 Fy rydw i, I wonder if I'm on the second meeting of the welfare reform committee for 2015. Get everyone please make sure that mobile phones are on silent. Agenda item 1 is our first item of business today and it's a decision on taking item 3 in private. Item 3 is consideration of the committee's participation in a future parliament day. Do the committee agree? That's agreed. That brings us to agenda item 2. This is oral evidence on the impact of welfare reform on children's When the welfare reforms were first introduced, concerns were voiced about the direct and indirect impact that they would have on local authority budgets and delivery. The aim of the session is therefore to establish whether those concerns have come to pass. As noted, it will focus particularly on the impact on social work and children's services. I would like to welcome our witnesses today who are going to help us to understand this subject. They are Alasdair Gawr, who is the vice president of Social Work Scotland. Stephen Brown, head of services, is children, families and criminal justice at North Ayrshire Council. Richard Gass, welfare rights manager at Glasgow City Council and Margaret Consellor, district manager of care and learning at Highland Council. Do you want to make some opening comments to the committee from your experience so far? I do not know if you have very discussed how to do that. I thank you for the invitation. I have not prepared opening comments, chair, but I think that the first thing that I would say is that it is still relatively early days with welfare reform. I suppose that our main anxieties are for the future rather than necessarily what has happened up until now. I think that the major impacts will continue to develop over the coming years. We have concerns about potential impact. Two areas are impacts on outcomes for children, because we know the links between poverty and poor outcomes for children are very strong. That would be issues around health outcomes, educational achievement and attainment, children's growth and development, their overall wellbeing and confidence can all be negatively impacted by poverty, and there is extensive literature on that. I suppose that the other area for me is to do with the potential cost shunting of pressures moving from the benefits agency and DWP budgets on to either local authority or health budgets to meet the needs that arise through the reductions in welfare. I think that for us, Alasdair Wright, it is very early days, but we have certainly seen an increase in child protection registrations related to parental mental ill health. Over the last three quarters, certainly in North Ayrshire, that has been very significant. Previously, parental substance misuse and domestic violence have been the two main risk factors that are identified, but we have certainly seen a huge increase in parental mental ill health. That is not bipolar, schizophrenia or adults in distress. It is obviously having an impact on their ability to look after their children. My comment at this stage would be that, as Highland was the pathfinder of universal credit, we have had to very quickly come into a lot of multidisciplinary work that has been successful, what is being successful. Equally, I think that the scale and the speed at which the universal credit has been introduced, which has been relatively slow, has hopefully not lulled us into a false sense of everything is going to be all right. As yet, we are still anxious about what lies ahead. Richard, do you want to make a comment? In relation to demand, there has been an increase in demand for welfare rights and money advice type service, and for that type of advice from social work staff, there has not been a huge increase in the costs for social work departments in Glasgow, but there has certainly been an increase in demand for the extra services, the benefit type advice. To set the ball rolling, I will come back on that point that Richard has just made. Third sector organisations, in particular, who are involved in the front line of some of those issues, have started to indicate to us, just exactly what you said to Richard, that there is a clear sign that information and advocacy is coming under real pressure. Have you noticed yourselves departmentally whether that is happening to you and can you quantify that in terms of how that would then impact on third sector organisations? Is there some correlation between that? In Glasgow, welfare rights and money advice for non-social work services is provided by the third sector. We do try to provide that in-house to our social work staff. There has been a general failure on claims to come forward in relation to matters of sanctions. If there is a reluctance to come to a social work department and announce that there is a sanction in case that opens up some concerns, it might be better to go to the voluntary sector for that information. Just anecdotally, because you mentioned that, it was put to me that this must come from casework, because I do not think that people would make this up. There might be some reluctance on the part of people to come forward, because there might be some concern that they would be considered neglectful of their children if they had not come forward and asked about financial assistance various other things. Can that put people off actually coming forward? I cannot give you evidence that that is in fact happening, because they do not then come to social work and declare that to be so. We know that in relation to sanctions, there is a large number of sanctions decisions affecting service users, but the service users are not by and large seeking that information or support from our own department. There are folk coming forward looking for referrals to food banks, because sometimes access to the food bank requires a counter-signature from a duty social worker, so farms are coming forward for that purpose, but there is still a huge number of folk not challenging their sanctions decisions. Margaret, you are nodding there. Stephen, you wanted to make some comment as well, so come over to both of you. It is interesting, because the experience in North Ayrshire has been slightly different from what Richard has described. We have certainly seen a 500 per cent increase in destitution presentations through our service access, and probably about 40 per cent of those have been related to sanctions that have been imposed, so people have been coming through. The numbers are not huge. A 500 per cent increase, though, since 2012, we have seen. Last year, we were 500 per cent up, and we were probably talking about approximately 400 presentations over the year in terms of destitution. The situation in North Ayrshire is slightly different. We have certainly seen people coming forward and coming through social work to ask for the support. In terms of housing services, we were involved in supporting a discussion with tenants where it was very clear that people were reluctant to talk about their money problems and sanctions until the very last minute. By the time they were presenting and seeking help, it was much more difficult to support them. One of the issues that we have to look at is how we engage in that instance with tenants, but more largely with clients, on how to reduce their anxiety about approaching services for assistance. Based on what you have said, Stephen, evidence has started to emerge from people that we have been talking to, but you talked there about the large percentage increase in the amount of people coming forward. That must have an impact on front-line staff. Does that mean that the front-line staff are having less and less time to deal with more and more people? Anyone else experiencing that kind of pressure? I work for the City of Edinburgh Council and the city has put together a very strategic multi-agency approach to tackling some of the issues that have risen out of what is a massive change programme around welfare benefits. Our advice shop in our services and the voluntary sector partners that support it are certainly increasingly busy. There is a lot of that, but there is no doubt. We have also seen a huge increase in demand for emergency support. That relates to sanctions. When people's circumstances change, the system seems quite slow to respond in my view. That means that we have seen a tenfold rise in demand for food banks, for example, over the past two or three years. That has now become a mainstream part of social security in the city, which is clearly a big change from a few years ago. I will open up to members of the committee before I do. I noticed that a couple of youth have been pressing their buttons to come in, but they do not have to, so I will take care of that broadcast. Claire, do you want to pick off? Thank you for your introductory remarks. Obviously, the committee has taken significant evidence on the effects of welfare reform. We are aware that it is perhaps a type of iceberg in terms of what is coming down the line. However, Harry Stephens in the president of Social Work Scotland wrote an article in the Scotsman in February of this year. If I could quote from Max's, there are lots of well-understood routes out of poverty that Governments will be working on, income maximisation, increase in pay, suitable benefits, affordable childcare and the removal of barriers to education, but those are for the long term. We are facing a crisis now. Do you agree that there is a crisis now in terms of the increased demand, particularly in the area of child services? Yes, I would certainly, from our point of view, and I am very careful not to make the direct link between parental mental health and welfare reform, but anecdotally, we are certainly hearing from a number of parents who have been coping and clinging on the changes in benefit systems. Sometimes, not even when those changes have come into force, but the anxiety around that has certainly tipped them over from being coping parents into a situation of crisis. A bit like Alasdor said earlier, we are attempting to identify problems as early as possible. We have based some of our money advice workers in the early years centres in North Ayrshire, attempting to remove the stigma from people coming into social services, for example, to try and provide that advice. However, it is very early days and it is difficult to know yet how effective that is. We are continuing to monitor the progress of that, but it is about finding people where they are to try to provide that advice. Certainly, the increase in parental mental health in terms of child protection registrations, the increase in adult protection concerns, so we have adults in distress presenting the accident emergency on a regular basis. Again, in North Ayrshire, that has increased by 293 per cent over the last 18 months. That is quite significant. I would not want to make the direct correlation, but the argument could be made. The anxiety that not necessarily knowing what the welfare reform is going to mean to individuals and to families has been of great concern to families. A bit like Stephen Steeves saying there, for some families it might not have been as overwhelming as they thought, but it has taken a while to get to that position. For me, not knowing how that was going to affect people has been of major concern to them. As Stephen Steeves says, the tip from coping just about into not coping has been painful for families. I think that there is a sense of, as measures unroll, there is a kind of ratcheting effect and there will probably be a tipping point. I think that that is what Harry was getting at. In some areas, that is probably hitting. Although the implementation is largely universal, I think that it affects different areas in different ways. For example, in the city of Edinburgh, we have quite a large population from other parts of the European Union, particularly Eastern Europe. There has been quite a lot of migration into the city in recent years. On what we have found, and it is very early days, Richard may know the technicalities of this better than me. Since April, there has been a change in the access to housing benefit for EU nationals. We have had a number of situations where, particularly in cases where there have been issues of domestic abuse or distress within families, where women who have had to flee domestic abuse are not entitled to any housing benefit. If their children are under five and as a result of that, they are destitute. We are having to look at putting some emergency situation solutions in place. That is just one example of changes. Rather than being one sweeping change, it tends to be the ratcheting effect that leads in different areas to a crisis point at different times. Richard? The situation that you have described is a problem in what you have there, where someone has support one day, but the next day they have no support and they are looking for somewhere to go to get that assistance. The other aspects of the reforms that sneak up on people are the fact that benefits are increasing at the same rate that they used to. Someone might not notice overnight that their money is not going as far, but over the months they might not be able to replace school clothes, retaking at bedrooms, etc. After a period of time, there are aspects that they require assistance with. It is more stelt, perhaps, wrong word, but the reforms are creeping up on people in that way. What we are about to move into is the migration of TLA to personal independence payments. We will see there that people who have benefit one day will not have it the next day. That will then present us with some of the more cliff-edge scenarios. I think that I could just follow that briefly. There are traditionally a lot of families who have used perhaps one benefit, say, a JCA or tax credits to pay their fuel bills, and then perhaps the next week or the week after we would use that money to get the food in, and that would feed the family. If there is a sanction on one of those or if there are changes around those, that is all that it takes for things suddenly to fall apart. Then they are at the payday lender boring money and then it is just a downward spiral. That is quite a common situation in our experience. Just to ask specifically about children's services again, in the article, it mentions that child poverty actually calculates that there are 220,000 children living in poverty in Scotland at the moment. Obviously, the Government has a strategy with the early years collaborative and with GIRFFEC to make this the best place in the world for children to grow up. What pressures are those competing effects having? Is this damaging the impact of the early years collaborative work on GIRFFEC in terms of the pressures on child services? The pressure on children's services is really quite immense. I have spoken to members of the family nurse partnership who are dealing with a very specific group of young families. Their evidence was that it has had quite a major impact on their work and the experience of families in that they have had to get to know more. Is this bit about previously, as health visitors or as midwives working in the family nurse partnership, that they did not need to necessarily get so involved in checking out where the young women were with their benefits? In that regard, it has had a major impact. Certainly, health visitors and early years support staff are finding that they need to be much more mindful of the need to check out whether families need to be signposted or supported, particularly mindful of literacy and numeracy issues. Coming back to us saying that there are real issues, as has been said around going from the anxiety about going from weekly or fortnightly payments to monthly payments, is major. People are budgeting. They may be budgeting very well on a very limited income, probably better than I could, but the idea of stretching that to monthly is just very, very difficult. Certainly, housing are saying that they are encouraging people now to seek changes. I understand now that the landlord can seek to have rent paid directly to them in the way that private landlords have been able to. We are having to look at ways of dealing with a very difficult situation, but certainly, yes, it has had a considerable effect on how it is. Mr Gaw talked at an early stage about cost shunting, which is an issue that the committee has discussed on numerous occasions. I wonder if I could maybe tease something out with yourself, Mr Brown, because you were saying that there was a 500 per cent increase in presentations of destitution and that you were dealing with much more child protection orders. Can I ask you in terms of, for example, a child protection order, where you may have a family who has lost a certain amount per week, which has led to the kind of worry that we have heard about today, which leads to a case of mental health difficulties and then the child protection order being put in place? I know that it is very difficult to give us an average, but what would a child protection order cost? What is the minimum cost of a child protection order? It is very difficult to cost that. We know that if a child is on the register but remaining at home and receiving fairly intensive supports, then probably about three years ago, we did an exercise in North Ayrshire to cost that, and it was approximately £22,000 per year per child. If we accommodate a child, depending on the placement, it could be anything from £400 a week to £2,500 a week depending on the nature of the placement, so it can be fairly significant. The very significant sum is compared to the types of savings that are being made, so-called savings that are being made because of welfare cuts in families, would that be fair to say? I would suspect so, yes. In terms of some of the work that has gone on previously by social work services and others across the country of the costs of dealing with individuals, because there have not been early interventions and there have not been the right inputs at the right times in their lives, it may well be, would it be fair to say that, after the child protection order has been put in place, that possibly the kid has been taken into care, that outcomes in the future might not be so great as well, which might have a cost in the state? Yes, I think that we would all recognise that at the point where we have to accommodate a child, the potential for positive outcomes for that child reduced, I think that there is no doubt about that. In reality, what you are saying is that those savings, welfare sanctions, those benefit caps may at the end of the day cost the state a huge amount more because we have not ensured that a family and their children are given the best outcomes at the very start? There is no doubt that the earlier intervention and prevention methods that we are attempting to put through and put in place, there is no doubt that the work that we are doing in early years and early years collaborative, all of that work tends to be much more effective in terms of outcomes for children and their families, but they are cheaper than some of the high-cost crisis interventions that we have to put in place. There is no doubt that if we can move upstream and provide the right support at the right time for children, not only do outcomes improve, but the costs in the state reduce. I wonder if we could hear from others too, convener, because this cost-shunting idea is not, in my opinion, just about the shunting of those cuts on to other bodies to deal with it. It seems to me to be a human cost-shunting over the period of somebody's life in a number of cases. I entirely agree. I have talked about the City of Edinburgh, but we are certainly not unique in that. We have been working hard to make the city the best place for children to grow up in and to give every child the best start in life, including children whose parents lie on benefits or who are born into very difficult circumstances. We have had substantial success over the last few years in reducing pressure on the numbers of looked-after children and in shifting the balance of care so that more children can stay with either their own parents or their own extended family. It is a concern that, if the services are under pressure for a number of reasons, it might be to do with population and demography growth, it might be to do with changes to benefits. However, if those efforts are undermined by the kind of circumstances that Stephen is describing, for example, of parental mental health, it undermines that strategy. The knock-on effects could be economically very substantial. The association between poverty and neglect is complex. There is literature in that, but it is undoubtedly clear that, whatever the causal factors are concerned, children who grow up in poverty have substantially less good outcomes. Therefore, they are much less likely to be able to contribute positively to society in the longer term. The more that we can intervene earlier and the more we can make sure that we narrow the attainment gap and the achievement gap for children and get their health outcomes, I think that market-touching literacy, which is a very good way of doing that for example, the more we can reduce those risks. I think that there would certainly be value in doing some more analysis and some more modelling of those potential costs. I wonder if we could hear from Ms Concella, please. As you might appreciate, Highland has a higher level of employment than, obviously, a lot of local authorities in the central belt. The issues that we face or that families face can be somewhat different. I think that it is interesting to look at the issue of rurality and employment. I was preparing for today, I was speaking to colleagues who remarked that, for instance, in Portree, on 31 March, 900 people were signing on 1 April—that is down to nine—that seasonal employment is so significant. Again, we are expecting families to be very financially sophisticated in managing money from one day, as has been said, to be relying on benefits and another day then to be in work. We are told that the welfare reform will be real-time, and so people will need to manage their claims through ICT. That can be very difficult in certain parts of the Highlands, where we do not get—certainly up on the North Coast, Broadband, etc., is very, very poor. At the moment, it is almost being mollycoddled along. Because we have been a pathfinder, people have been very supported very often, one-to-one discussions with DWP workers. Our anxiety is that, when there is considerable migration across to real-time, there will be considerable problems for families in maintaining their claims up-to-date. That is straight off your particular issue. That is fair enough. I am glad to hear that as well. You talked about financially sophisticated. People have become quite financially sophisticated. You have to be. I am not suggesting that if I am managing on a very limited income, I have to be very mindful of that, so that how many people in this room would not know where to get the cheapest tea? You could be knocked off your stock quite quickly. Absolutely. I remember a number of years ago, when I was paid weekly and suddenly I got a job that paid me monthly. During that period of time, I got myself into some wee difficulties. Of course, I had the good luck of having parents that would bail me out at that point, but often folk do not have the ability to be bailed out. Even the changes of weekly payments, fortnightly payments that we have heard to monthly payments, can cause great grief to folk. An example is that if you have got a job and you need to find childcare, very often, childcare providers will expect a month's money up front. Although you might be getting the 600 hours nursery entitlement, you will perhaps need to top that up. Again, how do I find a month's deposit on my childcare when I am not going to get paid? At the same time, I have an anxiety about my benefit stopping before I get paid. Whilst a lot of thought has gone into how to make stepping into work more straightforward and appreciate that we do not necessarily have the 16-hour rule, there are still considerable anxieties for people with small children who get a job, who are acting responsibly, who have sorted out their childcare and are then told that they will need to pay the balance a month's deposit in advance. Where do they go if they are not fortunate enough to have a mommy who can help them? I think that a couple of you have touched upon this. The reluctance of folk to seek help, particularly where their children are involved, until the last minute. Obviously, they have a fear that there may be interventions with their children, which they do not want to see. The fear that seems to be permeating about welfare reform What can you guys in the front line do to try and deal with those fears? Is that impossible unless we have a real hard look at things such as sanctions and conditionality? I think that there is a lot that we can do. Some of those fears are justified. What does a child need to grow, develop and thrive? More than anything else, the child needs security and predictability. In some cases, for those families, that is exactly what has been taken away from them. For example, if they are threatened with homelessness, if the family is moving around and they lose their accommodation, those are just the things that small children do not need. Having said that, there is a lot that can be done. If we go back to the example of food banks and where families are first coming into contact with crisis support, is it places like food banks? The food banks are getting much better now at integrating services, so they are trying to develop one-stop shops so that if someone is coming to a food bank because they are in real distress around the need to have food for themselves or very often their children, you can make sure that, at that access point, you get advisers who can give them support and help to do with either money management or access to debt advice, citizens advice bureau, whatever happens to be, but you can actually have people there on site who can take away perhaps some of those fears and anxieties and help to signpost people and take them into services that will actually make a difference. I think that, through good integrated co-ordinated services, there is a bit of a strategic planning above that, but good integrated co-ordinated services and making sure that you have the right people available at the access points so that somebody is not just coming in and getting a bag of food, they are actually getting the help and advice they need while that is happening. That is a simple example, but that kind of thing can make a real difference. Life would be much easier, I am sure for you guys, if there was no sanctions regime in place and conditionality was changed, would you agree? Yes, absolutely. Mr Gass? Yes, absolutely. Sanctions are a major problem and, as I said before, folk are not challenging decisions for a number of reasons. Some of the steps that we have taken in Glasgow to address that is to create a sanctions pack that we have made widely available to food banks and other organisations because we need to impress upon the individual that the sanctions decision is something that they have a right to challenge, that it is important to challenge. Unfortunately, when someone has been sanctioned with the way that the media has portrayed benefit claimants of it over recent months, that a sanction equates to a blame, that they are now to blame in some way for not having their money and to come forward and put their hand up and say, I am to blame is not something that people generally do readily, so we need to have a culture change in terms of folk's right to challenge a sanction. You are absolutely correct. If there was no sanction regime, then this would be a far easier task. Mr Brown? Yes, as I said earlier, of those increased destitution presentations, approximately 40 per cent are directly related to sanctions and there is no doubt that that is putting additional pressures on individuals. Many of those sanctions have been imposed as a result of mental health difficulties, substance misuse issues and are already very vulnerable for various reasons. When they miss appointments and have money cut, they become doubly vulnerable in that way, and if there are children involved in those situations, it is very difficult. On the issue that goes back to Alistair's point, I think that there are things that we can do to mitigate against some of that. We have made efforts in North Ayrshire to base multidisciplinary teams around our early years and, again, reducing the stigma of walking into a social work department so that parents can actively seek advice without necessarily the worry that, somehow, their children are going to be removed as a result of that. It is very early days in relation to that in terms of success or otherwise, but we hope that people seem to be taking the advice on it in a way that we would hopefully prevent them from requiring the assistance of food banks in the first place or getting themselves into difficulties in terms of finances. However, we are beyond just maximising people's benefits now. It is about financial capability, so it is also about linking them in with credit unions as opposed to payday lenders and some of the white goods sellers who charge exorbitant rates that nobody in this room would dream of paying, but it can be enough, again, to tip people into a real hardship. What has been noted is the variation in sanctions so that I can think of one particular office in Highland where they seem to have a much higher sanctions rate than other parts of the area. I think that we need to look at—somebody needs to look at—why that is so. Maybe there is a very late bus arriving that particular town, I do not know, but that is of concern because it shows a certain level of decision making being perhaps not quite right. I think the other side of it which is about how social work services, like Stephen, children's services involves both health visiting and social work staff complemented by support staff. I think we have worked very diligently in having that attitude with folk, which I think hopefully our clients know is as supportive as we can be. I think that gets away from the idea that if you start to share some of your worries and anxieties and difficulties with social work, then the first thing we are going to do is remove your child. I think those days are hopefully long gone. I think that the support given through early years collaborative and others is a key way into that. I think that, for instance, some of the work that we have done with midwives still in the NHS at looking at how we can support families has been really very interesting. That is using early years collaborative methodology. We are now looking to do that same—what we are calling is money health checks, because evidence shows us that people will not seek help until the last minute, as we have already said. We are trying to come back from that and say, look, where are you just now? What sort of support can we give you? We are looking to do that now with primary one children, so keeping that message in universal services so that we can attempt to encourage people to share their difficulties and get help sooner? Very briefly, finally, convener. Do you have any evidence that the reforms are having a greater impact on families with disabled children? Obviously, with the disabled children, they are still entitled to the benefits—the children's benefits have remained unchanged. That is not an area specifically where I have seen issues as yet. We find issues that often children with additional support needs and disability, where social workers are involved or where families have a multiple range of issues and problems. That is where the additional stresses and uncertainties around the changes to the benefits and the security that families have had can then exacerbate problems. For example, if there is a disabled child in the house or a child with autism, that can be much exacerbated by those other pressures. However, I have not seen anything specifically in relation to children with disability. My colleagues might have examples. I do not have examples as such, but it is a warning that, in universal credit, households with disabled children will be significantly worse off. At present, the benefits system would give a disabled child premium for any rate of DLA—about £60 a week. Any rate of DLA or under universal credit will only attract £30 a week to get the higher elements and will need to be on the highest rate of care component or on the highest rate of DLA living for personal independence payments. We will see, as universal credit extends to families, a problem there. We would also suggest that, in relation to sanctions, if there is a family with a disabled child, the extra needs of the disabled child will undoubtedly impact on the parent's ability to attend to perhaps the issues that they put in their claimant commitment. Too many claimants feel that, when they are signing their claimant commitment, they have to agree to everything and not recognise that someone working cannot afford childcare, but someone not working cannot afford childcare, so they will be at the school gate. If they have a disabled child, they might not be able to be at an appointment for half past nine. We need to have a greater understanding for claimants that the commitment needs to be revised before they are held to account for failing to uphold something that was impossible. Following on from Richard's point, the evidence that was given to me was the issue of having to seek work. It is that measure between having a child with a diagnosis and having a child who does not have a diagnosis. For my child to attend the after-school care, it might be that the after-school care people say that they cannot manage because of their behaviour. My ability to seek work becomes compromised. Having to seek work, the age at which our child needs to be before you seek work, is reducing. There is a complication in there that, very often single mothers, is having to think about, how can I go out to work when nobody will look after my child because of undiagnosed but very real behavioural issues? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, convener. Before coming in, Margaret, I am clear indicated that we wanted to have a supplementary on a point that Kevin made. It was on the issue of sanctions, obviously, not unsurprisingly. It has come up a number of times this morning. I suppose that a concern for me, as a member of this committee, is that we keep hearing about variations, even the use of language. It is a threat of a sanction in the way that it has been implemented. We have had concerns in the PCS union about pressure on staff to impose sanctions on people. Even the written evidence from Social Work Scotland today gives a number of case studies where the sanction was overturned at appeal but nonetheless had significant and very severe impact on the families involved. Do you welcome an independent review of conditionality and sanctions at this stage to address some of the variations and some of the problems that we have been hearing about at the moment? A very helpful thing, the sooner the better, if not yesterday. The problem with the sanction regime, if we can call it that, is that when people do not challenge decisions, poor decision making is almost condoned by the lack of challenge, so it goes. What we need is either a review to correct the errors or a proactive challenge to decision making so that incorrect, ridiculous decisions can be stamped out. Is anyone else? Yes, I would agree. I think particularly where parents have responsibility for vulnerable others, whether that is children or others that they are caring for. I think that there should be some recognition of that in a much more positive way than there is at the moment. Welcome back in. There was a statistic from one parent Scotland which you have perhaps seen that projected an annual figure from the information that they received through freedom of information. They estimated 9,000 lone parents in Scotland being sanctioned for 12 months, 6,000 of them on income support, which means that those 6,000 would have a child under the age of five or a child with a disability such that they were then a carer. The other 3,000 being on job seekers allowance, so that is quite an alarming statistic. We will come to Margaret, to be followed by Annabelle. Thank you and good morning panel. Obviously, all those welfare reforms and what we have heard today and in previous evidence is putting a lot of pressure on local authority budgets, if she has said, and very much so on the demand on social services in particular. I was interested to hear what Stephen Brown was saying around parental mental health and the impact that that obviously has on children. If parents are in distress, there is an all-con effect. Obviously, the welfare reforms are in part the cause of that. Obviously, the main concern is the wellbeing of children. That has a long-term effect on those children. As Kevin Brown said, it is a false economy to see that those changes will save money. I wonder whether the children are being, as you said, child protection orders increase in that. What happens then if a child is taken into care? I know that that is the absolutely worst scenario. However, because of all those pressures, are there enough foster parents available and are there enough places available in children's homes? I know that those are all the very last things you look at, but if there is a huge increase in the pressures on parents, is that support there to help the children? We have certainly had a pressure on our fostering service as a result of this, or certainly a result of an increased number of children being accommodated. We have had the unfortunate situation where we have had to house some children and some of our units at an earlier age than we would ordinarily like. Some of our children's houses have accommodated children as young as seven or eight, which is far from ideal because of an absence of appropriate foster placements. Although we are continuing to begin the process of trying to move upstream and it goes back to something that Margaret MacKinnon said earlier, the ideal situation is to prevent parents from tipping over the edge and to help to continue their progress in coping and the work that we are doing around the early years. However, there are also opportunities around the named person role in the new children and young persons act. I think that there is work that we can be doing with our colleagues, our health visitors, our midwives in relation to upskilling them and giving them the right skills when they are engaging with families and parents to identify where there may be issues and where they can sign post people on. We are a long way shy of that yet, but certainly the direction of travel is there. I am hoping that we will see some improvement as we move to take some of the pressure off quite apart from the pressures on the local authorities. It is the impact on children. Whilst we work hard to where we do have to remove children from parents, where the risks are so great, we do work hard to return them as quickly and as safely as possible. However, at any time we have to accommodate a child, the effect on both the children and their parents can be significant. There is no doubt about that. In Glashwood, there is almost a continual campaign to recruit traditional foster carers just to ensure that the resources are there to meet the demand. I wonder if there is an issue with whether people are in a financially precarious position themselves. Would you then choose to come forward to take on the responsibility for a child? Perhaps the economic climate is a barrier to folk coming forward, but certainly in Glashwood there is a campaign on currently to recruit additional foster carers. For Edinburgh, we have 1,000 children in the city of Edinburgh who are accommodated in foster care or with kinship carers or in children's homes. The majority of them are in foster placements. We continually struggle to find enough foster parents. We work very hard at it like Glasgow. We find ourselves competing with our neighbouring authorities or other fostering providers, but there is a need for more foster carers in the country. There is no doubt about that. There are 18,000 children in the city of Edinburgh who are living under the definition of poverty that is in the paper. Most of the children who are affected by poverty are living with their own families. We think that there is room for development here, particularly to support kinship carers. We have had some success in that, but we would like to see many more circumstances where, if children cannot live with their parents, they can at least live with their extended family and have supports around that. One of the problems that we have is that some of the impacts of the changes to the benefits system are having a negative effect on kinship carers. Certainly, there are grannies or uncles or aunts who give up work to look after children in those circumstances. Many people are finding that, generally speaking, we are not that great at supporting them, whether that is at a national or local level. I think that there is a lot that we can do in those circumstances. I want to ask a supplementary on the points that the committee has made. It is on that point of kinship carers, convener. I think that you will remember that, when we visited a housing association here in Edinburgh, we were looking at the impacts of direct payments and the bedroom tax. We spoke to a number of kinship carers at that point, one in particular that I remember very well. He was extremely concerned about the impacts on her income of being able to remain a kinship carer. I just wonder if you have mentioned that that is a difficulty. Is that a difficulty throughout the country? Have there been withdrawals from kinship carers because of threats to income because of welfare changes? There have been withdrawals, but there is an increase in anxiety. It is interesting if we go back to before the discretionary payment was introduced. We were very anxious that foster carers might have to withdraw from being foster carers. As it turned out, when we looked at it more closely, we did not have any families who were affected. For me, it shows the anxiety amongst professionals that what did that mean? Considerable amount of time was then spent in trying to establish whether or not this would have a negative effect on our foster carers, which in the end, fortunately, in our circumstances, it did not. However, it goes to show the amount of anxiety amongst professionals and services that it can cause. Equally, amongst kinship carers, having read the papers here today, I am not personally aware of where it has affected kinship carers, but I know that it has increased their anxiety about how will this affect my money if I take my grandchildren in or my sister's children or whatever. Certainly, an increased level of anxiety amongst families as well as an increased need to be very much on top of things for professionals. There was an adjustment to allow one extra bedroom for kinship carer households. However, if a carer is to take two children, it might not be desirable that they are sharing a bedroom yet that the concession within the legislation was to allow only one extra bedroom. The way that kinship carer can actually be afforded is that it is a mixture of DWP, HMRC benefits and conjunctions with the payment from the local authority that adds up to a reasonable sum. However, under universal credit, we will find that the bit that was the same as tax credits may no longer be payable to kinship carers. It may be something that the Scottish Parliament can address in terms of its legislation so as to ensure that what we have in place in Scotland does entitle folk to the maximum benefits from the benefits system. At present, we have a bit of a crisis coming forward for kinship carers who move on to universal credit. Just along the lines of—there is a perception perhaps by the UK Government that it is people who are unable to work for one reason or another, but it is their children who are suffering, but it is not just people who are out of work. Does anyone have any statistics on how many children whose parents are in work who are actually now suffering from mental health problems and all this distress as a result of the changes in welfare benefits? It is not just people who are reliant solely on benefits, it is people who are actually in work as well. Certainly talking to my housing department colleagues, we do not have statistics or hard information, but they are starting to look at the impact on families in low pay. At the moment, we are quite rightly putting a lot of time and effort into understanding welfare reform and the effects that it will have on clients, but in the meantime, we need to keep looking back into the needs of those families on low pay, because there is anxiety there that if people are on casual hours or zero hours, I appreciate that we are moving to not have zero hours, but it can be very much a low pay economy. We need to be mindful of making sure that those folk also have access to appropriate support and services. Certainly the case that front-line staff have spoken increasingly of in-work poverty, there is no doubt about that. As Margaret said, it is very difficult to quantify the levels. It is much easier when people are claiming benefits and we can count those and we can be very clear about where the deficits might be in terms of income as a result of X, Y and Z in relation to welfare reform. It is much more difficult within work poverty, however, certainly anecdotally, it seems that that is an increasing feature. I do not have any statistics for you either, but it does appear in reports that the use of food banks is not reserved to folk out of work, it is working families that are using food banks. The fact that the term in work poverty trips off our lips so easily shows that it is part of our common language. The problem being that the additional costs of being in employment, getting to and from work, laundering clothes, lunches at work etc—not to mention the huge childcare costs—means that the extra money that is earned from employment does not go towards meeting all those needs. Someone, because they are in work, does not necessarily mean that they are at the end of the day any better off and indeed will be, in many cases, unfortunately worse off. That is not going to hugely improve under universal credit. Can I just ask one more question? It is around appeals, which I mean one or two, if you have mentioned that people are not actually using the appeal system as well as they might. Quite often it is the third sector that would help people with their appeal, citizens advice for example. I know from my own experience that citizens advice is absolutely inundated with people. It is an appointment system now where it used to be a drop-in. It would have historically taken forward appeals to help people. What has been done to help the voluntary sector to deal with this? Obviously, there is a greater load going on to the voluntary sector now because of this. I know that social services are trying to deal with it and some of them have their own welfare rights offices and everything, but quite a lot of people would prefer to go to a third sector organisation and go into council for assistance particularly around rented ears and that kind of thing. What assistance and support has been given to the likes of third sector organisations to help to deal with the huge increase in clients that they are now having to see? In Glasgow, we have a welfare rights appeals team in social work that will take referrals from the voluntary sector and we are working in partnership with the voluntary sector. Indeed, some aspects of the voluntary sector will provide tribunal representation and additional funds, which recently, over the past 18 months and for the next 18 months, have been made available through the Scottish legal aid board. In Glasgow, some of the local citizens advice bureau has had additional resources from the Scottish legal aid board to address what was the perceived increase in appeals. In reality, the volume of appeals has not increased. We anticipated that and were perhaps wrong in that respect. There might be a number of factors as to why. The appeals volumes have not increased. There was the long delay in making decisions on new personal independence payment claims. There was the parking of ESA claimants while the ATIS contract was renegotiated and the fact that folk have a general reluctance to challenge a sanctioned decision. They may explain why people are not lodging appeals. There is also the mandatory reconsideration process, which was introduced to try and would bring down the number of appeals. However, we are not convinced that the number of folk who would ultimately want to appeal tribe are getting that level of decision at reconsideration yet, for some reason, the folk are not going on to appeal. Appeal numbers are down. Additional resources have been made available via the Scottish legal aid board. I can say in Glasgow that we work in partnership with the voluntary organisations that the individual client can see the adviser within the CAB, but when it comes to pure representation, if that bureau does not have the resource to do it, we can represent the person at the tribunal and they can be reassured in advance that this is not the state interfering with their benefit. A lot of local authority areas, either through community planning partnerships or through establishing their own strategic approach to addressing issues around benefits change because it is such a massive change process, have looked to join up very much in working partnership in this way, so they will set a set of strategic objectives around reducing the impact of homelessness, for example, trying to maximise income wherever that can be maximised, doing some work around workforce, how you upskill your staff groups either from the local authority or from the voluntary sector, joint training programmes, making sure that the right advice is available to people in the right place, developing the one-stop shops that we have talked about, making sure that resources are aligned. There is a huge amount that community planning partnerships or taking a strategic approach at a local level can do to mitigate both the impacts of the changes but to provide the kind of support that you are describing, where the voluntary sector would be the port of call at first base, which can be much less threatening. Quite often it is done through food banks and church groups, for example, but the important thing is that if community planning partnerships or a strategic approach within a local authority area to the welfare benefits issues is taken, people can be properly trained and have the knowledge that people need and they can take away a lot of that fear factor. There is a lot of work going on across the country to deliver that. I mean, sorry to interrupt, but if sanctions are increasing and the appeals are actually not increasing in line with that, we must be missing out. We are missing a trick somewhere and the message is not getting out to the clients who are being sanctioned or how do we overcome that? To find out why people are not challenging the decision in the first place and if it is back to one whereby benefit claimants are part of the problem and if you have been sanctioned, then you are the biggest part of the problem. If someone feels that that is the position they are in, then we need to understand that and then empower them to overcome and to see the appeal through, which I do not have an easy answer for, but it is probably going to involve working at community group levels so that individuals who are sanctioned do not feel that they are isolated, that they can speak to other folk who have been sanctioned and realise that the decision that they are facing is not one that is perhaps going to stand up, that there is a prospect of success. Did you want to comment on that? Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Margaret. Annabelle, to be followed by Christina. Convener, thank you. Good morning. I have been struck by the number of times in which you referred either to intervention or earlier identification of a problem. I was interested particularly in Ms Consellor's submission because that laid out a whole range of processes and procedures that were all about collaboration, consultation and information. Interestingly, because your area was to be a pathfinder for universal credit, you said specifically that there was multiagency and service collaboration in an attempt to understand what they had. Can you just describe a little more detail what that was, that whole process? Who was speaking to whom? I think probably in the first instance it was chief execs and finance, very concerned about the possible implications of renter ears from their tenants. So they were wondering how big this whole was going to be. And as a result of that as well, and children services saying, well, how is this going to affect us? Coming together really, for instance, as a result of getting it right, we already have very close working relationship, particularly between housing and children services around the issue of possible homelessness and evictions and such. So a local level people know each other very well and understanding the financial difficulties that families can be at, I suppose on a very practical level, we said we need to speak to you. And they were equally saying we really don't want lots of people becoming homeless. We want to ensure that our tenants understand their responsibilities in terms of the rental changes. And we need to work together to ensure that tenants are mindful of what could come. So as a result of that housing were sought to be involved in a major consultation with their tenants about the best way to inform and update them involving ourselves from children services as well as adult mental health services, because we've all got the same clients basically. So it was in everybody's interest to ensure that our clients, our tenants, our service users were fully as aware as they could be of what was going to take place. And at the same time, we saw particular routes, multidisciplinary routes, to better understand where we need to direct particular support. I think some of the examples of work, for instance, the maternity services piece of work that we got involved in emanated really from the early years collaborative, where people were saying, well, what is it that you can do? And mindful from housing where people were saying, I don't necessarily want to be labelled as a problem. I don't necessarily want to let you know of my difficulties. We struggled very much in trying to reduce the stigma of not managing. And so we're very much focused on providing, appearing to provide support at a universal level. So earmarking, for instance, a woman's booking appointment with her midwife. Every woman who's pregnant gets that booking appointment. Now, as it turned out, most of the people who got the support were those people either on low pay or on benefit. However, it didn't necessarily appear a stigmatised service. We did have people who were in work, in good work, and everybody was offered the ability to have what we called a money health check. So that was a minimal piece of work for midwives. They were very clear they did not want to be involved in the 15 minute rapid appraisal of somebody's benefits. It was very much just, here's something, move you on. But which was offered to all pregnant women in a particular town, and which we're now going to roll out across Highland. Knowing, in reality, we will be impacting on those people either on benefits or in low pay. So, and looking now to develop that into primary one. So using the early years collaborative of small tests of change, looking at the issue, but also very much trying to present this as a universal offer to reduce the, as has been said already, the sort of feeling of inadequacy and guilt, because I can't manage on money that nobody can manage on. So, yes, that's one of the approaches that we're taking. That is being rolled out, I presume. It's being rolled out across Highland. You regard it as a very positive process. We regard it as a successful way to impact on people at particular points in their lives, where they might need additional support. And I think what's happened there as a result of that, they go back and they tell their next door neighbour, or their pal, or their sister, that actually they're not as bad in there as we thought they were. So it's also reducing the stigma, as we've heard already, of social work, just the big baddies. We're not necessarily the big baddies. And so, in effect, we're trying to use that as a way of changing, perhaps misguided perceptions of what services are. Is there any out of that? You can pick up possible referral routes that the individual may be unaware of. For example, I was interested to see that you've had local authority requests to DRP for direct payments, for example, direct rental payments. And was that recognising that that would help some individuals and some families with their budgeting? I think that's been a major concern for social work and for housing, as the member spoke about managing it, going from weekly, fortnightly money to monthly money. And that idea of having a range of income, of a range of money coming in at different times. And the anxiety of falling into rent arrears. If you go on to universal credit, you automatically go into rent arrears, because it's paid in retrospectively. So you're immediately into five weeks rent arrears. If I missed a mortgage payment, I would find it quite difficult to pull back on that. So I think we'll wait and see. It's difficult because we don't necessarily want to take a blanket approach to everybody who's on benefit, necessarily the local authority or the landlord seeking fortnightly rental payments, or the rent being paid to the landlord immediately. But when we speak to tenants, that's what they want. The majority of tenants actually are very anxious about managing this money from weekly, fortnightly, and your rent being paid automatically, to getting this sum of money into an account on which I now have to balance everything. And a lot of tenants would prefer, maybe in the short term, maybe, to have their rent paid automatically to the landlord. And it's quite how we manage that, recognising that a lot of the welfare reform is about the argument of personal responsibility. But if my personal responsibility says, I can't manage all of this money, and I would like you to take this element away, and I will attempt to manage the rest, well, maybe that's personal responsibility. That's very helpful. In amongst all the engagement, the consultation, partnership initiatives, what was your relationship with DWP? Did you manage to engage with DWP? There are monthly meetings between DWP and the local authority, and although I do attend them, I must admit their business seems to be much more with housing and chief execs than ourselves. But maybe we just haven't got on to mutually useful gender items. That's every month? Yeah. There are meetings with DWP. And to avoid the gentlemen feeling excluded, but I was just interested in the submission from Highland Council. From what you've heard, are these examples of practice being replicated in Edinburgh or North Ayrshire or Glasgow? Clearly in terms of the liaison meetings with the DWP, those happen, and I would assume they probably happen in most areas, and we attempt to raise issues and identify problems as early as possible with them, and sometimes those discussions are very fruitful. These meetings take place for North Ayrshire? Exactly, I'm not sure, but monthly probably isn't far away from the mark, I would have to say. More widely than that, I think, as welfare reforms rolled out, and Alasdor spoke about it earlier in terms of that ratcheting effect, I think that all public services are continuing to try and keep their finger in the pulse and be responsive and make sure that every time something else is introduced, we are clear about what the potential implications are and that we continue to work together as public bodies to try and find out the most sensible solutions moving forward. Inevitably that cannot be done simply on a social work basis or simply from an NHS or it requires a whole system approach to it, so I think probably what I'm hearing from Highland is very similar to what goes on in North Ayrshire and I would be surprised if it were different elsewhere. Until recently, we had bi-monthly meetings with a universal credit team from DWP since the announcement of a go live date of 8 June for Glasgow. There's been another group set up in addition to that that meets on a monthly basis, but we've not yet introduced universal credit yet. Outside of that, we have quarterly meetings with the DLA PIP, the personal independence payment team. That's on a more district basis with Glasgow, the North and South Lanarkshire and East Dunbarnshire. At those meetings on the issue of sanctions, if you thought that practice was developing where claimants were being adversely effective with the application of sanctions, is that something that you could raise at those meetings? We have raised it at the meetings and the sanction pact, which I referred to, was shared with the DWP staff who attended the meeting and felt that the pact was very helpful. You talked about a sanction information pact, Mr Gass. Is that what that is about? The sanction information pact contains a description of the claimant commitment. It has a standard letter should somebody seek to cover a reconsideration and some more information, but that was shared with our colleagues from DWP who welcomed the pact as a helpful tool. That's helpful. Mr Gaw, in relation to Edinburgh, are you able to speak? Edinburgh is very much trying to take a strategic response to welfare reform. There are multi-agency discussions around the table on a regular basis, and that includes regular communication with DWP, who have given presentations and issues around sanctions, for example, are discussed. That has to be the way ahead. If organisations can work collaboratively, there are a lot of solutions in place. On Margaret's point, the issue about sanctions is that the problem that we have, particularly for social work and for vulnerable children, is that often the people who are impacted are the ones who are least able to manage the degree of personal responsibility that the new system expects. Clearly, there may be many people through the implementation of the changes who will build their own capacity around personal responsibility, but there are many people who are involved with social workers who have mental health problems, who have learning disabilities, who are parents or who have other challenges in their lives that make it much more difficult for them to meet the demands that are expected of them in the new system. That is where I am most concerned. It is a bit like so much of public policy making. It is the most vulnerable system that is meant to be there to give the security who seem to be the ones who are not getting the security from it. That, for me, is where we need to still do better in terms of joint working around that. To help you, Mr Gray, perhaps it can also help to clarify. It was not quite clear in response to questions from Mr Stewart. Do you believe that the welfare system should operate without sanctions, or are you concerned about the way that the sanctions are operating? For me, clearly, any welfare system of any type has to have a dialogue and an engagement with the people who are receiving the welfare. There has to be just good social work. It is about achieving changes in behaviour. It is just not about maintaining dependency. Clearly, at the moment, as has been well described by my colleagues, the impact of the sanctions tends to fall disproportionately and those who are at least able to deal with the difficulties that that then puts them in. That is the problem that we have with the system as it currently stands. You are with issues of operation. Are you just genuinely interested in whether you want to see a welfare system without sanctions? That is a matter of public policy. I think that any system of any service has some degree of expectation. It is a two-way process. The difficulty with a benefit system is that where you have sanctions and the way that it operates is that the sanctions fall on those who are at least able to deal with the impact of them. That is clearly, as yet, in the development of this new policy, as the change process unfolds. The people who are being most impacted are those who are at least able to deal with the impacts of it, and that is my primary concern. Does Mr Gosby reflect the three of you? I have worked in welfare rights for nearly 30 years, and there has always been an element of sanctions. Originally, it was a six-week suspension of benefit and a reduced rate of income support for those who were seeking work. However, what we have seen is an expansion of sanctions. Sanctions now fall on lone parents, on those who are unfit for work and on carers, and that is perhaps taking the sanction policy a step too far. Can I have lost my thread there, sorry? I will just intervene here. We are straining a wee bit away from children's services. To help clarify, the committee has already undertaken an inquiry into sanctions, and we all have unanimous agreement that there has to be some form of conditionality in any system, and that the concerns were around the practical implications and the criteria for the current sanctions system. If we can all accept that that is the position that we are starting from, any other questions that you have got on the issue and I will carry on. No, that is helpful, convener, and thank you. It was really only because Mr Stewart questioned, legitimately, fairly extensively on sanctions that I was interested in just clarifying one or two points. Going back to something that Mr Gaw said, and it was an interesting observation, because food banks are a contentious issue, and the one hand is praised for being there, and the other hand is a subject of concern that they have to be there. However, you indicated that, in terms of being a source of helping some people to be referred or signposted to other services, they had a positive role in that respect. Do you think that your phrasing was that they are getting better at doing that? Is this something that, from your different areas, all food banks are good at doing, or is it something that they could be assisted in doing better? I think that they are getting better. I think that Alistair's depiction of what is happening in Edinburgh has certainly been replicated in North Ayrshire. I think that we have certainly seen a much closer link between the food bank staff and the wider support services that are available and that they are picking up. The difficulty, I suppose, is that it is not at an earliest stage that we would like, because the fact that people are having to present at a food bank in the first place is probably at a stage where they are in a degree of crisis and really struggling. Ideally, what we would like to do is move away from people's reliance on food banks where at all possible, but I recognise that we are a long way shy of that. I think that, as a result of the nature of people coming along with their identifying quite quickly, there may be additional vulnerabilities beyond just the financial elements, and we are getting support for those individuals. I was going to say that I enjoyed, but I have probably not enjoyed all your evidence so far. I think that it has been very enlightening and actually quite heart sore, to be honest. The Child Poverty Action Group has developed an early warning system, and I know that many of the local authorities have taken part in that, especially welfare rights officers. They have identified a number of areas. They have used about 900 cases using different seminars and different ways of gathering that information, but they have identified a number of areas that I will highlight very quickly to you that there has been an increase in demand for information that you have confirmed today in advocacy services. The services have increased contact with families experiencing an income crisis, which you have talked about today. Increased evidence of families unable to access basic services is a result of financial barriers and that there has been a reluctance in some families to engage with public services for fear of being classes neglectful. There are some very keen and hard areas in that to deal with. I am wondering whether you could give me any information on some of those areas. In particular, one of the ones that I wanted to focus on was the increase in evidence of families unable to access basic services. Many of you this morning have given us examples of the impact on families with children who have disabilities. I know that the point has been made that it is less likely for those benefits to be impacted upon, but if the parents' benefits have been impacted on, the opportunities are then lessened. I will be keen to hear about any information or update that you have on and how you have managed that. One of the case studies is that a family could not afford to take their child for a regular healthcare check at the local hospital and how the local authority had to step in and help them with that. Do you have any examples of that and ways that you have helped to resolve that for families? Yes. One of the issues in North Ayrshire last summer was our K. A. Leisure, who run all the swimming facilities and the gyms, had opened up their pools to children to attend free swimming lessons and free use of the pool. Astoundingly, the use over the summer was less than it had been the previous year. We did a lot of head scratching and began to ask questions about it. The more we spoke to parents that we work with, free use of the pool was well and good, but by and swimming costumes for the children, the transport to and from the pool, a cup of coffee whilst the kids are in it, all beyond what parents could do. Again, something that we thought was fairly good and would have been a useful initiative, the uptake was way below what we would have expected. I think that what we were hearing back from parents was that it was just a step too far. It was not just about the free use of the pool. That was never going to do it. It is interesting around parents affected by disability and being reassessed. At the moment, we might say that it does not appear to have an impact on people. The reason for that is because of the slow pace at which that is happening. It would be unfair to say that it is not having an effect. The reason it is not having an effect is that it has not happened yet, or it has happened in very small numbers. We are not necessarily getting a true picture of the impact that it will have or it is beginning to have. I am not able to answer that question in an honest way, other than that it is minimal at the moment because it is not happening much, if you understand my rationale. I cannot say that it is a major drama because of the slow rate at which the assessments are happening. Given that Highland was obviously a pilot area for universal credit, are you finding more parents coming and looking for self-directed support packages in order to support children with disabilities in the family? We are certainly putting a focus on self-directed support. I am not able to necessarily link the two at the moment, but that would be an interesting one to go and look at. I do not have examples of good practice in the Glasgow area, because I am an oil rights worker and not familiar with what is happening in education, leisure and so on, but I would highlight that although children are not impacted by some of the changes, they are correct. A sanctioned family is a sanctioned family in the child, but in that family will bear the brunt of that also. In relation to the DLA changes, when a disabled child of 16 claims DLA, they will need to claim personal independence payment. In all likelihood, the level of personal independence payment that we pay after 16th birth will be less than was paid prior to 16th birth. As resources in households are pooled and shared, that will be a loss to the whole household. There is a further barrier in that it is the whole DLA to personal independence payment migration. That affects not just the children turning 16, but the adults who are on DLA as well. The system is unrealistically cumbersome. You will be contacted by a letter and invited to make a phone call for personal independence payment to indicate that you wish to make a claim. You will do part of your claim over the telephone. You will then be sent a form to be completed and returned. For folk who may be aren't OFA with forms or the whole bureaucratic process, that is just a barrier to maintaining benefit. It will be fair to say that anybody today in receipt of DLA would quite like to receive the success of benefit, and they should not need to have an invitation to make a phone call to start a claim to receive a claim form. In the way that DLA is renewed in advance of expiry or centre renewal pack to complete a return, if you choose not to return it then or are unable to return it in patron benefits. However, here we now have a letter of phone call, a claim form, and for social work resources that we are trying to support those households, it's not simply a case that if we go out to someone, oh, you should be getting this benefit. Here we've got a claim form can fill it in. It's a case of having to phone up to request the form, to have it sent out, to have a repeat journey. I'm on this bandwagon. In the event that the DLA is not converted to a similar word of PIP, if there's home care services, chargeable services going into that household, then not only is there a loss to the individual, there's also a loss to social work revenue through their charging policies. Just on that process and that whole thing and I just was spent two hours away, a constituent, yesterday at our home trying to sort all this out for her. There's a young carer involved in that family and it's a young carer that usually has a responsibility for a lot of this and I don't know whether you've picked up any evidence or any examples where the impact on young carers has been greater than it maybe has been in the past. I have examples but, quite obviously, if there's less income into the household, then the ability of that household to cope, regardless of who the principal carer is, is going to be. Is that an example on the same with the self-directed support one where the child poverty action group's early warning system would be able to start gathering some of that evidence and that information? Harry Stevenson, who I know very well in South Lanarkshire, has children are my constituents and I deal with them every day of the week. Part of his letter he said, living in poverty creates long-term difficulties for these children who grow up at a greater risk of mental health, chronic illness, unemployment and homelessness, so the cycle continues and starts again. I think that Stephen Brown mentioned in his opening remarks about adults in distress and the impact that that has. I had 19 years in social work before I came into politics and I have to say that the transferable skills have been very valuable indeed. However, at that point, for every pound that was spent on a child in an early year's situation, it was £9 saved out of the system as an adult. Has that figure changed? Has that become £1 spent on every child as £18 saved out of the system at a later date? Or is that £1 now spent on a child of less value than it was then? Alistair, maybe? I mean, a number of those types of figures are mentioned, aren't they, these ratios of 1 to 9, 1 to 12 or whatever. I think that we've made a number of points this morning about the value of early intervention and I think that there's no doubt that if you can have children in a way that they are ready, readiness for school, if a child can start school, reasonably achieving milestones as the rest of the children in the class, then the opportunities of them are far, far greater and obviously GERFEC and the framework around that and the early years collaborative has got some very specific goals around those targets. I think if we could all focus in a joined up way on achieving those targets, that could actually make a real difference. That's not just about the household income, it's about much more than that, but there's a huge amount of literature. Writers like Harriet Ward, the NCH, a lot of the stuff that the child poverty action group draws on, there's robust evidence that if children are growing up in poverty, the outcomes for these children are significantly poorer and they then are able to make much less of a contribution in the longer term, so whatever ratio you put on that of 1 to 9, 1 to 12, 1 to 18, the lesson is the same, I think. Mr Brown of Ute, did you have a... Yeah, I suppose just to reiterate what Alasdor was saying, I think there is inevitably, and I think the child poverty action group have done a lot of work around this and are very clear about if we don't get it right for children in poverty within those first five years, by the time they are beginning primary school, they are between 10 and 13 months behind in terms of readiness for attainment than children who are not born into poverty and brought up in that environment, so the early years collaborative is certainly focused on that, but again, the impact of parental mental ill health on children and living with that day in, day out, it's very difficult and I know there's been a lot of financial modelling about if we spend a pound a year and how much will that save in the longer term, but actually I'm never convinced that the figures can be entirely accurate because it's not an exact science and when you build in the impact on the NHS services, on the Scottish prison service and you begin to build all that together, I suspect to be even higher than 1 to 18, but that's just a personal, you know, I suppose. Dennis Constable, you were not in a way there, if you wanted to add in. No, I was just thinking of, it was around multi-agency involvement and thinking about the balance between the right privacy and multi-agency work, so that for instance, when we were trying to seek to identify those people who would be most affected by the benefit cap, housing had that information because they could see where the housing benefit was paid and that might have been of interest to social work, but it was quite right that we didn't necessarily know those names, but what they were able to say was, and because communities are small, they were able to identify those communities where some of those people would be and for social work then to check their system to see whether or not they needed additional support, because in preparing for this, I asked social work teams, did they have anybody on their books who were identified as being affected by the benefit cap and there are 20 families in Highland affected and I know for sure that two of them are definitely known to one social work team, so that shows I think the level of, some didn't get back to me and one or two definitely didn't, it's a mixed bag, but I just think it's quite right that we maintain people's privacy and data protection is there, but we need to think about how we can use the information that we hold to ensure that families get the right support that they need. Absolutely, I understand the sensitivities within the data and stuff like that, but to have a truly holistic approach to family, to help them, is very important. That sort of gives me a very nice segue into my second last question, convener, on the issue around about in-work poverty. You've got these children who maybe have limited opportunities to then become the parents of the future and the impact that then has on them and the ability to earn and the opportunities that they can then have for jobs and the resolution foundation printed out a paper in December last year and one thing that they said, if we really want to help working families on low and middle incomes, boosting the work allowances would be more effective and better value for money than any tax cuts. We talk a lot about tax cuts especially in the last few weeks, we've talked a lot about tax cuts. The report goes on to state that a thousand pound increase in the work allowances available to a single parent earning £12,000 would boost their income by £650 per year, but in contrast a thousand pound increase in personal allowances would benefit them by just £70 a year. I don't know whether you've managed to do any modelling on that or whether there's been any impact that that would have, but I'm sure you would understand that some of the impacts on actual people who are in work and having to claim benefit as well, because we do have a bit of a low pay economy and although we're being told we're in recovery, the distance between high earners and low earners has increased rather than got any better along with this recovery that we're all experiencing. I just wondered whether you had any information on that, anything that you could give us to help us to understand that a bit better? I'm looking at you. I'm just trying to formulate an answer that if we allow folk to retain more of their benefit before it starts to taper away then they keep, so for example, if thresholds were increased by £20, then that's £20 more in their pocket, whereas making a similar increase to tax thresholds, then they'll still pay a percentage of their, a percentage of what's with 20%. I don't know if that's where that comes from, but obviously there's something within the mechanics of it that means that if you put it in one place they get to retain more of it, put it in another place then they don't get to see it all and I can only imagine that's because of taper systems. The taper system on or benefit system presently is that if you're working and getting housing benefit and council tax reduction then for every pound you earn then 65 pence comes off your housing benefit and 20 pence comes off your council tax reduction and you're left with 15 pence, so if your boss comes and gives you an extra tenor you only get to see £1.50 of that because of the way the tapers work, however if you increase the threshold so that if the boss came and gave you an extra tenor you got to keep the tenor, then yes that would be to the person's advantage and not only to the person's advantage but to the economy's advantage because every pound that's given in benefits by and large, every pound by and large there's a contradiction, but benefit money doesn't get spent too far from the local community so it helps the whole economy and we had done a piece of work with Fraser of Ireland, the research institute, on the loss of benefits and they concluded that if Glasgow were to lose £112 million per annum because of the benefit changes, which we feel was a kind of like erring on that at the size of caution, there'd be nearly 2,000 jobs lost in the Scottish economy of which 1,300 would be from Glasgow, so this is Fraser of Ireland and there might be a report that the committee would wish to see. It's quite a complicated one and I know I put you on the spot a bit there on that but it's something that we have to, if we're serious about bringing people out of poverty then it's something we need to look at, cuts to tax rates and stuff, if they don't work for people then we need to acknowledge that and look at other ways. I'm doing that but it takes me on to what's planned for the future and it is my final question convener, the plans for the future and you know on the radio this morning I heard a politician say that the future for welfare is child benefit only being paid to two children in the family so the first two children so if you have more than two children no child benefit and actually a way to save I think it's 12 billion pounds worth of more cuts is to take it from in the work benefits and it was just your thoughts on that and the impact that that would then have on all of the individuals as I say Harry Stevenson's children are my constituents I see it every day that the impact they have that further impact I dread to think what that would do to people. Quite clearly then taking that level of money from people then they themselves will be worse off but economies will be worse off because that's money that's not going into our local shops etc. Over and above that we're folk are no longer able to afford childcare then they'll look to their extended family or even their neighbours to try and provide some of that childcare so well you know there might be households out there who feel that they are completely immune from benefits if we could actually trace the benefit pound through through our economy we'd be quite surprised as to where it actually ends up and the withdrawal of that money the implication for folk as I say would be perhaps you know neighbours asked to look after their children because they can't afford the childcare any longer so that those further cuts do worry me. Mr Brown? Absolutely I think we've heard a lot today about the emerging increase in demand for services across the public sector and the third sector and I think that that would only increase hugely as a result of some of those proposals I would have real concerns about and I suppose the point to make in North Ayrshire and I'm sure it's the same across the country there are real pockets where there are higher levels of child poverty and deprivation than there are other places and communities are generally very resilient and will do whatever they can to help out and however I think and it goes back to my point much earlier on around the increase in destitution presentations people no longer have the aunt or the uncle or the neighbour that they can go to for an emergency £20 just to tide them over to see because actually there are communities now where everyone is in the same boat and everyone is struggling and they no longer have that reliance that they maybe once had and I think that brings additional pressures to the public sector and the third sector as well so those types proposals will inevitably have an impact I think. I think to go back to the focusing on children here I think I've already said that children if children are to be resilient and independent and self-sufficient they need to mature into people who can be independent and resilient and self-sufficient and we all know that children only grow up to be that way if they have the basic security and predictability and they have a life that's devoid of fear and all the other bits of parenting and the community that goes with that. I've already expressed my concern and I share it with Harry that the changes that we're seeing at the moment are stripping away that security from children which then stops them being able to grow into the resilient children that we want and the resilient people that we want and I think if we go down this road further we're just going to create more problems for ourselves that would be my response to your question. I don't think that people set out to have difficult lives. People when their child is born hope for the best and I think the idea that somehow people live that their complicated and vulnerable lives from choices is misdirected so yes it's a difficulty that people face and I don't think that reducing child benefit will necessarily do anything to help the vulnerable families. On that note, thank you very much. Thanks Christina, finally Joan. I'd like to continue with this £12 billion additional cuts figure because it does come from the UK government so it's something that we know is a serious risk. There was a leaked file given to the BBC some time ago that suggested ways that these £12 billion of cuts might be obtained. My colleague Christina McKelvie has already talked about child benefit but some of the suggestions in this leaked document were for example restricting carers allowance to those eligible for universal credit and there was also a suggestion that DLA PIP and attendance allowance would no longer be tax free and there was also a suggestion of regional benefit caps and I just wondered what your reflections were on the impact if those options were taken up because we haven't been told where these £12 billion of cuts are going to come from in the welfare budget but if it did come from one of those areas how would you see the impact being on the people that you deal with in particular families? The cuts come from when someone's going to have to have less money and unfortunately the most vulnerable society are clients of social work services so the majority of social work services have an entitlement to one or more state benefits so wherever the cuts fall it will be an additional responsibility at the end of the day for social work services be it children's services, older people or physical disability, mental health. One of the issues here is that that's a leaked document, it might not come to pass but I think what we started off saying is that the anxiety that emerges from this sort of information or rumour is very distressing to vulnerable tenants or vulnerable clients and at the same time it can cause anxiety among services because thinking right okay how do we cope with this so that there's a very practical response of people who may well be affected but there's the other side which I think we've all indicated is the anxiety that that sort of rumour speculation or fact we don't know can cause for folk so that's almost it's not as distressing clearly as not having so much money but it is very distressing and time consuming. Just touching those I think that I mean I have to say that as yet certainly in the city of Edinburgh we've not really felt the impact of the benefits cap that's not something that's come to prominence here in relation to to children certainly taxing DLA, PIP or tenants allowance will mean that put more pressure on those on those families and similarly restricting the availability of carers allowance is likely to do the same. Where we do have larger families limiting child benefit in the way described clearly would again reduce the family income so these would exacerbate the pressures that we've already discussed and probably lead to a bit more cost hunting probably lead to a bit more pressure in some families that may end up with children coming into the care system which of course is much more expensive. Also in terms of this 12 billion cut politicians or in the current government have suggested that a couple of times in the media recently that disabled people will not be affected do you think that's do you think that's credible to suggest that you could get 12 billion pounds of cuts from the welfare budget without affecting disabled people? Disabled people are already affected by the cuts and the large part of those cuts have still to happen, the migration or the transfer of DLA to PIP is still to land so the original plan for the change was part of the original cost saving exercise so undoubtedly folk will have less money from those changes to I don't see how it's possible to cut even if it's by way of tax those benefits and then see that that won't have an impact on the end recipient that those things don't add up unless that person has so much income that they don't notice the difference but the folk that we're working with don't have those levels of money. Just if I could ask Social Work Scotland in terms of the migration from DLA to PIP, in your written evidence you say that as PIP doesn't include any replacement for the lowest care component of DLA, those with less visible needs are likely to lose out and substantially fewer people are likely to receive PIP-enhanced rating mobility component that would have received the equivalent DLA component resulting in isolation and increased pressure on social work and health services. Is that something you're seeing evidence of already or is it something you're planning for? We've not seen it already as Richard was saying, that's something that's in the pipeline but yes we're having to plan for that, it doesn't necessarily directly affect children of course, this is across the population but that is one of the concerns that Richard's just described. At present, if someone gets a lower rate care component of DLA, they are then protected from non-dependent deductions so they may be living in a house with their son or daughter that protects from the non-dependent deduction. The loss of the DLA component will pale into insignificance in comparison to the level of the non-dependent deduction that could be applied. I've got some figures here or not, I'll trouble you to put them at the moment but someone on the minimum wage I think that the loss would be £45 a week if not more so yes you'll lose your £14, £15 DLA but in addition you would then have applied to you an undependent deduction and if you had two such adults in the house then it would be double that. And also in that same social work Scotland submission it talks about the impact on unpaid adult carers of this is over 650,000 unpaid adult carers and as a result of the loss of the daily living component I wondered if you were able to say a little bit more about the impact on unpaid carers. Well again Richard can probably give you some detail on the technicalities around it but I think already in what's probably not well understood is that a massive amount of the day-to-day care and support that's given to families is done without any support, is done voluntarily, is done by extended family members and neighbours or whatever and primarily when it comes to children by parents particularly disabled children and the changes in allowances that will have that impact will undoubtedly put additional stress on those families. We're doing a lot of work particularly through self-directed support to try and ameliorate some of those problems and look at what packages of care we can put together and there's a really fundamental contrast between the framework, the thinking, the policy and the principles behind something like self-directed support and the application of the benefit system. It couldn't be more stark really that you're trying to deal with many of the same issues but self-directed support is all about choice and empowerment which is exact opposite of the radical changes that we're seeing in the benefit system and the two things are a huge contrast and strike me as being a real example of where policy can be very very incoherent. I don't know if the technical bits of that Richard you unpaid carers, unemployed carers in that sense will claim a carers allowance depending on the person they're caring for getting middle or higher rate care component of DLA. If they get the carers allowance then there's some relaxation of the requirement to seek employment. If the person they care for fails to transfer from DLA to PIP then the person who cares for will lose the carers allowance. They will then need to claim jobseekers allowance and with jobseekers allowance will be the requirement to participate in the work seeking activities. Now the reality may be that the need for care hasn't diminished in any shape or form but the goalposts have moved. Just to finish off can I ask one question? I hope I'm not being unfair, Alasdair, but I'm going to direct this at you because I think it does cover the whole of Scotland. It's an issue that's coming to us from organisations right across Scotland and it's a general question. But it's about service planning and about the level of consultation with organisations who are being impacted and involved in this area. Under the Children and Young People's Act, there is a requirement for children's service plans. Can you reassure the organisations and people out there that those plans are being developed with an understanding of welfare reform at the heart of it and in consultation with those who are affected? I certainly can for the city of Edinburgh, but clearly the new children's services plans are 16, 17 onwards so we're a couple of years away from that yet, so it's time to get this process absolutely right. Most authorities, I'm sure and Stephen Mackay comment on this as well, are currently producing integrated children's services plans based on previous legislation, which are very much part of the community planning structure. For example, in the city of Edinburgh, we would have the people around the table who have the capacity to deal with those issues. That was well beyond the local authority, it includes the health service, it includes the voluntary sector. On the specific issue of welfare reform, most integrated children's services plans will have a strategic objective around poverty. We certainly do in the city of Edinburgh, so we might be trying to do some work in the joint up way around early years, some work around attainment for looked after children, but an equally important element of any children's services plan would be what we're doing to address poverty and the impact of poverty. It's the lens of the community planning partnership that really can get to grips with that. It's not something that local authorities can do on their own. My brief answer to your question is that it's already happening in many places and certainly in Edinburgh. Looking ahead to the new plans, I think that the pressures that are in the pipeline that we've discussed at some length this morning will inevitably mean that this will be at the forefront of people's priorities as we go forward. My answer to that is a resounding yes, that will be very much part of the future. As I said, I did direct the year, it was a general question, we're up against the clock, so can I just leave it at that point and accept that as your answer on behalf of everyone else, because I saw everyone else nodding as you were speaking. I don't think that we're going to get any descent from the position that you outlined, and I thank you very much for it. I thank you for the evidence that you've given us this morning. A lot of it was hard to hear, but it was important that we heard it. I just hope that other people elsewhere pay attention to the messages that are coming out from people like yourselves who are at the coalface of these changes. Thanks very much for enlightening us this morning on this very important issue. While our witnesses are leaving, I'll just point out that our next meeting on May 5, we expect to hear your say evidence from a range of PIP recipients and consider the committee's annual report. With that, I will bring the public part of the meeting to a close.