safety net but there's actually a platform on to something that's better. We need to get both of those things right at the moment. As you say, it's a leaky net. We're losing people and often some of the most vulnerable people, but when we redesign that process, particularly in Scotland, we want to make sure that people can progress and that they can actually have a better prospect, not just move into in-work poverty, which is obviously the enquiries focus at the moment. The only thing that I just wanted to add was that some of the evidence that we've been picking up has been around the areas that people have been getting into with their rent, people in private housing. They make up the fastest grand portion of people in experiencing in-work poverty and certainly we've seen many people very quickly because their rent is included within their universal credit payment, that they're building up arrears with their landlords and Hillary, for example, said to us, the reason I have to go to the food bank is because I'm in rent and arrears, which means I'm paying my rent and my rent arrears off universal credit and then there's not much more left to go around. We're particularly interested in a freedom of information request that was put in at the beginning of the year to all local authorities in Scotland, which found that nine local authorities had set aside £9 million in their budgets to cope with the roll-out of universal credit and what that would mean specifically in terms of rent arrears owed to local authorities in Scotland as a result of universal credit roll-out. I think that that really highlights a reason to focus on what's happening with housing costs, again, for people at the lowest end of the income scale, but also it demonstrates the interrelationship between the UK-wide benefit system and universal credit, local authorities and individuals and their experience of the private rented sector. I have a question about my head around what universal credit is meaning for those who are moving on to who are in work and who haven't experienced it before in the idea of conditionality and that contract between the person and the work, previously receiving working tax credits or child tax credits independently of this whole universal credit system. The idea of pathways out of poverty, the idea of career progression and conditions put on so if a single mum is in receipt of universal credit and for the last year, a year and a half has been holding down a minimal wage job full-time, pretty difficult circumstances, but it's getting some form of benefit through universal credit. Who decides whether or not she's trying hard enough to move away from a minimal wage full-time job? Who decides whether or not there's actually a job out there that wouldn't make that single mother and her children worse off in a variety of ways, including financially, should she seek to take something else? The job might not even exist. Who's qualified to make that judgment when deciding to put conditionality on someone's universal credit claim? Who has that expertise and who would be doing it? I don't think that there's an enormous amount of evidence about how they will go about doing that simply because of where we are in terms of rollout and who's been picked up at this stage. One of the things that JRF is doing is commissioning at the moment some work to follow the rollout of universal credit in Glasgow, for example. You heard from earlier witnesses that some of the evidence and some of the challenges and some of the very, very terrible stories perhaps relate to universal credit in its design and in its rollout at an earlier stage, that some of those tweaks and flaws have been fixed or ameliorated in some way and that it will be better from now on. One of the things that we will want to do in our small project in Glasgow is just to assess the universal credit as it's implemented now and see what impact that will have. One slice of that will be sitting down with work coaches if we can and getting a sense of how prepared they are to support that wider cohort of people, including people in work, and what resources they have at their disposal to be able to make those kinds of decisions and what help they're able to draw on in order to help the clients that they'll be working with. I'll be happy to report back how far we get with those discussions in due course, but I think that that is a concern. What we know is that if help is tailored for individual people, if it reflects their circumstances, if it comes from a place which is we would like you and your family to get the best deal for you, as the other witnesses have said, lone parents and other kinds of families tend to be very sensitive to economic incentives and prospects to improve their family. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, how can I screw over the UK Government today? I think that designing a system that is much more supportive. I'm glad you have provided the only laugh on this subject. Just for those reading the official report, there was lots of nodding heads when that previous statement was... I do hope that I have a job when I go back to the office. We know that you can do that in a way that is very supportive and enabling for families. The question is, if you've got a caseload as a work coach, you've got a caseload of 290 people to support, how are you going to be able to spend that time individually with people to do that? What we know from other kinds of programmes and other kinds of interventions, particularly with lone parents who are particularly hard-earned, is that it is better. You get better outcomes if you are able to get people into the right job for their circumstances rather than any job. Pauli Jones Just a couple of things to share. Somebody said to us that their work coach I was told that if I walked out of my job, I'd get sanctioned by the job centre and I said, how can you sanction me when I don't have any hours? Somebody who had a zero-hours contract and wanted to leave it because she didn't have any hours, but as far as her work coach was concerned, that was equivalent to walking out of the job and therefore she would be sanctioned on the top of it. So there are clearly some problems with how some of the sanctioning works around changing work contracts like zero or contracts. Someone else who said to us that they come off universal credit because I was still expected to go look for work up to a certain amount of hours and for £1.35 I didn't see the point because that meant to have to spend all that money to get data for the internet which wasn't worth it. So for some people, the advice that they've been given from their work coaches doesn't actually make financial sense to be doing that. It's not the sensible logical strategy. Cut both ways. Sometimes the advice might be flawed because the work coach simply doesn't have the time to look in detail at what a sensible solution would look like for the client or it could be a lack of training. It does all seem to hang on if we get the structures right, if we leave that hanging there. A lot then depends on a trusting professional, compassionate and supportive relationship between the work coach and the individual. It's how you legislate and build structures around that because when you put in those relationships, those vary so greatly. Is there anything additional that you believe could be put in to support that? We touched earlier on the fluctuations in people's income. I think designing a system that has a little bit of flex in it is incredibly important because people's circumstances change and they're often dealing with quite difficult circumstances at home. A system that doesn't overreact with claimants would also be very helpful. That might be an area that the Scottish Parliament can do more about. Just smooth out some of the peaks and troughs for people and to provide some wider wrap-around. It reacts just a little bit less quickly to changes in circumstances that enable people to have a little bit of space to breathe. A couple more questions, and I apologize. Did you want any of my apologies? There are things that have been quite clear in the evidence that we've been picking up. One is around the issue of implicit consent. With universal credit, advisers, for example people who might work in a council welfare rights unit or within the Citizens Advice Bureau, were able to access the system to see what the current status of somebody's benefits were, which is really important because they may well be your first port of call if you were having a problem and you wanted it fixed. With universal credit, they don't have implicit consent. The only person who has implicit consent is your MP. I'm sure our MPs don't really want to be the first port of call for all of these issues, and it seems to me a very straightforward point to try and extend implicit consent so that advisers can support people who are struggling and have questions about universal credit. That's something specific. It's really important that the safety net built in through universal credit is within the DWP is maximised as well. There are short-term benefit advances and hardship payments that should be available to everybody who is having an income crisis. We would want to be confident that those are always made available and explained to somebody who might be in having an income crisis have no money for food that those are available. That isn't always the case at the moment. Just because of time constraints, I've got two further questions that have been intimated by members. After that, we'll have to close the session because we're running up quite close towards Parliament starting. Jeremy Balfour is followed by Alison Jordanson. I mean clearly your reports highlight the negative experiences that people have had, bit like MSPs. No-one ever comes to us when we've had a positive experience and say wasn't it such a great experience. Do you record positive experiences at all or do you simply put them to a side so that your report reads in a certain way? If so, are you able to share some of those with the committee? Jeremy Balfour did some work with Britain Things and it did some work with individual claimants and there were positive experiences. It wasn't wholly negative and the organisation has been able to share those. The profile of the people who had positive experiences tended to be people without any additional barriers who were working and for whom a high quality internet connection and all the things that enabled them as a household to interact with the system were all relatively straightforward. Some of those claimants had a perfectly positive experience. That wasn't the case for people who had a different kind of profile. For all the reasons that we've talked about, whether it's fluctuating earnings, very vulnerable circumstances, disability or ill health, without direct access to the internet at home, all those kinds of things. You said that everybody who had a negative experience had a negative experience. No, it wasn't that. Could you answer to what you've just said? You said that everybody who has low internet access or a single parent or that has had a negative experience. Apologies if I misrepresented that. What I meant to say was that the report says that you are far more likely to have challenges interacting with the system if you have any kind of vulnerability, poor quality internet access and that, conversely, people who didn't have those challenges were more likely to be a qualitative focus group or more likely to rate the services as positive. The people that we're working with are only people who are left with no money for food. It's worth bearing in mind that our comments come from research with that particular group of people. Even in this session, I've been quite clear about feeding back and sharing with you the positive experience that someone had with their work coach in a job centre about how they'd gone out of their way to help them navigate an online system. Also, one particular job centre where we'd had from lots of people we'd interviewed, they'd all said, what's happened to that job centre? It's brilliant. It's a totally different experience. Not only have I shared that with you today. We went and spoke to DWP people managing DWP across Scotland and also that job centre to feed that back to them because we wanted them to know that people's experience of that particular centre was something positive that could possibly be looked at to see how it could be shared across Scotland. So, absolutely, when there's great positive feedback, we want to see that all across Scotland, not just hidden in some qualitative research and a report on a bookshelf. That's how we learn and make it better. I was just going to raise the issue of implied consent because we had taken evidence from organisations and muscle brought on the impact that was having on the fact that explicit consent is insisted upon for full service. I think that it's probably having an impact on our correspondence as well, so thank you for raising that. You mentioned earlier the impact that you see was having on rent arrears. Do you have any understanding of how easy it is for people to ensure that payment goes directly to their landlords? Is that something that they're made aware of? Is it quite straightforward? We know that we can see that for many individuals it can make a big difference to how they can budget because the money obviously gives them the option for the money to go straight to their landlord, so that's also a good thing. However, it seems less clear about how easy it is for people to be given the information that Scottish flexibilities is available. My understanding is that you would be asked about it after your second visit and asked about it once. It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that you might want the option to be asked about at many different times through your experience. Clearly, there's some work between the DWP and the Scottish Government about how Scottish flexibilities are embedded within a system that otherwise is being delivered by the DWP, but that seems to me something that we want to keep an eye on to make sure that it's not a one-time only opportunity to take up that offer but that your work coach is in a position to be able to encourage you to make sure that you've got that information so that you can decide if that would make your situation better. We have very limited time left. We are all done with our questions. Is there anything you want to put on the record before we close this evidence session, Paulie or Deborah, that you don't feel you have the opportunity to put on as yet? I've taken a note of a couple of things to follow up, some specific pieces of information to follow up, which I will do. Just one thing, which is that universal credit is a reserved matter. For many for change and our work across Scotland, our focus has been on what action could be taken at a local level across Scotland that makes a difference right now to people on the lowest income. Even when some of the issues may be caused by or the result of UK-wide policies, what action can be taken now? I think that's something that we included in our submission of evidence to your committee. There are clear policy opportunities that the Scottish Government has to mitigate and support people who might be struggling with the roll-out of universal credit. I won't spend much time, so I'll just give you a quick list, but you've touched on some of these before about the Scottish Welfare Fund. How can you make sure that nobody, everyone who's eligible, can benefit from that and particularly that people in work may be able to benefit from it? How you might invest in advice services to really give that co-ordinated wraparound support for every community in Scotland? Looking at what you can do through public procurement contracts and making sure that everybody who is employed through a public procurement contract benefits from the real living wage, encouraging more employers to pick up and pay the real living wage, making sure that everyone who is eligible is aware of Scottish flexibilities, and lastly, you've got a number of bills going through Parliament at the moment, the fuel poverty bill, the transport bill, even the good food nation bill, whatever its current status is. All of those give you opportunities to look at how those different costs for people on the lowest income can be reduced or limited so that they can participate in society just like everybody else. That's held what I should point out. Please do follow this inquiry. Do you feel free to give an additional written submission and keep that communication going, and we've listened carefully to what you've said here this morning. But time is upon us, I'm afraid, so I do have to close the seven sessions. Thank you to Paulie Jones and Deborah Haye for coming along this morning, and we now move into agenda item 5, which we've agreed to take in private.