 Gweinidog fawr osweithwyr dechrau na'r keyboard i ddiw yw'raniau Halun yma dw i'w rai d 걸ag dfirelmu fy llIG- Milft Cymru. Felly fawr o'n alarms. Myfchner ddim yn gweld ar gyflaen-deblogaeth, d answered fashion.央d yn 19 podeid yn gennym gweithio gan echadag ei wneud, ac maewn bydd wedi yn dig vein of un pieddiol iawn. Gweithio er� including 90hm a 19Dm iawn ei gweithio lle showed ag treatments Mae Gryffin MFP wedi cael ei wneud hynny. Rwy'n meddwl i'n meddwl i agenda item 1, ydych chi'n dechrau i agenda items in private, ac mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i agenda item 4, y cyfnodol y ffordd, yn meddwl i agenda item 2, social security a in-work poverty. Agenda item 2 yn meddwl i social security a in-work poverty, ac mae'n meddwl i third evidence session. Rwy'n meddwl i ddim ddim o fod angylcheddu o'r cadw. Rwy'n meddwl i'n meddwl i ddim yn meddwl i fy nghymru yn meddwl i gael, ac mae'n meddwl i ddim yn meddwl i gaelれ, ac mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i dweud i gael, ac mae'n meddwl i gael i ddim yn samaridd, yn meddwl i'r cadw i ddim yn meddwl i gael. Mae bob D horas MSP a bl甚麼fynion yn y cyfnodol yn y fwyaf. Mae sorry am y MSP a blisio. Maewn stiffyn, Steve Ryan. Rwy'n meddwl i gael mynd i gael y MYnd i Time Mission. My name is Maddie Natt. I work for Coss Highland and we facilitate the food bank in Tain, which is in Russia. Jeremy Balfour, MSP for Bolovian. Evan Adamson, I work for Instant Neighbour, running a food bank in Aberdeen. Sean Robison, MSP for Dundee City East. Laura Ferxon, the Trust for Trust Operations Manager for Scotland. Alistair Allen, MSP for Nehalyn and the Nears, the Western Isles. Mark Franklund, I'm from the First Bice Agency Food Bank in Dumfries. I'm Michelle Ballantyne and I'm an MSP for the South of Scotland. Joyce Leggett, I'm the chair of Cracody Food Bank in St Johnston, MSP for Bolovian. Okay, so thank you everyone again for coming here this morning. We're keen to have this as a round table event, rather than a formal evidence session where MSPs just pitch questions to witnesses, so I'll maybe open up with an initial question that's not directed at anyone in particular, but just to get a conversation started. So there's been much discussion in the public about the changing face of food bank usage and our enquiries in relation to inward poverty, and what we're really keen to find out is what witnesses here have experienced maybe over the last few years in terms of those who are using food banks, has there been a change in that? Have you experienced many people who are in work coming along to use the food bank? Just to start that conversation, I want someone to give them perhaps kick his off in relation to that. Joyce Leggett, we have a fairly small number of people in work coming along. It's only about 5 per cent of our total who are admitting to be in work. Again, in Fife, there's quite a lot of seasonal work in fields and car washes and things like that as well. I think that it could well be quite under-reported, but we've had a huge increase in the number of referrals, I think, in the same as every food bank over the last year in particular, and a bigger increase in the number of families who are coming and presenting to the food bank. Previously, there was more single meals, but now I would say there's still more single meals coming, but families are making up about 46 per cent of our total. That's helpful in relation to other comments to that. I think that an average of 10 per cent of our users are in work or admit to be in work. We have a general 10 per cent rise consistently with new users, but the in work is rising consistently with it as well. It seems to be just a consistent 10 per cent for us who are in work or admit to be in work. More people who are in work using food banks but not an increasing percentage of those? No, the percentage seems to stay the same buck because we have an increase in usage anyway than obviously there. That's helpful. Other comments? Steve Wright. I think that the experience of out-in-procity mission, we have a network of nine food banks. This year, we will see a 50 per cent increase in referrals based on last year. The year before that, it was a 22 per cent increase and the year before that is a 26 per cent increase. So, there's been quite a dramatic increase in the actual number of referrals this year. Probably about 20 per cent of those have some connection with in-work benefit problem. The fact that in-work benefits have been perhaps frozen or people now still being paid the basic wage rather than the living wage, prices are increasing. People who are in work, salaries have been frozen over the last three years and they've struggled along, but now they've got to the point where they have no resilience and no resources. The number of children including that is really quite frightening as well. There is an increase. It's not just a spike this year. It's a problem that's been building and now it's reached crisis point, I think. Thank you. Some of the comments that we're making about the reasons that's driving that increase in food bank use, we're definitely going to explore that in just a moment, actually, so that's really, really helpful, but would anyone else like to comment just on whether there's been a change in demographic, more people in work going to food banks, the patterns being maybe not made a contribution yet? From a trust-to-trust perspective, we have 53 food banks in Scotland. Last year, we distributed over 170,000 food parcels to people. That was a 17 per cent increase for Scotland, whereas the rest of the UK was only a 13 per cent increase. Some of our food banks, for example, are seeing increases of 50 per cent, some 80 per cent, and that's where they are now in an area full roll-out of universal credit, so that's a massive concern to many of our food banks. I think that two thirds of our food banks are in areas of full roll-out at the moment. One in six households where we've given out food parcels have been in work, and that's primarily because of part-time work or insecure work, where they can't rely on their wage from week to week. Okay. Any other comments before we move forward? Mark Franklin. I mean, what I would then say to the people we see who are in work, when you sort of have a conversation with them, they really should have come about six to eight months earlier. In that six to eight months, the credit cards have got completely maxed out, mum and dad can't lend them any more money, and that I'd say is almost entirely down to stigma. It gives us the impression—I get the impression—that there's a big cliff edge that we might be getting to where people who are in work, they leave it to the absolute last resort before going to a food bank, because there is—I don't know whether that's down to what was quite a concertive, almost like a media campaign against the shirkers' and scroungers' story and the endless poverty documentaries, but you do get the feelings of a lot of people who are coming to that cliff edge, and when they do come, it could take quite a lot of dealing with. I think we've got a similar story in Tainbury, a small rural area, and yet we've now doubled our storage capacity, and that is because we're now in a universal credit area. Everyone who was vulnerable and on a benefit is now being rolled on to universal credit, and we've seen this again and again. We mostly work with people similar to Joyce, I think it was said that most people that we work with are just vulnerable, long-term, unemployed, but part of that is, and when we start to work with people, they are getting into work, and then they go on to use the universal credit benefit, and it seems as if it's just part and part of the package of—I know that they've tried to change the waiting time, and we are getting some advance payments, but it seems to be that now it's just part and parcel of the fact that you go on to the universal credit, you get yourself into work, you wait five weeks, we get into debt, we borrow it off of every single person, which is what you're asked. When you ring up and get money, they say, have you asked your friends, have you asked your family? These people haven't got any more people, and the more people they borrow from, the more stressed there is, the more they have to pay back when they get this meager £317, which is all they get for four weeks, so they have to borrow that, and it becomes part and parcel of it that you just have to get into the food bank system, and I think we've gone beyond being too embarrassed, we've gone beyond this way too embarrassing to go, when you're desperate and you've got kids waiting for breakfast, you go to the food bank, and that's what we're seeing, again and again and again. You know, the system is very hard on people. You are five weeks, you know, you've got people that were never in debt, they were having housing benefit, their rent was secure, their home was secure, and suddenly they are five weeks in arrears, because they've had to wait five weeks, and not only that, the council writes to you and says you're five weeks in arrears, where's your money? And when I ring up and say, this person's only in arrears because of universal credit, I say, yeah, yeah, we know why, but we got it, so standard letter, we send it out, more stress, more worry, trying to do work, we start a job, we had one guy, I'm sorry, I'll stop now, but we had one with passionate, one guy who got a job, he couldn't afford to wash his uniform, he couldn't afford to put the electric on, he couldn't keep the job, he had to lose the job, it was his first job in seven years, but he couldn't do it because he couldn't pay and he couldn't turn up for work, you know, that's the situation, it's diastrates, it's very difficult for people. Can I actually not say that you have to stop talking, because that's the whole point of you being here, is to share these experiences, so thank you very much for doing that. I think Alice Rallon wanted to take forward the discussion. What's interesting, Mark Franklin, you were saying there about some of the reasons that people don't come forward and some of the stigma that still exists, and I think myself and other MSPs, I'm sure, who've spoken to their local food banks, will find that the same message is coming through, that some people, perhaps particularly older people, feel that stigma. I wonder if you have a view in that case, you mentioned some of the stigma that people feel, whether you feel that that creates an impetus and a requirement for all of us in the public domain, to speak about people and benefits in reasonably respectful terms. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, certainly the whole Shirkus Grounders narrative, I think, has left a lot of damage on people, and they're almost made... It's another form of othering, I guess, because, you know, for them to put off... I'll give you an example. A local minister who is one of our volunteers has been, for a year now, trying to deliver some food parcels to a couple of families near Lockerby, and they're in dire straits, you know, everything's gone wrong with the benefits, the various sickness benefits haven't come through. Even though she said, I will come, I will bring this food in plain bags, no one's going to think anything whatsoever, they still wouldn't take it, until she eventually found out, at sort of three o'clock in the morning, they're going down to the local service station and pulling food out of the skips, rather than the prospect of the neighbours getting to hear it. And, certainly, when other meaties have had with local food banks, there's always a debate about what your criteria are, what kind of means testing are you going to adopt. And our view is, we set a really, really low bar. I mean, we have food available through 25 collection points across the region, most of them local libraries, and we just say, if someone needs food to the librarian, if they come in and ask for food, give them one of our food parcels, because for every one person who might technically get some food, which they're not entitled to, we reckon must be at least eight or nine who are not coming in because of that sense of stigma. And so, I mean, our view, I think, with all food banks, should be setting as low a bar as possible. It's really hard to walk through the door for an awful lot of people. And if the first thing that is a clipboard and a load of really intrusive questions, then they're not going to come. I'll give preference to the witness. We'll take you in a little second, but Steve Wright, do you want to add to that? I just want to pick up on what Mark said. When we started the project in 2006, it was a referral-only service, and the thinking was that if somebody recognised they got a problem and had sought help with that problem, they'd be open for other kind of help. Four years ago, we reviewed that because we were having people come in who had no connection with support workers or social workers. They'd never been in the system, and therefore we started just taking what we call self-evidence referrals. And the number of that has grown substantially because this raft of folk who already find it difficult to ask for help because it's their first time kind of thing, we don't want to put barriers in their way. And now we will have people walk in and we will give them one bag of food, well, a blessings bag. But it gives us the opportunity, then, to find out what their real problems are. On the flip side of that, we've seen a massive increase in Scottish welfare fund referrals from the local council. My concern with that is there is no bar, you can just ring up a number of five options and you will get a food bank referral. We, on the front end, are having to do more and more of the filtering and the investigation, and that's putting a massive amount of pressure on our resources, both manpower, but food. Last year, we gave away 100 tonnes of food, and this year we're going to be substantially over that, and we're totally reliant on donations, so there's that side as well. I don't want to say too easy, but we might create a problem in our ability, and we may have to close one or two food banks just due to the lack of resources. Our food bank, Coddy Food Bank, does allow self-referrals and always has done, but we are now sitting at over 81 per cent of our referrals, our self-referrals, and we don't restrict the number of parcels. It's a very free, open access food bank. That said, we know that 89 per cent of our clients do not abuse the food bank. They'll come between five and ten times maximum. The very small percentage who will come more frequently have complex mental health issues, complex benefit issues, the debt, and the amount of debt that people are accruing now on universal credit is crippling them. From a personal point of view, when I see the mental health of people deteriorating when they're having to come in week after week after week and getting ground down by the system, they think their benefits are being sorted, and then they've got this massive clawback in debt that they've accrued usually to the local council, either to the welfare team, to the advance loans or rent and council tax ar-years. Thank you. A couple more MSPs want to come in, but do you ever add some first? I just wanted to address the self-referral thing. We're an independent food bank, and it is totally self-referral that we deal with. Interestingly, this past 12 months I've actually been on universal credit and using food banks. I've literally just started with Instant Neighbourhood as a community connector. I was fortunate enough that even though I was made homeless and I was jobless, I had things that I could sell. I had belongings and that's how I managed. I didn't see the problem with universal credit initially. Once I'd sold everything that I had, that's when I started noticing issues. As far as referrals for food banks, I had no idea how to do it. I went online in Aberdeen. When you google it in Aberdeen, it's the Trussell Trust that comes up. I couldn't get a referral to the Trussell Trust. I didn't know how to use food banks. This is an issue that I've seen with universal credit, with the benefit system, is that they don't want to tell you anything. I found out that when I got offered an interview for this job, I didn't have suitable attire for interviews. I found out that I could get a grant for a suit. I started the job at the start of the month, about the eighth of the month, so I knew I had three or four weeks where I had to get to work but didn't have money for bus fares. The job centre, my job coach, arranged for me to get a bus pass, but I was told, don't tell anyone. I think that what Mandy said about your client who had to give up his job, there are finances available for those things, or in Aberdeen anyway, through our job centre, but you're told to keep it quiet. If you don't ask, you don't get it. I'm stubborn, I always ask why. If I get refused anything, they'll say why, what am I entitled to, but the despondency in a lot of our clients that we deal with means that if they're told no, I'll stuff it. I'm not going to have anything to do with it now, I don't care, and that's what we're dealing with, is despondency. They don't care about coming into the food bank, we have them, we issue parcels every 14 days, and they queue up on their 14th day to come in. They don't have any, there's no sort of embarrassment of that about using it, they just don't want to deal with the benefit system. Most of the MSPs in this room do we give out referral vouchers for food banks, and just that discussion about referrals or directly referring, I can't imagine a situation where my office would ever or I would never not to give a referral, if someone's in food need, you hand out the chitty and you give the referral or not, or not, they go and have had that discussion with the Trussell Trust as well, who have said, look, if there are repeat referrals from individuals, yes, we would like to work with them to see if there's anything else that's underlying, we can support them with, but actually don't not give a referral, give the referral, we need to feed people, so I think that's been an interesting conversation about what the point of a referral system is in the first place, because in my experience, I've never known anyone not to give out a food bank referral, so if the gatekeeping is sleight of hand, because no one's going to give out, no one's going to not give out a referral, then you could argue, why do we need the referral process in the first place? There could be management issues in relation to that, I appreciate that. Sorry, Lyra Ferguson. I'll carry on, I can... No, no, no, I've taken my own reel here, so I'm going to stop talking now. I was just thinking that it's a really delicate balance, because we want to, whether you have a referral system or not, we want to recognise the invaluable work that food banks do within our communities. There's no doubt that food banks save lives, that they are there, they provide emotional support, they provide wraparound services to help people in their situation, but we cannot forever rely on food banks to pick up the pieces of a failed welfare state. We cannot further institutionalise food banks, they do do an amazing work, but we just cannot be here forever. I would note that, if you're still around, you should look at the next item on our agenda, where we'll be looking at that point as well. Matt, I'm going to break my own reel twice here, because the deputy convener's been incredibly patient for the last 20 minutes trying to get in, so I will take you next, Mark, but I'll be here. No, actually it is quite timely that Laura went before me, because I think you've hit the nail on the head, which is... So we're beginning to learn the picture of what food banks are doing and the added burdens that they're taking on. I would... This listening to this, I'd almost describe it as almost a shadow social security system that we've ended up with, but what you said there is, I suppose, the key question for this committee or the wider work of Parliament, which is how we're going to get out of this, where people are now so dependent on food banks and not just food banks, but the expansion of different types of banks, so whether it's... You need a suit for an interview for a job, but you can clearly see how we easily expand that further set of... So I'm supposed to be a question for me is how we're actually going to turn this around. In answering my question, can I just add a few things that I'm interested in? I don't know much about who the donors are to food banks. I wasn't aware there was so much self-referral, and I just wondered, but obviously there's lots of people who do get referrals. What do they do the rest of the time? We just, again, you wonder, there's another network of people who just... What do they do in between? Well, what is people are... Oh, it's a good opportunity to actually... Mr Franton, I'll take you in a second, but Mr Ziria apologies that we had to start. I know you were delayed getting here, but it's a good opportunity for you to come in at this point. My apologies for being late, but we were held up in traffic. All I wanted to add two things really to support what Evan said before. With respect to referral, there are people who don't even wish to go that route. We have a few examples, in one case a policeman in fact, who had been recently divorced and who was having to pay for the upkeep of a child, and who had a lot of financial commitments and who didn't know how to even go about referring himself and who ended up coming to us. And we helped him over a period of time to get through. And there was also a situation of another divorced man with two children who hadn't eaten for days and had been surviving on water for four days. And he had no gas electricity and he received three parcels from us over a period of time, plus some top-up so he could have utility in his house. And this allowed him to see his children for the first time in many weeks. And eventually, he got through. And that would take me to slightly different sort of a matter of Fair Food Transformation Fund, which we received. And this is to answer your question about what happens if the food parcels are being given. Then Fair Food Transformation Fund is helping people to actually have shared food, reduce wastage and have some kind of support for people who want to get through the week, but can't, but who are not really in a situation of complete destitution or lack of foods? Thank you. Mr Franklin, do you want to come in? Yeah, picking up on, this is something which gets me really frustrated. Often on TV when we hear politicians asked about food banks, we often hear that phrase, the disgrace of food banks. Now, I know they don't mean we're disgraceful. It's the whole concept of food banks in the 21st century, blah, blah, blah, is disgraceful. I think it's a ridiculous attitude. I mean, just take yourself as an example. We hand out between five and six emergency food parcels a year through 25 collection points. We have a staff of two, both who earn 20,000 quid a year. We have 50 volunteers, most of whom providing their own vehicles. I mean, what would that cost if the council tried to do that? And one thing we find, I mean, it's often discussed that we're an aging population. There's an awful lot of retired people with fantastic sort of life experience abilities. They don't want to just sit there and watch daytime TV every day. They're really keen to volunteer and do something. And the food bank has become this model which has been created over the last 10 years or so, enabling huge numbers of people who are concerned of what they see on the telly. They're concerned that so many people living in poverty, they want to help. A food bank is a vehicle for that. And yet everyone seems to want to close the food banks down and let's get back to the council doing everything. Someone's hard up, then, means test them, hand them a tenor. I really don't understand it. Rather than that, I think that the attitude should be, this is something that's actually working incredibly well, largely volunteer based, completely rooted in the community, completely local on an incredibly low cost for what we do. And yet what we've got at the moment is we've got the rest of the welfare state in Britain gets 300 billion quid a year. Food banks get nothing and say we must in fact get rid of them altogether and somehow reabsorb it. I don't understand the thinking when food banks can tap into so many brilliant volunteers who've got loads of talents. I mean, the average age of our volunteers would be 65. And they're really pleased to do it. I suppose the question might be, Mr Franklin, that would be that if the welfare state was to impose further benefit cuts, that would drive up further need, which would mean that food banks would have to yet again expand to pick up that need. And I think what we're definitely going to be saying is there's food banks out there, and there's been food banks about for a long time, but on a much slimmer scale, whether food banks should just effectively become part of the welfare state to save governance money or whether or not they should be the exception or the extremity of need rather than just the day-to-day provision of meeting need. And I think there's a lot of people out there that would say, actually, the state should step in and should meet those most basic needs. And when that fails, food banks do a wonderful, amazing volunteer-led job that we all really, really appreciate and welcome. And there's debt, but I appreciate the point that you're making, Mr Franklin, Mr Wright. I agree with what Mark said. I think when we started, we were very much an intervention of crisis. My concern is that we've now got to the point where the state is dependent on food bank provision. And I guess, looking round the room, any of us working in food banks, we don't want to create a dependent relationship between the people who use our food banks and ourselves. We want it to be a stepping stone. But there's been a trend over the last few years where the third sector is expected now to pick up the slack and to fill the gap. Councils dare I say, Parliament absolve responsibility to some degree because we're working in a time when we're all working on limited resources. I'm not going to say we're broke as a nation, but we certainly have less money. Therefore, we have to make some difficult choices. But my concern is, by default, the third sector, which costs very little, I agree with Mark totally, our food donations come from different areas. Looking round the room, I guess, you'll get food from different areas, but we're totally dependent on our working schools, some supermarkets, local collections, churches and things like that. We've created a culture, or we are in danger of creating a culture where it was, well, this is what we do now. And my concern is, I certainly don't want to see food banks closed where there's a need, but we're not doing the education and prevention, we're having to deal with a crisis, and we're so busy dealing with a crisis that we can't address the prevention. My concern, too, is that we've got a fairly open-ended referral time. We do it on a case by case, but there comes a point when we do finish. My concern is that folk will just move to the food bank somewhere else. It creates more dependency on the merry-go-round of clients using different food banks. For me, it's just the point that I'd love to be able to put the genie back in the bottle, but for the life of me I can't see how we're going to do it. I'm not asking other people to fund what we do, but there needs to be recognition and some kind of provision. We took a radical step two years ago that every one of our volunteers now goes on assist training, suicide prevention training, because they're dealing with folk day in, day out, who share signs of perhaps harming themselves. That's a service that shouldn't be run by volunteers. We've had to start debt management services. Again, the reason that we do volunteers is that, since advice do not provide the resource locally, the council don't provide the resource locally, if we don't do it as a third sector, no one will do it. If we address the root cause, if we do that root cause analysis, those are things that we all have to address. If we don't, food banks will just continue and probably grow and expand. I guess that I wanted to probe a little bit more about the changing nature of food bank use. We've just heard some more of that about the expanding roles. In terms of the people who you're seeing come through the doors, Laura, you mentioned that, in the full roll-out areas, you're seeing more people. It would be interesting to hear a little bit more about whether the profile of those people in the full roll-out areas is changing. Initially, I get the feeling that there was a lot of younger men who were coming through the door, but that's maybe they were seeing more families, more women. Whether that is a true observation or not. Secondly, looking ahead to the idea of food banks potentially being overwhelmed, we've heard some evidence around those who will be coming on to universal credit from working tax credits. We have a whole group of people there who don't actually see themselves as part of the benefit system at all. They see themselves getting tax assistance through HMRC, who are suddenly going to be coming into this system. I have particular concerns around the transitional protection arrangements, which are being mooted as being there to maintain incomes unless there is a change of circumstances. As we can all imagine, some of those family breakdown situations, abusive relationships could be very concerning here. In short, my question is this. In the here and now, are you seeing in the full roll-out areas more women and families are coming forward? What are your specific concerns about that further group of people who may require your services and whether you feel that could add to the point that you are making about the overwhelming food banks and the work that they do? It's just to get a little bit more detail on that. I think that the vast majority of our food banks have seen more families come through their doors. Particularly over the summer, there's been a massive increase, and that is just normal everyday families who are struggling to meet the need over the summer holidays. Previously, we still have a lot of single males coming to Food Bank, primarily because they were the ones who were making new claims to universal credit. We're affected by universal credit first, whereas now we are seeing more families being affected if you're in an area full roll-out. That has moved from feeding primarily single people to feeding families. That has put a massive strain on our food banks because you're giving out more food. Some of our food banks are really struggling with the increases in demand. I think that none of us would say that food banks are a bad thing. They are absolutely a great thing, and we all would help our hungry neighbour in any way that we can. I just think that the level of need that we're at now is unsustainable. Food banks cannot continue to meet that. When you say about the school holidays, is there an issue there around families relying on school meals during term time? Do you get the holiday food poverty issue? I know that some local authorities have been doing a lot of work around that. Some people will term this as holiday hunger. This is poverty that happens throughout the year. Parents who get free school meals during term time come to the holiday period. It's summer holidays and they want to do things for their children. They want to be able to take them places, but the reality is that there's nothing in their cupboards at home. They struggle to put food on the table. Parents, mothers and particularly will go without themselves in order to make sure that their children have something over the summer holidays. I absolutely agree with that. We have seen a huge increase in the number of families, and about a third of the recipients of Cacody food bank are children. That's an increasing trend. One of the other issues is to recap about the advice to give people. Our local citizens advice has a three-week waiting list to give people an appointment due to the demand on their services. People are having to come into the food banks. An even more distressing thing is that over the school holidays, the October holidays in particular, we had quite an increase, but it's the number of children that are right in the parcel in the food bank opening stuff up to see what they could eat on the way home, whether it's a packet of biscuits or anything. If we have any bread to give out, it's getting eaten before they're going home, which is quite shocking to see that level of hunger in children. Do you have any comments on that, Aziz? I just want to add to what Joyce said, that we had a young child who had been eating tomato sauce at school and then coming to us for food, and then us receiving a kind of a note to say thank you for giving my mum food so we could eat some food. Some situations are very, very critical. Quite a high percentage of people who access our food banks are people who are on benefits. The issues are complex from debt to housing issues, to mental health, a number of things. Mark Franklin? We've heard a bit around the table about getting towards breaking points on this. Three years ago, I went and spent a week in Athens visiting food banks just to get a feel of what they were doing, and since the Euro crisis and Greece's problems, the voluntary sector over there has been feeding consistently 2.5% of the population, so I did the maths on the area we covered as 100,000 people lived there. We're giving out 125 food parcels a week. The Greek equivalent is 2,500 a week, so we should be very careful when we say, oh, we're at breaking points, this is as big as it's going to get. We're nothing compared to Greece. Now, we can say, oh, it's not going to happen here. I hope to hell it doesn't, but this is why I welcome coming along today, and that's why I think there should be a strong connection between council government of food banks, because whether anyone likes it or not, we're the place of last resort. If something goes badly wrong, people are going to come to our door and we don't turn people away. I think sometimes, obviously, the majority of the uplift we've seen every month, like everyone has been universal credit, but I think we can get too focused on that. One area where first base might be a bit different, we don't get all our donated food in and divvied up, and when we've run out, there's no more food to give. Each of our parcels, we have a set list of ingredients. If it's not donated, we buy it. This year on last year, I've noticed last year where we were spending £1,000 a month buying food, it's now £2,000 a month. When we shop, we don't shop at Waitrose, we go to the value ranges of each of the supermarkets and try and buy it, obviously as cheaply as possible. I took a list of 10 of the main items that we buy in October 2017, compare them to now. They have gone up 70%. Now, you hear on the telly about food inflation at 3%. That's for your Heinz beans. Check out the value ranges. I mean, there's a real big thing that's happened this week, Tesco this week, do no longer sell value milk, the value long life milk. It's gone. Last year, that was 49 per litre. As of today, it's 79 p. You imagine the number of families who have been struggling for years, income is just matching out goings. That's where they shop. They shop on those aisles. They're not going to expensive aisles and suddenly they're going to be hit by a 20, 30 quid a week increase. We should never say, oh, this is as bad as it's going to get. That's what going to Athens taught me. I mean, how the Greek voluntary sector have done it, I will never know. It's miraculous what they've managed to do, but, you know, this could get much, much worse before it gets any better. I was actually going to comment back on what the deputy convener was asking about. You know what is the solution? I think it's all very well saying the third sector picking up the pieces, and that's not right, but it's not just the third sector picking up the pieces because we are getting donations from people that are paying their taxes, are probably struggling themselves or whatever wage they are, and those people are donating the food to us. They're not third sector. They're not voluntary people. They didn't volunteer for the food bank. You know, these are people that are going to work and generously giving us food so that we can give it to members of the community that they probably wouldn't even see. So I think it's not just third sector. I think we're actually, you know, if we continue to just use food banks, and we're very similar to you guys, we never turn anyone away. We don't even, we ask the criteria so that we can give that back to Trust or Trust, so they've got the information to come back and tell you guys why or why it's not, it's working. But you know, we are using donations from people that are just generously giving those things, and they didn't volunteer for the food bank. You know, so we are, it's not just the third sector. I think the other thing that you mentioned there was, you know, how can we put it right? I feel very much it's about putting support in. It's not just about, you know, paying for the food banks. I think once the government start paying for the food banks, what we might as well just give up because that will go the same way as everything else has gone. It will get cutbacks and cutbacks, and then we will have to be very hard on people when they come because then we'll be more accountable to the government. So at the moment, we get a lot of grace. We supported one man who was sanctioned for five months. He never had anything in his house. He had no food, no way to get any money whatsoever, and that guy was supported, kept alive, and now he's got a job, he's got his life back on track. You know, that was a long process. I think that the problem has got worse since Universal Credit. I think that the problem is that to be on Universal Credit and to live your life, it takes budgeting, which is financial planning, which vulnerable people, long-term unemployed, don't do, and it takes timing because they have got, I actually rang up Universal Credit to find out, because we don't work with a lot of people that are in work, to find out, took me 15 minutes, 20 minutes to get through, to speak to someone that would tell me how to do it, and it seems you have a window from the 18th to the 17th of each month to report your earnings. Now, you can't report earnings until you've got your earnings, so you're already in debt before you start. You ring up and you say, I earn 300 quid this week. They go, oh, we gave you a Universal Credit payment, so we're going to take that back, and we're now going to take back 63b of the pound of what you've earned. These people are earning £2.96 an hour to actually come out. Most people say they get £317 on their Universal Credit, they get maybe £500 of rent, which is £817. To actually get out of that trap, you would have to consistently work 26 hours a week at a living wage. That's not just random, a job at Tesco is where you've got x amount of hours, or zero hours, and then maybe this week you can cover so-and-so who's not in because she's on holiday. It's a huge thing, and it's a huge budgeting thing. We need more support in there that helps people to plan their money. They don't plan their money. The whole idea of Universal Credit was to get people into this idea of getting a job and working. When we work, we get our money, we spend it, we spend it on our kids, we take them somewhere, do something. These people can't. They have to say, right, I earned £300, so I'm going to have to realise I'm not going to get that next month on my Universal Credit, I'm going to have to pay my rent and do this. There's no luxuries, there's no extra, but in particular people that donate to the food bank did not volunteer for it. It's just we are relying on the generosity of people that are paying their taxes and trying to live their own lives, and that's really how food banks are surviving. One of the things that really frustrates me is that people end up at a food bank but could have received help from elsewhere beforehand. There are resources out there, so, for example, the Scottish welfare fund as Steve said earlier, in Edinburgh you phone up the Scottish welfare fund, you press option 5 for a food bank referral, no questions asked. That to me is a waste of an opportunity and a waste of resource. Why are people who are saying that they need a food bank referral not going through the application process to receive a crisis grant from the Scottish welfare fund to have the cash? We had a meeting with the Scottish welfare fund team in Edinburgh. We said to them that this is not best practice, it doesn't happen in other areas. They were willing to remove the option 5 to make sure that people were receiving more support, then a councillor got involved and that option was taken off the table, where option 5 is there to stay. It just frustrates me that people who are ending up at a food bank but could receive resource from elsewhere. Alison Johnstone I suppose that a constituent has actually written to me about this meeting this morning and you've just sort of hit the nail on the head there. This constituent was saying what would be the impact on the Scottish welfare fund and other entitlements if food banks didn't exist. I understand where Mark Franklin is coming from but I suppose I've grown up, most of my life, food banks weren't a thing. Now they are very much a thing. They seem to me to become part and parcel of the welfare state. However, as Mandy Nutt pointed out, they are entirely reliant on people donating their time, money and food. This is the safety net, this totally voluntary, non-statutory organisation of people who don't want to see folk in their communities in crisis. Frankly, I don't think that it's good enough, so I have concerns about that. I've heard a couple of views. Mark Franklin said that it's really hard to walk through the door and I've had constituents, a woman whose disability benefits were changed, who said that it was the worst day of her life when she had to take her two children to a food bank. Evan Adamsson has said that you have people who are quite relaxed about coming. I have had others who have contacted me to say that, if the approach at the job centre was the same as the warmth, the empathy and the advice that they are receiving from some people who have obviously developed great expertise in the food bank, there seems to be some best practice going on there that we might want to take into our more statutory services. I would just like to understand that there's a feeling for some people that some people would rather go to a food bank than get into discussions and the whole bureaucracy that's around the DWP. Is there an opportunity for that kind of ethos to feed back? One thing that I was thinking about there was that our Glenrothes food bank had Scottish welfare funds advisers come and sit within our food bank centre. Normally, Scottish welfare fund operates as a telephone or online application. Five council managed to fund advisers to come within the food bank and food bank referrals dropped by 30 per cent, and that's because people were going through the application process, they were receiving money. Five council say that they see that as being such a success because it was face-to-face contact. People weren't so annoyed and frustrated about the system. They felt that somebody was sitting in front of them, listening to them and doing their best for them. I think that just having somebody within that food bank centre meeting somebody at the point of need and getting them a crisis grant and reducing food bank referrals is something quite special that we should be thinking about elsewhere. Sorry, that's really interesting. Obviously, Glenrothes is only 10 miles away from us in Kirkcaldy, and we tried to get somebody from the welfare team to come along, but they couldn't accommodate us. They couldn't come regularly. They actually came twice, and they had nowhere—because we used various church premises, etc. There was nowhere private for them to see clients, so clients didn't want to sit in a foye speaking about such private matters. I think that accommodation facilities resources are influencing what we can manage. Our volunteers do a great job, like everybody's. We are 100 per cent voluntary agency in Kirkcaldy, and we rely entirely on the generosity of the local community, both financially and by handing in donations of cash and food, but it's not sustainable in that the demand is overwhelming, even our 100 volunteers that we have. When we've got over 200 people a week coming in, nobody is unfortunately able to come and give us this front-line advice. It's just so difficult. We were fortunate enough to work with Sitton's advice bureau to have an advisor floating across the network, and that was a funded project for three years. The average savings, or the average increase in benefit payments, was £175,000 a year. When it came to the end of the funding time, there was no further funding, so what it meant was that people who were coming in, who didn't know like our friend here, didn't know what entitlement he was due under the benefit system, they were then able to access those benefits to the tune of £175,000 per year. We then stopped the funding. I know with the increase in people coming through the door, that figure would be substantially increased, but one, we don't have the expertise of the benefit system, a changing benefit system to offer that service. There seems to be no funds to allow us to provide that. It's about joined up thinking, joined up access, being able to monitor the benefits so that you can show that there's a cash benefit not just to the clients but to the state, because this money sits in a fund. I dread to think how much benefit money sits there not claimed, but we just do not have the resources to access that. If we go down the route of we need money to buy food, my argument would be that we need some money also to stop that and increase access to solve the problem at source rather than maintain the problem. Alex Rowley, on a bit earlier, do you want to come down? Briefly, I noticed, convener, that it's come up in the conversation and also came up in some of the written evidence from Trussell Trust about the issue of the five-week wait. I just wondered if yourselves or anybody else wanted to say a bit more about what your experience was of that, both in terms of its impact on the people you deal with and what could be done better to avoid the situation. Five-week wait is a massive issue for people who are claiming universal credit. What are you supposed to do? You put in your application for universal credit and you have no money for five weeks. I wouldn't be able to cope with that. Even if you've got savings, how do you cope for five weeks without any money? There's the option of the advance payments, but a lot of people don't know about them. Second of all, if you do know about them and you get one, you're then still paying that back for the next 12 months, so you're still experiencing a drop in income over the next 12 months and getting into debt. I don't know if somebody else has a specific story from somebody. You do now have the option to get your universal credit paid to weekly, which is great, and that is offered. I do think that 17 years ago, when I started this work, you would go into a face-to-face person in the job centre or wherever a benefit is offered, and they would say, this is what's available to you. They knew everything. It does seem as if it's a bit of a secret now as to what you have. I do know there seems to be a concern about unclaimed benefits, so I don't know why they're not telling us. We had exactly the same situation as you had. One guy rang up the job centre and said, I've got an interview. They said, well, good luck with that. I then rang up a one that was just Dingwall, but she's probably just 20 miles away, half an hour away, and they said, yeah, there is money available for him to have an outfit to go there, so we was able to do that for him. Going back to what you were saying there, so it does seem to be individual places are given out different information. That's what I was trying to say there. Going back to that, you can ask for it to be, which everybody seems to go, all the clients that I take to the job centre to speak and to do their application, to go and do the ID check after they've done their application online, which again is another 20 mile away. It's £10 to get there on the bus, so we have to take people. I could run a bus service. I pick people up on the A9 going backwards and forwards to the job centre because they're thumbing it, and they're told to thumb a lift. You know, these are young women. They're told to thumb down to the job centre, so we go to the job centre and they are told that they can get it two weekly, which they love because that's what we're used to. We love money coming in every two weeks. This is why it fails at five weeks because people are used to getting their money regularly. They only have to get by. I know people that get their money on the Tuesday. They're not going to get any more money to the Tuesday week, but when they've spent all their money on the Monday, they say, well, I'm getting paid next week. They've still got a week and a half to go, but in their heads, money is coming next week, so that's as much as they plan ahead for. They can get it two weekly, but they have to do it after the initial five weeks, so they can't straightaway get it. They have to do the five weeks, then they wait another two weeks, then they start to get it on a two-weekly basis, and, of course, that feels like a pittance. It's 317 when you get it after four weeks. It's 100 and whatever that is half when you get it. Again, my mantra, if ever I say, they've now been offered to off-tail them, they can have a benefit advance, which is okay. I was with one boy that had come out of prison, chronic alcoholic, and was just given £500, and I'm continually saying, you've got to pay it back, you've got to pay it back, you've got to pay it back, and now he's paying it back at £40. It's just got nothing to live on because the money, the option was given to him, so it has to be done carefully. It is great that it's available, but it has to be done carefully. It just can't be thrown out there because people will take it, people that have no money will take it, but you can get it now two-weekly, but you have to wait for the initial five weeks, and your rent is still paid at a different time. So there's money coming out at different times, there's rent being paid at different times, and in the mix with that, you then get a job and you're trying to work out what is, and it's just a mess. It's just a mess financially. It's hard enough for us to work out, let alone, someone that isn't used to budgeting and planning. That's the big thing. I've just started with Instant Neighbour, so I have the joy of my first pay packet and my last universal credit coming in in the same week next month. It's great, but a lot of the guys that I'm working with, there is a general feeling of entitlement amongst long-term benefit users, I find. So yes, there's addictions, there's mental health problems, but a lot of people are like, yeah, I want that phone, why shouldn't I have that phone? So we've got a lot of guys coming in using our food bank, and they've got the top-of-the-range phones, or they're wearing designer clothes, or their kids are wearing designer clothes, all this kind of stuff, and it's because society today says you want these things, and they feel left out by not being able to get it, so they'd rather go and buy these things and use the food banks. That's where they're solely reliant on food banks, for their food. We've got over 20 food banks in Aberdeen, most of which are self-referral, and we've all got a 14-day, you can come back in 14 days, but we will tell the clients, yeah, you can go to that one next week, or, you know, they basically travel around Aberdeen using all the food banks, but the fact that the last universal credit payment, and in fact, I think I have two because of when I started working, I would like to get another one, a partial one, next month. If you've been on no money through your universal credit, then you go and get work, and you're expected to pay back the debt you've built up through being in universal credit, but all of a sudden you're handed your universal credit on top of your wages, you're going to celebrate getting a job, you're going to go out and blow your money, buy yourself something nice, and that's, you know, I know that I'm going to have to battle with that when these payments come through because I've got debt to pay back, but all of a sudden my bank account is going to have more money in it than it's had for years because of this five-week wait. I don't understand that from what I was looking into it, it sort of, you know, will give you this in arrears so that when you get back to work, you know, there's almost an assumption there's a lie month now with jobs, and there's no, there's very little companies do that any more, you know, especially in a month. I remember when I was younger and getting paid weekly, there'd often be a lie week, but never a month, so all of a sudden all this money is being handed into the hands of these people who've been on universal credit. A lot of them have, you know, gone down the route of starting to drink heavily just to try and cope or even got into drugs, and they handed all this money, and a lot of them are going to end up unemployed again, and it's just a nightmare system. One of the issues that I've seen that food banks tell me all the time about the five-week period is what people have done to get through that five-week period before coming to the food bank, so they will have borrowed from here, there and everywhere. They will therefore be starting in a cycle of debt that they're constantly trying to pay back. They will, you know, self-disconnect from their prepayment metres for heating at home, and you self-disconnect from that, so you're not putting any money in for heating, but you're still charged every day for your prepayment meter, and a lot of people, even when you get money and you want to put money on your meter, the debt will be taken off first unless you know to ask for it or unless you have the confidence to ask for the debt to be pushed back. It just puts people into a downward spiral and a vicious cycle, I think. I think it also feeds into the antisocial side of things, is why people get into prison, they are borrowing from, you know, everybody. I think there is always a, you know, to a certain degree, I agree with you in that fact, there is always going to be an element of people that abuse the system. Universal credit is set up so that people can't abuse it. People that play the system will play any system. They'll find their way around anything. I'm more concerned today about the people that aren't playing the system and really need the genuine help. I do think that there is an expectancy, or I think that it came out when people first applied, when they first piloted the universal credit. The biggest problem we had is that when the question was asked on the application form, do you pay rent, they said no, because they don't pay rent, the housing benefit was paying the rent. So we had a huge problem that we had to then go back and get all that rent paid into people's systems because they didn't think it. And I think that is sometimes the issue. People do tend to, a certain amount of people think that universal credit is topping up their life because actually their money isn't very much. What they earn is theirs and maybe universal credit will still pay for the rent. You know, again, it just needs support. We do housing support so we're able to work very closely with people, but not everyone gets that, and I know that the job centre is very stretched. They're supposed to have work coaches at work with them, but all that is now through the computer. You've got a journal, you speak to someone, eventually you get back to you. It's very difficult. People don't realise that originally that they get a personal element and they get a housing element. And it was great because years ago when you were on the dole that the housing element didn't get paid if you got sanctioned and then you got in problem. So somewhere in the wisdom, they decided they would still pay the housing element. So people don't go to their appointments because they've got no money, can't get to them. They don't go and do it. They get sanctioned. They then see this money in their account because they think, well, I didn't get sanctioned. Somebody gave me a bit of grace and I got away with it, but actually they then use their rent money because it's not being paid directly to the landlord. So, you know, people do play the system and I do think there's that element of it. But if you still, we think we've got those people that are genuinely in need and they're the ones that we need to fight for, really, here today. Thank you. Probably should flag up. I'm not hearing that much in the media about a problem with universal credit. We were one of the trial areas. I think about three years ago it was announced that we were going to be a trial area. And at that time, this really quite inexplicable drug war broke out between a gang from Liverpool, gang from Glasgow. It all got quite bad for a while. And none of us, we worked with quite a lot of people with drug issues and you couldn't really understand why because the drug use was dropping quite quickly. But we've quite quickly found out in the area of town where it was going on, there's basically a thousand people on the methadone programme. And just like the government was running a trial to see how rolling out universal credit would work, well, the drugs industry decided to do the same because if you've got a thousand people who are going to be given an extra 500 quid a month for the rent, all of a sudden there's another 500 grand a month of business to be had, which is worth anybody going for. And what it meant that when the Liverpool gang eventually won the drug war, they started offering everyone a 600 quid credit line. And where they got it wrong, they thought the rollout meant everyone's going to be switched onto universal credit, which of course they weren't. It was only new applicants. And of course then you got this render situation. Everyone of course was taking the 600 quid credit line, but there was no universal credit to pay the bills, so it was all getting really quite dangerous, people getting legs broken. And in the end we had to sort of go to the local paper and say, for God's sake, we put on the front page that everyone's not getting switched. And they stopped giving the credit lines out. But now it is working. This is how they work. I mean, it's big money. And so they will go and say, you can have your 600 quid worth of heroin, meet my man and go to the cash point when your credit payment comes in. Well, if you've got the choice to pay your local housing provider or pay the guy with the baseball bat, it's... But that's... We're seeing people getting evicted because of this, because they... You know, there's some people are pretty good at getting that rent money. That's a very specific story, Mr Franklin, but what I can see is that I'm aware of it. I did a joint advisory with Patrick Grady MP in my constituency in relation to universal credit and got welfare advisers there and did blanket mailings to the area. Will universal credit affect you when lots of people turn up who just assumed universal credit were going to affect them, including a lot of very elderly and frail pensioners who, because of what they've been reading in the newspapers, were terrified that universal credit was going to affect them, but it's not going to affect them, so there's a lack of clarity out there in the wider public. They see this car crash of universal credit coming towards them, and yes, it's going to hit a lot of people, but there's others who won't be impacted, so that, I think, part of what you were saying was a complete lack of understanding and clarity of how universal credit's going to impact, and I think that's quite important to put on the record. Do you have my apologies, Mr Wright? You went in. Just to pick up on the comment, you said, Mr Comffinia, there's a lack of clarity about the implementation of universal credit across the nation. It keeps getting pushed back, and that in itself brings uncertainty and insecurity, which will feed on people's mental health. Some time ago, our MSP here asked about families and how the effect of the changes are hitting in work families. Whenever we discuss food bank issues, we do go to the vast majority of people who use food banks who have addiction issues or alcohol issues or whatever, but if we bring it back to the families, just to put some content into it, I've just done a quick calculation, this year we've seen 130 families, an increase of 130 families, who have used our food banks, they are working and they're struggling and understanding universal credit. The more shocking thing is, there are 120 children connected to those families who were not being fed because breakfast clubs don't run during the school holidays, school meals go for whatever reason, but that's quite indicative in this nation's capital city that whatever we think, the reality is that these benefits are having an effect on people who work, and we need to address that because if we cannot restore some sense of aspiration, some sense of it is worth working, if you get out of bed and you do your job and you still struggle and you see people next door who don't work, who don't seem to be struggling quite as much, why should I bother? It's that insidious eroding of social fabric and aspiration, not just within the large housing schemes, but within the suburbs, then we're just building up a potential problem that will explode. I think that that's my specific concern about working tax credits because I think they have actually been quite a success working tax credits because they've given people that support in work to help make work pay. I think that the fact that it will become part of what is seen as a bad benefit system with all the publicity that has been around universal credit, my worry is that some people will just say, I'm not even going to go there, and they just will think that it's more hassle than it's worth. Is that a concern that you would It's definitely a concern and I think that another issue is the irony is that as a nation, as a state, we've agreed a certain level of benefit is required for people who work to give a standard of living. Now, whether you agree that it's a different matter, but we've agreed as a nation, but then we freeze in work benefits. So by the very fact of inflation, we are not maintaining that level of provision that we have a nation of identified and want to pay. So by default, people are condemned to poverty and the poverty will hit children. I'm not sure the figures in Scotland, but within the UK, recently, I've read a report, 4 million children live in poverty. That's the thing, I think. With the issues around food bank and emergency food provision, we lose the fact that it is now affecting very different people to when I started nine or 10 years ago, that social profile has changed. Trusts are fantastic at providing stats and I'm sure they'd say the same thing. The profile, look around the table, you probably have experienced the same thing. The profile of our service users, of our guests, as I prefer to call them, is changing and it's changing quite quickly. That's my concern. Thank you. I was only going to add that, after what Steve said, we're seeing that to three or four generations now. It's not so much that people say, well, I could go to work and I could struggle on, but I'm looking at the family next door and none of them work and all the benefit gets paying, they seem to have the phone, whatever. We're now seeing that not just one generation, two, three generations, that children, dad never worked or granddad never worked. No one's doing that. We're just seeing it repeating itself over and over again. It's been around a long time, but we're really seeing the fruit of that now. Another demographic that we're starting to see in Cacodi food bank are pensioners. It has been fairly recent. Over the past six months, we're seeing more and more people who cannot survive on their basic state pension. Again, to go back to Mark Franklin's point, the cost of food. The pensioners are a very, very reluctant group to come in. We've just started to gather data on that, so we don't have very good complete data at the moment, but anecdotally, there are a lot more people who cannot survive on a basic state pension and the transfer on to the various benefit systems there. It's really causing quite a lot of pain. Thank you for putting that on the record. I'm going to give a time check just for the purposes of this meeting and my apologies for having to do it. We've maybe got about 10 minutes left. I'm conscious that a few comments ago it was mentioned that, it might have been Evan that mentioned about options that perhaps work coaches have within job centres to provide support, and some of those have been given out freely and professionally and supportively by some, not at all by others. It might be another group that would like to give them out but think that they might be a culture where it's not really seen as the right thing to do, which would worry me greatly. However, the reason for bringing us back to that again is that our inquiry is about in-work poverty. In that group of people that Shona Robison was talking about, they're going to be in the gambit of Jobcentre Plus and DWP and maybe sanctioned for increasing their hours or their hourly rate. If there's help and assistance that can be provided at a job centre, but some of them maybe have a culture where they're not being transparent and open about where that sits, I would find that quite worrying. Next week we've got PCS, who are the union representing job centre staff coming to the committee, and the week after that we've got senior management from DWP who have to make the system work. I just put that in your heads because there's maybe certain things that you would quite like us to ask them when they're here. We won't be short of questions to ask them, of course, but there might be questions that you want us to ask them based on your experience, whether it's personal, everything, and you should thank us for sharing some of that, or whether it's from people that you've spoken to across various food-back networks. I'm just wondering if there's anything that anyone would like me to ask them, Evan Adamson? I've got a client who's actually also a friend, who's self-employed, and he works probably three to four months of the year on good wages, and the rest of the year he's talking £100 a month. He's just gone on to universal credit. He's been self-employed for about three or four years. There seems to be confusion with universal credit about whether the minimum income floor applies to him or what have you, and in his first month he made far more than he was, so he got a nill award, but he has health issues. He's gone through health rehab, so he went to join one of the local gyms, one of the local sports centres, and he needed proof that he was on universal credit. Now, he knows that over the year he will get awards, but every month if he's made more, if he's got a nill award, the letter actually states you are no longer entitled to universal credit. It doesn't say you are not getting anything this month, it just says you are no longer entitled, so it's not just for gym memberships or council-run things, but if anyone needs dental treatment or anything like that, then the letter that they get, and it's taken him two months to get a letter from the local job centre just stating that, yes, he is on a universal credit award, but this is just the way the letters are worded. Again, I pushed, I asked, I'm stubborn, and I encouraged him to, but there's a lot of people who would get that letter and think, hang on, I need to go to the dentist, I can't get my free dental treatment or whatever. You know, a lot of these subsidiary benefits that you should be entitled to by universal credit, if you're getting a letter saying you're no longer entitled, then what are the agencies taking these letters in? That's a very good specific point, and we've got PCS here. Individual employees might think that that's a ridiculous letter to present out, but their employees of DWP, they can't comment publicly on that, but their union representatives, of course, could do, so that's a really helpful individual point. Any other points would be great for the welcome, Matt Franklin. Yeah, I think that the whole design of universal credit and the way the job centres apply it, they grossly underestimate how many people either are illiterate or have fairly chronic learning difficulties or zero computer skills. You know, there's this assumption that this is a tiny, tiny fractional minority of maybe 1%, it isn't. And of course, if you haven't got the ability to go onto a computer and do what you're required to do, or you can't read and write at all, or you maybe have a learning age of 11 or 12, you just cannot do it. And there's this assumption that there's very little help for people like that. That there are very often the ones who just not only are not on any kind of benefit, but can't get on any kind of benefit. And I think that figure, someone once from the Scottish prison system said to me in prisons, it's about 20% is illiteracy rate. So it's obviously not 20% in general society, but I think it's higher than the job centre accept it is. And, you know, we've seen guys coming in who may be on a sanction because they've just not been keeping up online. And they'll be in the 50s, left school at 15, often worked country jobs, drizzed owned ikeen or farming or forestry. They've never had to be able to learn to read and write, they're good with their hands. And suddenly are presented with, you've got to go on this computer and you've got to do this, this and this, they just can't. And there's no acceptance that there are people with this problem and therefore the records that help made available, I think they really underestimate how many people are in that boat. We'll be sure to make sure when we have that opportunity, we ask about those presenting job centres with learning disabilities or poor literacy, memory, what additional supports are or quite frankly are not there, or additional time that work coaches may have or quite simply may not have in helping those folks. I think that's a really important point, Mandina. I think that the worrying thing is that it did seem for a while that each job centre plus was just being run autonomously that one would hand out one thing and one wouldn't sold. Questioned that there is a blanket rules to cover more, but I would say that when we first ran out the universal credit it was very difficult. It really was a little bit in computer says no, there was no way talking to anyone, but our job centre in Invergordon has absolutely changed now and I couldn't do the work that I do if it wasn't for them. They are very open, they do actually ask people if they've got literacy problems, do they want to address them, very often not, but they do ask them, they refer, we've got a very open door, easy-ozy type of referral system between the pair of us and it's great, it works very well. So I would just say that mention that because actually that is working very well, whether they are, that is standard across the board or whether we've just struck dead lucky within Invergordon, I don't know, but it has, and they have employed a huge amount of staff to try and cover it. I think at the beginning they were running blind, they were the ones put in the front, they were handing this out saying this is the new credit, deal with it, they didn't know how to deal with it and it was just a mess, it was a car crash, but actually now they are getting to grips with it and they're very helpful to us. I think that was Evan Adams' points about the inconsistencies, you get that, it's patchwork. As ease, I'm going to take it in a second but time is almost upon us, I'm going to give all our witnesses the opportunity if you want to make a final statement or a final comment, maybe the conversation is taking a turn that wasn't what you thought you wanted to be here to put on the record, that would become your opportunity to put that on the record at that point and once we get those final comments we'll have to close this particular session, but as ease you get two bites at the chair because you get to comment on this and then we'll get you doing that general mop-up. Professor, very quickly, I think it's a vicious circle because literacy or not, people who have difficulty with finance may not have the money to have internet exits, they may not have the equipment, what do they do in those circumstances, what support is available so that they can access internet, they can access equipment to do it, where do they go if they don't have it, so I think that is something to be really very about. Thank you. Time is almost upon us, so Mr Wright, we'll start with yourself. Don't feel obliged if you think, oh no, it's all been said, there's nothing more I want to say, I suspect that that would be the case, but this is your opportunity, anything at all, whether it's just a general comment or a steer from the committee or whatever, this would be your opportunity to do that, Steve Wright. Thank you, Comfina. I found today really helpful, I've learned things from different people's experience, but my overall impression is that in a world of diminishing resources, in a world where access to services is being eroded, we are working in a situation that is being eroded from all sides, and it's really important that we look to address fundamental issues rather than just the crisis. I was just going to comment at the end there that for the clients that have used our food bank this year have died over the last six months from three drug-related deaths and one suicide, and as horrific as this is, I believe that this number would be significantly more, was it not for the invaluable work of the food bank, it offers practical help in the way of food provision advice and guidance in a non-judgmental way, but more importantly, it keeps people connected and known to the services, which has proved to help to preserve lives again and again. Wherever they're playing the system or not, it keeps them alive if we're putting food in their stomachs, and I just wanted to thank you that you've given us a chance to come here. I can't tell you how many times I've ranted to people that could do nothing about this system, and I'm very, very grateful that you've invited me and everybody else here to really put this point from the sharp end to put this to you, and I really hope that you take it on board and that some changes are made. For me, my passion is to get people proactive. I think there's been a lot of the clients that I deal with have just gotten used to being in the system, and my aim is to encourage them to be proactive, because if I can do it then the way I look at it is that anyone can do it, everyone can have a little bit of luck, everyone can have a little bit of good fortune coming their way, but at the end of the day, keeping your mind active is the most important thing for these folk, and I think that my main point, as far as universal credit goes, is that there should be more transparency about what other little grants and things are available, because people don't know about them, and if they're not going to ask, in my experience, these things aren't offered. You have to ask, you have to push, and I would really appreciate that to be addressed with the system, because if those things are available then people can get bus passes to go to job interviews, that kind of stuff, that gives people hope. At the end of the day, that's what we need to, as food banks, that's what we're kind of doing, is trying to instill hope for people, trying to give them something to work towards. I think that for me it's that we cannot forever rely on food banks to pick up the pressure in the third sector, and that's been pushed on to us. We have to start addressing the underlying causes of why people need emergency food provision, and looking at where people are best to access that, how that's best delivered, but we cannot forever think that giving out food parcels is okay. I'd say that, like many of the charities involved in running food banks, we're always nearly running on fresh air. You've often got enough funds in the bank to see through a month, two months, three months, which, actually, when you're feeding a lot of hungry people, there's an awful lot of pressure, because you hate to think what would happen if you don't open the door. We have, for some time, had a proposal to the Scottish Government where you could actually do some genuine support of food banks. One, just create a register of official food banks in Scotland. Have they got governance? Have they got a stock of food? Check out with local councils, MSPs, if they're not crooks. They're a genuine food bank. Anyone on that list can, at the end of the month, look at how many parcels they've handed out, and invoice the Scottish Government £5 each. Now, if everything gets better and unemployment falls through the floor and universal credit's perfect, and we, as a food bank, go from £500 a month to £100 a month, instead of invoising you guys, we don't invoice £2,500 and we invoice £500. But if we go a few miles down the road towards Greece and we're giving out £1,000 a month, then, accordingly, our invoice goes to £5,000, that really would be the Scottish Government saying to food banks, we've not completely got you back, but we do know you've all got to pay your rent, got to pay your electric bill, got to pay your phone bill, got to pay your volunteer costs. We can't do this on nothing, and that would almost be a deal. When the Government say, we'll give you enough to pay those basic overheads, and hopefully the community will continue to donate the food and you guys make it happen. I think it is time, really, that not just new funding screens, which has got to be for some new creative happy-clappy idea, but just some reliable long-term funding to pay for the nuts and bolts of what we do, or a contribution towards it, give us some stability, rather than just mere kind words, which is all we tend to get at the moment. I think for transparency purposes, because we're going to look at an item that is connected to some of the things that you said, Mr Franklin, and the next item on the agenda, which will be in public session, which might not quite strike a chord with everything you've said, part of it, but not everything. I wouldn't want you to make that comment, and then suddenly find out that we were saying something in the next agenda item that directly related to what you were saying, and we didn't say to you. It will all become clear if you hang about for the next agenda item. I should point out, I just wanted to draw it to your attention. Is he serious? We are already doing a lot of kind of astinage work with the people who are on our food banks, so we work with financial management, jobs, mental health services, straining, but I think in some ways I support what the gentleman was saying. We are very volunteer heavy, and it would be useful for the work we do to get supported as well, so we can do it more efficiently. I think that the inequality gap is widening, and poor people are getting poorer, food poverty, every kind of poverty, and that gap cannot be sustained. It has to be closed because people are losing heart and they are stopping trying and giving up, and that's a dreadful thing in this country. I think that all it remains for me to say at this point is thank you to all of you for coming along and being so forthright and frank and passionate and using your direct experience. MSPs do have direct experience, but let's be honest that it's not to the extent that all of you have who are doing this consistently every day and every week. We should also say thank you for what you do, and despite the fact that we'd love food banks not to exist, please don't go away. Please stick at it, and we appreciate what you do. Stay involved. What is a relatively short inquiry, I have to say, and we'll keep you updated with our recommendations on how we seek to take some of those recommendations forward. Thank you everybody for that. That ends agenda item 2, and can we just suspend briefly before we move to agenda item 3? Thank you everyone. Welcome back everyone after that short suspension. We now move to agenda item 3, which is consideration of petition PE 1571, food bank funding. The third item on the agenda is consideration of said petition by John Beattie on food bank funding called for the Scottish Government to provide direct funding to the food bank. I refer to the note that is provided by the clerk at paper 3. The petitioner was notified that this petition would be on the agenda today, however there has been no acknowledgement or response received up to this point, and there has been no contact from the petitioner since the petition was referred in 2016, so it has been about for some time that this petition. I am going to read out what the recommendations are, which I then think, given the session that I have just had, I think that it would be reasonable to maybe have a discussion around that recommendation before we then decide whether to close the petition or not. The committee has invited to close the petition on the basis of that, and I read one. It agrees that with the Scottish Government that providing direct funding for food banks would effectively bring food banks into the welfare state, something that is not supported. Two, a longer-term approach has been taking to tackling food and security across a range of policies. In closing the petition, if that is what we decided to do this morning, the committee may nevertheless wish to acknowledge the work of food banks, what they do and the growing pressures placed upon them. That is undeniable, given the agenda item that we have just had. Before I ask the committee whether content to close the petition, given agenda item 2, we should have a discussion around that. Are there any comments that people would like to make? I think that that is a sensible approach. Given what we have heard in the committee today, we have heard a lot about the great work that is being done by food banks, but I think that I have consensus that they should not be, and I do not think that they would want to see themselves as part of the welfare state. What you are suggesting seems to be a sensible way to bring this petition to a close. Another comment from Michelle Ballantyne. One of the important things that was mentioned during the debate is that part of what makes people feel able sometimes to go into food banks is that it is not a state provision. In the same way that many support organisations in the third sector will come and will talk and will share their problems and get support, because it is not a state provision. I certainly support the fact that it should stay very much in the voluntary sector and should stay free of the bureaucracy of state in the processes in which it delivers. I was just going to say that some of the issues that were raised around the table in the last evidence session, which coincides with some of the issues around the petition, can probably better be picked up as part of our inquiry and reflections and no doubt the report that will eventually be produced from our inquiry. There are some issues that we can pick up within that and take them forward in that way. I think that that would be more appropriate, so I agree that the petition should be closed. Are there any other comments in relation to this? I, too, am content that the petition should be closed. We have obviously learned a great deal this morning. From on-going work with menu for change, for example, that is a partnership between child poverty action group, Nourish, Oxfam and Scotland and the poverty aligns, who are encouraging a shift away from emergency food aid as the solution and towards preventative and rights-based measures that increase the income of people facing crisis. We have heard from several excellent commentators this morning that when we have people with rights expertise and advice knowledge working with food banks, that has a really positive impact. I would like us as a committee to keep an eye on what is going on, because food banks are finding themselves in an increasingly difficult position when it comes to supplying people with emergency food aid. However, I also think that we have to look at the extent to which food banks are masking a problem. Are they a symptom? Are they showing that people are not getting the help that they need from other agencies? I would like us to at least keep a watching brief on this, convener. I think that that is helpful. Thank you, convener. I am happy with the recommendations. We should put on record what we have heard today. It is not just the third sector, but it is civic society in general, which I think was a very good point made by a couple of individuals. Yes, it is the third sector that delivers the food banks, but the actual food is coming from the whole of civic society in different ways. I think that that is really important to note. There is an issue that we need to keep an eye on as a committee. Probably not for noting today is in regard to third sector funding. I agree that we do not want food banks, per se, to be getting direct money for the reasons that are already outlined, but we have to make sure that the third sector in Scotland is getting the appropriate financial support, both from the Scottish Government and local authorities. That is something that we need to keep an eye on as a committee over the next number of years. I agree with what has been said previously. I am content to close the petition. I have just addressed a few points. It is a dilemma for any Government that sees the proliferation of food banks and other types of banks, where they are struggling for help and the good work that they do. The fundamental principle is that if we fund them, we go down the wrong route, which is acceptance that that is okay. That is a kind of dilemma for any Government. However, every time we discuss the issue, I certainly learn more and more that I did not know before about the work that has been done, the full range of services, and the impact. I do think that it is worth considering at a future point whether or not the whilst I do not support the idea that the Government should whole-scale fund them because of what other members have said. I think that there is a need for a more precise picture of the provision and what the food banks are doing. At some point, I think that there needs to be a full addressing of the question of where we would begin to start to turn things around. That is a much bigger debate convener. I fully appreciate that. We have overhears the arguments in the chamber. I personally think that the start of that process is the scrapping of the current scheme on universal credit. I realise that debate for another day, but I certainly think that it is worth turning to the question of whether or not we think that the Government should perhaps put some resource behind ensuring that they have all the facts and a full picture of what food banks are doing out there in the work that they do. I will make a few comments before I ask everyone about their position. I am minded that Mandy Mack also mentioned, in the last evidence session, that conflation between funding of food banks and the independence of the food bank network. There is a slight caution in relation to that. Supporting food banks and funding from time to time is not ruled out by closing the petition. It is the idea of a direct structural relationship between any Government, a social security system and food banks that bring food banks effectively into the welfare state. I think that there is consensus around this table that that is not desirable. That is not to say that we did not hear in the last evidence session some pretty good ideas for things that we could explore further as a committee that does not take this petition to do it, which included the mapping exercise of where food banks are across the country, what support has been provided in the past and maybe provided in the future to food banks. I think that I would point out that, given a significant amount, if not the vast majority of referrals to food banks are caused by UK welfare reforms, I do not think that I would be looking at just the Scottish Government in terms of who is supporting that sector but also, quite frankly, the UK Government and local authorities and wider and beyond. I do not think that it is as simplistic as that either. We should find out what support has been given in the past and what could be provided in the future. I think that it is important to put that on the record just now. Also, to give a pledge that, given that the Scottish Government has said that it is keen to take a longer-term approach to this that goes beyond just food banks, then our committee has got a responsibility to follow some of that through as well. The wider point that I am seeking to make is that it should not take a petition as well-intentioned as it is to make sure that core business for this committee as we look at the Scottish social security system, how it interacts with the UK social security system, the winners and losers within that system, those in absolute need and hardship and how they have become increasingly reliant on the third sector and others in society for food need and other needs, that we should be doing that as core business of this committee anyway. I think that, in recommending that we close this petition, it is not a recommendation that we do not follow through in lots of the issues that were raised in the last evidence session. There are some pretty good suggestions from Mr Mark Franklin in the last session about some of the ways that we could follow through on that. Sorry that that was so long winded, if you like, but I think that it is important that we treat this pretty seriously given that last evidence session. Given all that, is the committee content to close this petition? Thank you for your four bairns. We now move to agenda item 4, social security and work poverty, which we previously agreed to take in private, so we now move into private session.