ouring and welcome to the 22nd meeting of the Welfare Reform Committee for 2015, I can ask everyone to make sure that mobile phones and other electronic devices are silent or switched to airplane mode. The first item on the agenda is a decision on taking items 5 and 6 in private. Item 5 is a review of the draft call for evidence of the draft budget and item 6 is a discussion about digital working committees, does that agree? Item 2 in our agenda is consideration legislative consent memorandum. It is in relation to the welfare reform and work bill in this morning. We have with us Alec Neill, the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners' Rights. Welcome, Alex. With him is Caroline Cowan, who is the head of the Tackling Poverty Team Scottish Government, and Gillian Cross, who is the policy adviser tackling poverty team in the Scottish Government. As all members will be aware, the UK Government's welfare reform and work bill is currently making its way through the UK Parliament. The bill contains significant changes to welfare benefits, tax credits and social housing levels and introduces new duties on the UK Parliament to report and progress towards achieving full employment, the apprenticeships target in England and the troubled families programme in England. However, I am here today to seek legislative consent for the elements of the bill that relate to the Child Poverty Act 2010. I fundamentally disagree with the changes to the act that were proposed by the bill for a number of reasons and are therefore secured amendments to remove Scotland from the UK Government's proposed approach. I will outline for the committee the changes in my opposition to them briefly and will be happy to answer any questions the committee may have. Over the provisions of the bill, the Child Poverty Act 2010 will be renamed the Life Chances Act 2010. The UK Government will no longer be required to report on income targets, instead it will be required to report annually on life chances. That means reporting on the number of children living in work-less households and on educational attainment at 16 in England. I believe that income is a fundamental driver of poverty and I therefore see the removal of income-based targets as totally unacceptable. Replacing those with a target focused on worklessness completely ignores in-work poverty, which, as we know, is a growing problem and affects 120,000 children in Scotland. At a UK level, 67 per cent of children in poverty live in a household where one or more adults is working. The Scottish Government does not feel that we can support a child poverty target that does not take those children into account. The second issue is the changes that the UK Government is proposing to the Child Poverty and Social Mobility Commission. That will be renamed the Social Mobility Commission in one fell swoop removing the child poverty aspects of the remit. The new commission will report in progress towards improving social mobility in the UK as well as promoting social mobility in England. The Scottish Government has worked closely with the commission in the past and we feel that its role in scrutinising the Government's tackling poverty efforts has been invaluable. The child poverty elements of the commission's remit are fundamental to its work and to remove them at a time when child poverty remains such a priority issue does not seem appropriate. We have therefore negotiated amendments that mean that the duties in Scottish ministers under the Child Poverty Act will be repealed and we will not be part of the new social mobility commission. That is not a decision that we have taken lightly, of course. I am extremely committed to tackling poverty and improving social mobility in Scotland. I have discussed my decision with Alan Milburn, chair of the social mobility commission, and I have stressed my commitment to continued informal co-operation with the commission where appropriate and possible. All of this means that the Scottish Government must look forward to developing a Scottish approach to tackling child poverty. We will do that by working closely with our ministerial advisory group on child poverty, our independent poverty adviser, this committee and other stakeholders and confident that we can build upon and revise the innovative and robust measurement framework that we already have in place to come up with a distinct Scottish approach, one that genuinely addresses the issue of child poverty rather than sweeping it under the carpet. You wish a different set of indicators in Scotland, but you are not convinced of what has been proposed about children living in work-less households and educational attainment at the age of 16. Would it be possible to do what you propose but retain those? Would it not be of some value known about failures in relation to educational attainment? Obviously, we are engaged in a debate just now specifically on educational attainment and how the best way is to close the gap in educational attainment. There are such divergencies between the Scottish education system and the English education system that how they measure their attainment is obviously different from how we measure ours. Any measurement of attainment would be the subject, and it is the subject, as you know, of consideration by the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. It is an issue being addressed by the Wider Access Commission as well. We believe that, since we have a separate Scottish education system, it is in any case better to measure educational progress here in Scotland as we do using a whole range of measurements. I understand that, but could you not use those Scottish measurements and still have the target of measuring educational attainment? There are real concerns about collectively relating to all of us a failure to close the educational gap, so would it not be wise to use Scottish measurements to have a target in Scotland relating to educational attainment? As you know, the education secretary and the First Minister are looking at this very issue at the moment. The issue is whether anything like that should be in this bill, and we believe that it would be inappropriate. What is in the bill at the moment is very much geared to the English education system and not to what is happening in Scotland. Or, indeed, I do not think that it covers Wales either. Wales, as you know, has taken a similar position to this bill as we have. Perhaps I am failing to understand, but is it not possible to have the same target but to use Scottish indicators and Scottish measurements? The theory is possible, but it is obviously a weird indication in the debate on what exactly the target should be in terms of educational attainment, how it should be measured, when it should be measured and what metric it should be used to measure those. We have all the legislative power that we need to build that into our own legislation and to make it part and parcel of a wider widening access and closing educational attainment gap strategy. There is no added advantage in having one of those targets at age 16 in this bill. Will the cabinet secretary for education bring back to this Parliament a proposal to measure gaps in educational attainment at age of 16? That should do as all part and parcel of the consultations that are going on at the present time in the work of the wider access commission. The cabinet secretary for education will come forward to Parliament in due course about how and when those things should be measured if any changes are required. The four UK children and young people as commissioners have expressed their ire at the changes in the new UK bill. In terms of the formulation that you are going to undertake in terms of Scottish measurements of those issues, you will ensure that the children and young people as commissioners here are involved in that consultation and that his views are taken into account when you finally decide how you are going to carry on in this regard. Obviously, the Children's Commissioner plays a significant role in all aspects of policy towards children and young people. Our measurement framework was set out in anual report on child poverty in October 2015. You may remember that when the original act was passed, initiated by Gordon Brown in 2010, there were four specific aspects to measuring child poverty. Of course, we believe those four aspects are still very relevant today, but we have developed a more comprehensive and, we believe, a more robust set of measurements and a measurement framework for measuring progress on child poverty specifically. However, as I say, we absolutely agree with your assessment. I thank you for your explanation this morning. I notice that Ian Duncan-Smith proposes to measure educational attainment, worklessness and addiction. In many cases, those are the symptoms of poverty rather than the causes of poverty and how our Government might refocus on them. I am not saying that those things should not be taken into consideration, but how do we refocus what we do to recognise that sometimes those are the symptoms of poverty rather than the causes and how do we reverse that? Absolutely. As I said in my introduction, it is very clear from the analysis that we have done in the work done, particularly by our independent adviser on poverty in Scotland, by far the biggest challenge in Scotland in terms of poverty. In the rest of the UK, poverty is in-work. That is not just about the adults, it is about the children affected by in-work poverty. 67 per cent across the UK of children who are in poverty are living in households where somebody is working and the figure is about 59 per cent in Scotland. No matter which geography you are looking at in Scotland or the whole of the UK, no matter which way you cut it, in-work poverty is by far the biggest challenge. Yet, in-work poverty is being totally excluded from targets or from the provisions in the bill. I think that the bill is part and parcel of a wider agenda of trying to paint people who are unemployed as some kind of skivers. We do not agree with that philosophy or with that approach or that analysis at all. I am glad to hear that cabinet secretary when we talk about vulnerable young people. I notice that in the legislation that they talk about the most disadvantaged proposed at the age of 16, but we changed our focus in Scotland a few years ago when we reformed the children's hearing system to measure vulnerability to the age of 18 and maybe longer if it is young people coming for care or coming for a very, very seriously background where welfare is the issue rather than criminality. I wonder how we will measure that, because that is a gap between 16 and 18. For some young people, that is part of the most vulnerable time of their life. We believe that our approach has to be to measure those things throughout the child's life and young person's life and not just at one particular point. The fourth element in the Gordon Brown Act 2010 on child poverty was about persistent poverty. One of the things clearly, if you look at any analysis of poverty either in Scotland or in the UK, there are people who are in and out of poverty. A lot of the people are in poverty, out of poverty and back in poverty because of their circumstances, but there is also a hardcore group of people who are in persistent poverty who never actually get out of poverty or out of the statistics at any time in their lives. If you are looking at poverty, then clearly poverty is something that is no respecter of age, because clearly we have people in poverty right through from children born into poverty to people who die in poverty. The other point in all of this is very clearly all the evidence suggests, and I know that the committee has previously heard evidence from Harry Burns and others about the biology of poverty, showing that the level of poverty very often is determined when the child is in the womb, let alone when the child is born, and the life chances of a child are pretty well determined within the first year of that child's life. To wait until the age of 16 and put all the emphasis on the age of 16, there is nothing wrong with measuring it at 16, but that is only one snapshot in a lifetime of poverty or being in and out of poverty. We believe that the whole approach embodied in this bill and taking the remit of child poverty away from the commission included is a mistake and is deprioritising child poverty as an issue. We believe that, far from deprioritising it, it is a top priority to tackle child poverty in our country. I have a final point on that transition period. Do you think that the changes that are proposed to welfare benefits for 18 to 25-year-olds, no housing benefit, some of the changes as far as tax credits and all that have an impact on those young people who are probably at a stage where they are starting their families, so that completes that cycle of poverty? Do you think that that is wrong-headed? What is the Scottish Government's answer to that? Absolutely. Very clearly, young people have feared badly from the budget earlier this year and from the spending review earlier this year. Although the headline reforms to the tax credit system were a U-turn on that, there is still a lot in the bill in particular that is going to damage people who are in poverty. The freezing of benefits until 2020, the limiting of tax credits to people with only two children and the range of measures that you mentioned, all of those things are going to be, I believe, detrimental to the fight against poverty. The people that I meet do not want to be living in poverty, they do not want to be unemployed, they do not want to be disabled or sick, they want to be able to work if they can and they want to get a job and they want to have a decent income. Our emphasis should be in helping people out of poverty but not by ignoring the problem or trying to underestimate the problem but by being upfront and honest about the scale of the problem and therefore the scale of the challenge that we face. Sorry, convener, I just have one really, really quick final point. What is the Scottish Government's thoughts on the third child conditionality and the issue about a woman having to prove that she is being raped? My view is that this is because of the changes to the tax credits that are being made and we would not make those, agree with those changes in the first place, so the issue would not arise, but it is a very good example of how ill-thought-out those proposals are. By adopting a different measuring framework and coming up with a different set of indicators, we are going to have some divergence of the information that is being kept. Welfare payments effectively operate outside the Barnett envelope, which they come according to need. Is there a danger that, by measuring different figures in Scotland, we might ultimately get a disagreement or a divergence in entitlement in North and South of the border? The entitlement is not necessarily, but if you look at the correlation between entitlement and the level of poverty in many of the benefits, it is a very thin correlation. It should be a much stronger correlation so that the people who are in poverty are the ones who get the most help. However, very clearly, if you look at the measures in this bill in relation to the further changes to tax credits, to the freezing of benefits, to the changes for 18 to 25-year-olds, those are all groups where the levels of poverty are very high and yet those are the people who are losing the most benefits through this bill. Therefore, the correlation at the moment in terms of policy determined by the UK cabinet, the correlation is very thin indeed. At the very beginning of a process at the moment where the Scottish Government in future years will begin to participate more significantly in contributing towards the welfare budget and we may see new benefits evolve, is the divergence in the information that we record likely to be an area that could be exploited to reduce the UK contribution towards benefit payments in Scotland and pass the burden progressively to the Scottish Government? Obviously, the fiscal agreement that has to be negotiated in the process of being negotiated between the Scottish Government and the UK Government is designed partly to address that issue as well as many other issues so that we end up in a situation that if we take a different policy decision in relation to any matter that there is no detrimental impact on the Scottish budget or on the individual, we might remember that when Henry McLeish introduced free personal care, the then Secretary of State for Social Security, Alistair Darling, decided that all those receiving free personal care would no longer be entitled to attendance allowance, which today would be worth about £40 million to the affected people. Similarly, when we declared in 2007 that we wanted to give and extend the benefits that foster parents enjoy to those involved in kinship care, we were told by the then Secretary of State for Social Security that if we gave additional money to kinship carers, every penny would be taken off in the benefits system from the UK Government. A key part of all that is the decisions that we make in future on the new devolved powers and the existing ones, there should be no consequential diminution in either our budget or in the individual budget of anyone who is a benefit recipient as a result of decisions that we take, so the different way in which we measure it should not impact on policy in my view at all. Is it not the case though that the Cabinet Secretary described previous events that were clearly understood because we had common benchmarking and that if we have different benchmarking, it is simply likely to open up an area of contention in future fiscal negotiations? The decision that was taken to take away the attendance allowance for people getting free personal care has nothing to do with benchmarking or anything else—it was pure spite, quite frankly. Similarly, if we had introduced kinship carers at that time and given them the same benefits as foster parents, that was not based on any measurement other than pure spite. History does not tell us anything about the future. The important point is to establish a guarantee of no detrimental impact either on the Scottish Government's budget or on the budget of individual claimants as a result of any policy differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK. I am going to ask Caroline to come in and give you some of the technical aspects of that. It is just to clarify that the statistics that are used for a lot of these, the households below average income, will continue to be collected across the UK. What is really changing is that they will no longer be used to inform targets, policy targets but those baseline statistics will continue. I am sure that I heard this morning you commending the work of Gordon Brown and saying that we have all the power that we need. I congratulate you on that. Yes, you did. Yes, you said that we have all the power that we need in relation to the narrow aspect. I commend you on getting out of the right side of the bed this morning. In relation to poverty and commitments to eradicating it, I do not question that one bit. However, why has the report into inequality, as reported in the media that we can, been joining the growing list of reports that will be delayed until after the election? You are talking about the index of multiple deprivation. That is a decision that was taken in April this year by the chief statistician on the advice of the advisory committee on multiple deprivation. It is not a political decision. The decision is taken by the chief statistician under the UK code of statistics. I am sure that the convener, as a former minister, will be able to confirm that, on occasions like that, we are not even consulted. The decision is taken and then announced in this case by the chief statistician for Scotland. The reason that the decision was taken was in relation to a consultation about the geographic definitions being used in the index of multiple deprivation and as to whether it was providing an accurate enough assessment of what it was intending to indicate and to report on. That consultation was not completed on schedule at the time. That was the reason that the chief statistician gave for his decision to delay the report. The earliest that he has indicated—he said this many months ago—the earliest that the report will now be available will be May 2016. That is a non-political, independent decision by the chief statistician. Ministers were not involved in that decision at all. When it is just published, are you confident that it will show that the inequality and poverty gap is narrowing in Scotland? No, I am not confident of that at all. When you look at the impact of the tax and benefit changes made by the UK Government, the impact of those may well have made inequality more of a problem and poverty more of a problem. We have just been talking about young people aged between 18 and 25 who are relying on benefit. I do not see how you can anticipate that poverty will decline if their benefits are being withdrawn completely or reduced or frozen. Do you expect the gap or the performance in Scotland to be better or worse than elsewhere in the UK? I think that it is very difficult to anticipate that because of the population changes south of the border. There is a net immigration last year of over 300,000 people, and a lot of the figures will be influenced by the profile of those people. If they are people who are relatively well off and with high levels of employment and the indications are that they may well be, a lot of those people tend to congregate in the south-east of England rather than a high proportion come north or to the north of England or Scotland, if that is the case statistically, it may well show an improvement in England because of that one impact. It may well do. I do not know because the research has not been completed and the figures have not been published, so I do not think that it would be wise of me to try and forecast the outcome. In terms of FEM policy, which policies do you see that have been enacted by the Government in the moment where we are redistributing to those who most need it to narrow the poverty gap? Under this Government, the social wage has increased enormously. Specifically in relation to children, the expansion of childcare of all the things that we have done is probably the most important one. I think that all the evidence shows that the extension of free childcare is fundamentally important to the life chances of children, but it also helps the life chances of their parents as well. However, there are many other policies, for example the introduction of free school meals for P12 and P3. I think that there is a fundamental change in many— Everyone gets that. The reason for free school meals is that many of the people who were entitled to it under the old system did not take it up and now they are taking it up. Do you accept that there is no redistributive element? No, I do not accept that at all. That is a discussion that, as a society and as a Parliament, we need to have. It is not germane to the topic that is before us. Neil, is there anything else on the legislative consent motion? No. Cabinet Secretary, I attended the conference yesterday on welfare in Edinburgh and we had contributions from one parent families who have produced a child poverty action plan along with CPAC and other stakeholders in this area. Income is a key element of what they are asking for, so I absolutely understand and agree with the Government's position on the income. We also talked about the complexities going forward, about a shared social security system going forward, should the Scotland Bill be enacted. I have a big concern about the lack of consultation prior to this from the Government and were you surprised that the devolved Administrations were not involved prior to this bill coming forward with its proposals? Unfortunately, it is part of the course. Very often we are not consulted. I mean a very good example. Probably the best example was during this financial year when £100 million was taken out of the Scottish Government's budget without a buy-your-leave by the UK Government. So when they tell us the treatise with respect, I have to say that I take that with a large pinch of salt. Of course we should have been consulted, as indeed should have the Northern Ireland Government and the Welsh Government. Unfortunately, the Department of Work and Pensions, I think at times, parts of it. I do not think I have heard of the word devolution of power. Forget that there are now three other legislatures in the UK in addition to the one in London. Unfortunately, it was part of the course, so there are no surprises in that respect, but of course we should have been properly consulted. Just on that general principle of consultation, you obviously feel strong about it. Do you consult with local authorities, each individual local authority, before you make changes to their budget? Absolutely. For example, John Swinney and I, tomorrow morning, have, I think in the last eight weeks, we will have a fourth or fifth meeting with the COSLA leaders in relation to their budget, which of course will be announced by John Swinney on 16 December. We have very intense negotiations going on, and that is just at political level, convener at official level, and it is on a daily basis. Each individual council, do you discuss that with them? Obviously, each council, what we do in the agreement is that COSLA negotiates with us on behalf of local authorities across Scotland. That is the system, and it has been the system for a long time. Okay. Anyone else? If not, can I thank the cabinet secretary for his contribution? We will suspend the meeting to allow the cabinet secretary to leave. Agenda item 3, consideration of the LCM. We have heard the evidence from the cabinet secretary, and the committee has to report to Parliament on the LCM. Effectively, we need to indicate whether we are content with the terms of the legislative consent memorandum, and are we content to report accordingly? Any views, comments? Okay. If that is the case, then we agree that. We will now bring the public part of the meeting to a close. This is the last meeting of 2015, and we will reconvene on 12 January 2016 to consider the draft budget. Okay. Thank you.