 The first item of business is a debate on motion 5.8.7.9 in the name of Angela Constance on the Child Poverty Scotland Bill. This is stage 1. May I ask those who wish to speak in the debate to press their request to speak buttons? I call on Angela Constance to speak to and move the motion. Up to 14 minutes please, cabinet secretary. I am delighted to open this debate on the principles of the Child Poverty Scotland Bill. My opinion is that the principles are indisputable. The bill will establish Scotland as the only part of the UK with ambitious targets to reduce and ultimately eradicate child poverty. The background to this is that, in July 2015, the UK Government announced its intention to repeal significant proportions of the Child Poverty Act 2010. The proposed to replace the four income-based targets with measures on worklessness and educational attainment to remove child poverty from the remit of the social mobility and child poverty commission's remit and to rename the legislation the Life Chances Act. The Government, Presiding Officer, we fundamentally disagreed with this approach, in particular the removal of targets and the use of alternative measures that do not take income into account. In the Scottish Government's view, this represents a shift towards characterising poverty as a lifestyle choice rather than addressing the social and economic drivers that cause people to fall into or remain in poverty. The Government therefore requested an opt-out from the UK Government's plans and committed to bringing forward our own approach. Since then, we have worked quickly to consult on and produce the bill that members are considering today. The income and poverty statistics for 2015-16, which were published in March of this year, indicate rising levels of child poverty in Scotland with 26 per cent of children living in relative poverty after housing costs. I know that members across the chamber will agree that those numbers are absolutely unacceptable. At UK level, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has projected that child poverty will increase further in the next few years, in part because of welfare changes imposed by the UK Government. By the end of this decade, the start of the next decade, we will see an increase of child poverty by 1.2 million to over 5 million children. With the bill, the Scottish Government is making a clear statement that child poverty is neither acceptable nor is it inevitable. That is why our targets, which are set on an after-housing cost basis, will be even more stretching than those in the original 2010 act. What's more, we are acknowledging the income or a lack of income essential to poverty, which is a view that our stakeholders strongly agree with. If passed by Parliament, the bill will establish that Scotland is the only part of the UK to have statutory income targets on child poverty. Our consultation on the bill, which ran from August last year, was designed in collaboration with the ministerial advisory group on child poverty and also the First Minister's independent adviser, as well as other relevant stakeholders. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who contributed to the development of the bill and all those who took the time to respond to the consultation. We received a total of 116 responses and a broad level of support for the proposals that it set out. Today, I very much hope to reassure members that the bill provides the robust framework, the strongest of foundations that are needed to drive our ambition to eradicate child poverty. The bill is made up of three key elements that I will now turn to. First, it places a duty on the Scottish ministers to meet four ambitious income targets by 2030. Those targets provide a clear picture of the fairer Scotland that we all want to see. Secondly, the bill places a duty on the Scottish ministers to produce regular delivery plans, the first of which is to be published by April 2018. In each delivery plan will set out the measures that again the Scottish ministers will take to meet the targets and ministers will also be required to publish annual progress reports. Thirdly, the bill places a duty on local authorities and health boards to produce annual local child poverty reports that will outline the measures that they have taken to reduce child poverty at a local level. I would like to take this point to thank the Social Security Committee for its detailed scrutiny of the proposals and their comprehensive stage 1 report. I will take full account of their suggestions as we take the bill into stage 2. I am sure that we will have the chance today to debate some of those recommendations in great detail this afternoon. I would just like to highlight a few key points. Firstly, interim targets, having listened carefully to the evidence of stakeholders, my view is that interim targets would be a helpful addition to the legislation. Most useful interim targets need to be set at levels that challenge Government to take strong action, but they also need to take account of the evidence, for example, about projected increase in levels of child poverty in the UK and consider what that means for Scotland. Adam Tomkins I am very grateful to the cabinet secretary for giving way on the point of interim targets. I very much welcome what she has just said in terms of wanting to see the bill amended at stage 2 to introduce interim targets. Does she agree with me that those interim targets need to be set out on the face of the bill rather than in secondary legislation? Angela Constance I will come to the specifics imminently in what I propose to do at stage 2. The point that I want to emphasise firstly is that those interim targets need to galvanise action and be stretching enough, be ambitious enough but really to focus minds. My concern about the specific interim targets being set on the face of the bill is that that would be prior to some eminently sensible and crucial work being completed. I do, as I will outline, believe and will bring forward measures to ensure parliamentary scrutiny. Given that we know that child poverty in this country, in Scotland and across the UK, is projected to rise, we really need now to do some work in what the UK implications of rising child poverty to 5 million children, the impact that that will have in Scotland and what expected increases that we can expect to see. There is an important piece of work that needs to be evidence-led, and it is very important that, in all of that work, we are led by the evidence. Alex Rowley I think that what the cabinet secretary said is broadly welcome, but I pick up on the point that it was the poverty action group made where the point out that if you have, for example, young couples that are living in poverty and having children, then those children will be brought up in poverty. The question is that I would like to ask her what is the link between poverty in adults and poverty in children? Does she accept that what we need is a coherent anti-poverty strategy for Scotland as welcome as this bill is? Angela Constance I am going to ask Mr Rowley's point, but I will come back to the point of parliamentary scrutiny of interim targets because I have not completed that point. The point that Mr Rowley makes is that children are poor because their parents are poor and any child poverty strategy must not sit in isolation from that wider anti-poverty strategy. Of course, as a Government, we have the fairer Scotland action plan, where the number one action was to introduce the socio-economic duty, which will be the overarching duty across the public sector. One corner, one platform of that work will indeed be this child poverty bill, but it will also be the last education Scotland bill that we passed in this Parliament and it will also be the community empowerment plan legislation as well. One of the things that we can learn from the past, from the history of child poverty in Scotland and across the UK, is that despite the progress that was made in the early years of the last Labour Government, where it stalled was because there wasn't that joined up all government, all country response to tackling child poverty. My proposal with respect to interim targets is to make reference to the interim targets on the face of the bill and to allow regulations to be made under the bill, which specify the levels of the interim targets. To ensure proper scrutiny, I will indeed seek parliamentary approval for the interim target levels set out in regulations. Secondly, the delivery plans, while we receive general support for our proposals in the consultation on the bill, the evidence that we heard during stage 1 identified two further areas that merit additional consideration, both of which I will bring forward amendments on stage 2. On the need for delivery plans to align more closely with the parliamentary terms, I agree with the principle of this. It is crucial that there is a clear link between the priorities of a newly formed administration and the duties that ministers will be subject to under this legislation. On the content of delivery plans, my initial view was that we should not restrict ourselves to a short list of issues that delivery plans should consider. However, I accept the arguments in favour of including more detail on that in the face of the bill and will give very careful consideration to which areas might be appropriate, noting the committee's reference to those suggested by the end child poverty coalition. The evidence tells us, indeed, that there are some touchstone issues in relation to tackling and eradicating child poverty, and we could indeed place those in the bill. I know that achieving the target set out in the bill will be incredibly challenging—it is probably an understatement—but I would hope that everyone in Parliament today, no matter which side of the chamber they are on, supports our aims to eradicate child poverty. I am looking forward to a very open and constructive debate this afternoon, and I welcome members' views on the proposals that are set out in the bill, and I recommend that Parliament supports its general principles. I now call Sandra White to speak on behalf of the Social Security Committee. Around nine minutes, please, Ms White. As convener of the Social Security Committee, I am pleased to be speaking in today's debate on behalf of the Social Security Committee. I would like to begin by thanking the members of the committee for the constructive way in which we were able to reach a consensus view in our report on the general principles of the bill. I am also very pleased that we were able to be open with each other during the committee and in other sessions, recognising the differences of opinion that did exist in some issues but which still reached agreement as set out in our recently published stage 1 report. I thank the committee members very much for that. I also wish to thank all those who took time to respond to the committee's call for evidence, either in writing or in person. In particular, we were very much enjoyed hearing from our witnesses in Glasgow at the formal evidence session and the informal event that we held in the city chambers to hear from experts in the field. Those directly involved were very helpful to our deliberations of the stage 1 report. I would also like to put on record our appreciation of the cabinet secretary coming to the committee with an open mind, being prepared to listen to the evidence that we had received and the views that were expressed by the members of the committee. The willingness to reflect and come back at stage 2, with amendments in key areas, is something that we are very much welcome and look forward to discussing at stage 2 of the bill. I also want to extend thanks to the committee clerks for all their hard work and thanks to everyone who took part in the evidence sessions and beyond as well. Presiding Officer, as all of us here in this chamber agree, there should be no place for child poverty in a modern Scotland. The effects of growing up in poverty can last a lifetime and can impact on health and educational prospects long after a child has grown. We need to make a difference now to the lives of children here in Scotland who are facing poverty. With that in mind, I want to acknowledge that this legislation was brought forward by the Scottish Government as the direct response to the repeal by the UK Government of significant sections of the UK Wild Child Poverty Act 2010. That repeal included the previous income-based targets for child poverty. Research published by the End Child Poverty at the end of last year shows the levels of children in low income households by local authority across the UK and those figures tell us that, in Scotland, one in four children's lives live in a low-income household. With that in mind, one in four, however, in Glasgow, it is more than one in three children live in a low-income household. That is totally unacceptable. Therefore, as a committee, we felt that it was important to meet in Glasgow to find out about the work that is already happening in Glasgow and other areas to tackle child poverty but also to hear what more needs to be done. What we heard was very powerful and I will touch on some of the specific points that were made a little later in my contribution. Across the range of the evidence that we received, there was strong support for this Parliament to reinstate the income-based targets for child poverty. We were told that putting those targets back on a statutory footing sends a message about the importance that we in Scotland attach to addressing child poverty. Those targets focus minds and resources and set a direction for where we as a society want to get to. However, we all know that targets will not, in themselves, reduce child poverty, but they serve an important part of the bigger picture by enabling us to measure progress in Scotland and hold the Government here to account. Turning to the targets themselves, they mirror the targets previously in the Child Poverty Act 2010. Those targets are already widely recognised and have arrived at following extensive consultations. The targets are all income-based because at the heart of all poverty is a lack of income. Therefore, the amount of available income in a household is what counts when assessing whether a child is living in poverty or not. For the purpose of this bill, income has arrived at after the deduction of housing costs. That is an important difference between the targets in this bill and what was in place previously in the UK. We welcome the approach that is taken by the Scottish Government. Housing costs are invariably the largest regular outgoing for a household and are an essential cost, and that is why we support the approach that is taken in this bill. In their evidence to the committee, the Institute for Fiscal Studies recognised the benefit of taking an after-housing cost approach but also sounded a caution and a caveat around the element of personal choice that can sometimes exist in relation to that. We are giving the example of two households with the same money coming in, where one household has taken the decision to prioritise the quality of the housing of the house that they lived in. In the second household, with exactly the same income, they chose to prioritise the quality of the food or how they lived and purchased. Using those examples, one household could be measured as being in poverty, whilst the other was not. The only difference is that one family prefers to prioritise one thing over another. Despite sounding that word of caution from the Institute, it is clear that using an after-housing cost basis for calculating income makes the targets in this bill more challenging. We acknowledge that and we do welcome that approach. When discussing household incomes, we also heard evidence from a number of witnesses about the inequalities of wealth that exist between certain groups in our society. For example, we are told by engender and others that women are more likely to be living in poverty than men and that lone mothers are more likely to be living in poverty also. Engender told us that tackling child poverty in Scotland is closely linked to gender inequality. Inclusions told us that disabled children and the children of disabled parents are disproportionately likely to experience poverty. Disabled women are much more likely to be living in poverty than disabled men and many more disabled women than men are lone parents. That brings me on to the evidence that I would like to highlight about householders who, through no fault of their own, face additional essential costs that greatly reduce their available household income. Costs that relate to essentials are not a matter of personal choice. Inclusions Scotland and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation told us about the extra cost for a household where one or more parents have a disability. It pointed out that the targets in the bill take account of additional income received from disability benefits, but the full impact of additional costs faced by disabled people is not taken into account. Inclusions Scotland said that that has the effect of boosting household income and lifting many households containing disabled people out of poverty when the current measure of poverty is applied. In fact, those same households are consistently shown to be twice the risk of material deprivation compared to households where there are no disabled children or adults. The committee was very struck by that. For that reason, we have asked the Government to consider whether there are other deductions that should be made when calculating net household income, particularly when thinking about people with disability. I want to say some brief words about the date by which the targets are to be achieved in dates 1 April 2031. The tackling child poverty, meaningfully, will take time, and the committee absolutely recognises that. However, a strong message that came through in our evidence, and the cabinet secretary has mentioned this, was that interim targets would be helpful. We were pleased that the cabinet secretary said that she was open to revisiting the issue and bringing forward proposals at stage 2 of the bill. I thank her very much for listening to not just the evidence but the committee as well. The other important part of the bill, of course, is the mechanism for the Government to report its progress to the Parliament. We welcome provisions for delivery plans and annual progress reports. They will enable robust and comprehensive parliamentary scrutiny. We received a lot of evidence around the importance of the delivery plans and a number of suggestions about what delivery plans should cover. Again, our report has made a number of recommendations and we welcome the cabinet secretary's willingness to look at them and come back at stage 2. Elaine Smith, I ask the convener if the recommendation for a statutory commission would cover the calls for independent scrutiny then. Sandra White. It was certainly in one of our reports that we discussed it. There is differing opinion whether it should be statutory or not and exactly what the commission should be. We will be looking at stage 2 of the committee, but I thank the member for raising that particular important point. Local authorities and health boards will also report annually on the measures that they have taken to address child poverty in the local areas. Again, the committee, which was raised with us on numerous occasions and by members, is very much welcome. We all know of initiatives that are undertaken locally that could be tied in other areas. An important role of the local report would be to share information on what is best. Early in my opening remarks, I said that I would come back to some of the evidence that we heard in Glasgow. Therefore, I would like to draw attention to the good work of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and the impact that it has made on child poverty through its healthy and wealthier children initiative. I know that others are not aware of that work also. If I could just mention another couple of initiatives that have been signed off, I know that I have not opened my time slightly. We did hear similar stories from the City of Dundee in Fife Council, together with NHS Tayside in Fife, all of whom are building a growing understanding of what works, great willingness across all of Scotland to increase our focus on tackling child poverty and roll-out tried and tested initiative. The Social Security Committee welcomes the bill. It should act as a foundation for ensuring a focus at national and local level on tackling child poverty in Scotland. We did a consistent and sustained effort alongside cultural change in society for the reasons that the committee supports the general principles of the bill. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I call Adam Tomkins. Around seven minutes, please, Mr Tomkins. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I have been looking forward to this debate for a while. On these benches, we will be supporting the general principles of the bill today, but we look forward to trying to make the bill stronger over the course of stages 2 and 3. I have been thinking about and working on this bill for a little while, and, like Sandra White, I would like to thank the clerks to the Social Security Committee and to all of our witnesses who helped us with our stage 1 report on the bill, which, in my view, is the best piece of work that the Social Security Committee has produced so far in this Parliament. I would also like to thank John Dickie and Peter Kelly for their time and insights on the child poverty action group and child poverty binados and poverty alliance for discussions and advice about the bill. The Scottish Conservatives share the view already expressed by Angela Constance and Sandra White that measuring child poverty is important, but we very strongly believe that taking steps to tackle, to reduce and eventually to eradicate child poverty is much more important. The bill is introduced includes various provisions to measure child poverty in Scotland, but, on its own—I think that Sandra White said this—it will not do anything at all to lift any child in Scotland out of poverty, and as such it is, I think, a missed opportunity. However, the Parliament has the chance, as the bill progresses through its legislative stages, to improve and strengthen the bill so that by the time it reaches the statute book it can help us not merely understand the scope and incidence of child poverty but help us as parliamentarians hold the Government of the Day to effective and robust account for what they are actually doing about child poverty. Let me set out three of the ways in which we will be seeking to improve this bill. First, as we have heard, the bill focuses very narrowly on income. The cabinet secretary says that poverty is all about not having enough income, but on these benches we do not believe that that analysis gets to the root of the problem. We do believe that unless we do get to the root of the problem, no anti-poverty strategy will succeed, whether that is a child poverty strategy or, as Alec Rowley says, a more general anti-poverty strategy. For us, it is not enough to say that the solution to poverty is increased income. We need to dig deeper, to investigate, to understand and, without fear or favour, to address and confront the drivers that lead families to have insufficient income in the first place. While I am sure that we have all got more to learn about this, we do know quite a lot about what these drivers are. Among them are addiction, family breakdown, unemployment and educational under attainment. That is not an exhaustive list, but they are all relevant considerations. All of these are drivers of poverty in general and drivers of child poverty in particular. Our core contention in relation to the bill is that no anti-poverty strategy will be successful unless those underlying causes of poverty are addressed in a robust and systematic way. Alex Neil says that he thinks that addiction is a driver of poverty, but is it not the case that it is much more likely that poverty is the driver of the addiction? Poverty is the root cause of those problems, not the other way around in most cases. I am afraid that I do not accept that. I think that there are behaviours that drive people into poverty, so I absolutely do not accept what Alex Neil just said. What does the bill say about these matters, addiction, family breakdown, educational under attainment and the rest? The answer, Presiding Officer, is that the bill says nothing about them. I have to say that I find this puzzling. We have all heard the First Minister solemnly proclaim that closing the attainment gap is her Government's number one priority. We all know that educational under attainment is one of the key drivers of child poverty. Here in this bill we have the legislative opportunity for the Scottish ministers to turn the First Minister's stated political aspiration into hard legal reality, yet it is an opportunity not taken, an opportunity missed. At stage 2, we will be introducing an amendment that seeks to place ministers under a legal duty to take steps to close the attainment gap and to report annually to Parliament on the progress that they are making. I am somewhat puzzled and bemused that the member wants to make legislation in his words stronger and more effective, while his Government in London ripped the heart out of similar legislation that covered the length and breadth of the UK. As I pointed out to the member, we already have legislation that places responsibilities on ministers and local authorities to address the attainment gap. As he well knows that the issues that he mentions are properly to be dealt with in the first delivery plan and to be based on evidence and the economic needs of the time. I can allow you extra time for these interventions, Mr Tomkins. On the first point, the whole point of devolution is to allow parties to have different priorities in different parts of the United Kingdom without ripping the United Kingdom up. That is the entire point of having devolved politics. On the second point, section 1 of the Education Scotland Act places on ministers a duty merely to have regard to the importance of closing the attainment gap, not necessarily to do anything about it. It is plain from the Government's own documentation that that duty does not go far enough. In the Government's own child poverty measurement framework, the percentage of P7 pupils from the most deprived areas performing well in numeracy is going down. The percentage of P7 pupils from the most deprived areas performing well in writing is going down. It is plain that more needs to be done and more can and should be done on the face of this bill to force ministers' hands. The Social Security Committee, as we have already heard, has agreed that whether the bill's targets are met will depend on the delivery plans that are to be published in 2018, 21 and 26. Those delivery plans are absolutely critical. There was some discussion in the committee about the frequency and timing of the delivery plans, but for my part I am more concerned about their content. On that matter, again, the bill is next to silent. We agreed in committee that the bill should set out in detail the matters that must be addressed in the delivery plans. At a minimum, delivery plans must include information about the full use of Scottish social security powers. That is not only the benefits devolved in full but also the top-up power and the power to create new benefits. It must also include information about employment for parents and carers. That addresses another of the key drivers of child poverty, children who grow up in work-less households. The UK's Life Chances Act requires the Secretary of State to report on the number of children in England living in work-less and in long-term work-less households. In our view, delivery plans under this bill should similarly set out the measures that are taken by and proposed to be taken by Scottish ministers to reduce the number of children in Scotland growing up in families where no parent, guardian or carer is in employment or paid self-employment. The final matter that I want to address is the independence of oversight and scrutiny. The key word is independence. The UK's Social Mobility Commission is a statutory body whose powers and functions are set out in law made by Parliament. Scottish ministers, by contrast, proposed to establish an ad hoc non-statutory poverty and inequality commission in respect of which, as I understand it, Parliament will have no oversight as to its terms of reference, powers, remit functions or personnel. That is not a recipe for independent scrutiny, not in any language, and the Cabinet Secretary knows it. To conclude, right across the chamber, there is the political will to take the problem of child poverty seriously. I have set out how we in the Scottish Conservatives will seek to amend this bill to strengthen it so that it might realise its ambitions. I look forward to working with MSPs from across the chamber to make that happen. Labour fully supports the principles of the child poverty bill, and I echo the words of Sandra White and Adam Tomkins, giving thanks to the many organisations that give evidence and assist us in our work. We do everything as it stands the bill currently lacks the ambition that is needed, but we can work together across the Parliament to ensure that it has the level of ambition that such an important issue requires. We are fully behind the targets framework to measure child poverty with a framework that will set out policy and action designed to reduce child poverty by 2030. I agree that it is policy and action that matters, and targets only measure what we do. I believe that the committee worked well together to produce a very productive report, and I think that our consensus, I hope, will strengthen the legislation at stage 2 and at stage 3. I welcome the cabinet secretary's response today that she accepts that the introduction of interim targets would be an important contribution, but we are clear that it should be on the face of the bill and that it should be a statutory right to test those targets somewhere along the way before 2030, and I look forward to the detail on that. The committee rightly adopts the idea from the end-child poverty coalition that there should be at least five specified areas in the delivery plan such as the full use of social security powers and income maximisation, and I agree that it should not be restricted to that. However, I think that there should be some prescription on the bill, on the face of the bill, so that we can assess that any Government would be expected to address policy in those areas. I agree with Adam Tomkins that it is the independent scrutiny of the Government's work, which is essential. I believe that the committee did its job here by making a bold recommendation for the establishment of a commission on a statutory footing to ensure successive Scottish ministers are held to account for their actions. In the past, I have not been a great fan of commissions, I have to say. I have had my arm twisted on more than one or two occasions, but in this case I believe that it would make a significant difference in the scrutiny of whichever Government is in power. The last Labour Government created a tax credit system that transformed lives, reducing levels of child poverty and, according to the IFS research, says that both absolute and relative measures of income poverty felt markedly among children and pensioners. It was driven by very significant additional spending on benefits and tax credits. I quote that because I believe that it is the kind of policy ambition that we should support in the lifetime of this Parliament, and I do think that fundamentally it is the redistribution of income that will make the big difference. It is why Labour supports the proposals of the child poverty action group to increase levels of child benefit by £5 a week, £20 a month, because we believe that the impact would be large and transformational. I agree that there are other factors that entrench poverty in children's lives, but fundamentally it is a lack of income that makes them live in poverty. The child poverty action group shares some comments with me of those who might benefit from such a policy. It would pay for the breakfast club to help me to get to work ahead of time, said one parent. It would cover my daughter's bus ticket to school or pay for an activity once a week, like swimming. Those are the kinds of things that change the quality of life for a child, and some of those experiences carry forward with them into adulthood, so they matter. Ruth Maguire. Pauline McNeill, for taking the intervention. Would she accept that topping up child benefit by £5 would also apply to folk on incomes of £50,000 to £60,000? Although universalism is a good thing, we have to get over the stigmatism of applying for benefits as well. We cannot use it as an excuse. Pauline McNeill. Sometimes universalism is necessary in order to help the poorest people, and that is why we support the policy of the child poverty action group, because that is where we want it to be directed. Children living in poverty are less likely to go to university, and they are more likely to have poor health continue into adulthood. The cold reality is that living in poverty is likely to affect the length of your ambition, especially if there are not clear ways out of the cycle of poor housing and of low pay. Sadly, child poverty is on the increase, and the projections by the FSS—the cabinet secretary mentioned earlier—are bleak. They forecast an increase of more than 50 per cent in the proportion of children living in poverty in the UK by 2021, and that is not really that far away. It would reverse most of the fall and child poverty observed in the UK since the late 1990s. In an excellent report that Oxfam provided for this debate, it set out a fundamental point for me, which is that wealth inequality has risen in recent years. It is even more unevenly distributed than income, with the richest 1 per cent own more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent put together. I have listened to the Tories over the past few months saying that the best way to get out of poverty is to get into work, and I agree with that to some extent. The figures that I think belie that are worth examining, because 70 per cent of children in poverty are in working families, so it is not enough simply to say that work will solve the problem. In fact, the Government's own independent adviser, Naomi Eisenstadt, who has done wonderful work in shifting the curve, says herself that being in work is not enough. We need good pay and enough hours in your work. That is why Labour supports other key measures, such as a £10 living wage and other. That is why we identify that there are 2 billion people, or 2 billion people worth of benefits that poor people are missing out on. That is why there has to be a look at things such as automating benefits and looking to see whether it is possible to legislate to ensure that income maximisation both in the child poverty bill and in the forthcoming social security bill might take. It is important that we recognise the role of local authorities in the work that they currently do and that they will do in delivering under the legislative framework. It is important to look at placing a duty on local authorities and health boards to plan in line with the existing planning process so that there is a streamlining throughout the legislation. I fully support the principles of the bill. We now move to the open debate. It is speeches of around six minutes. However, I have quite a bit of time in hand, so I can allow extra time for interventions. Alex Neil is followed by Liz Smith. Thank you very much indeed, Deputy Presiding Officer. I also welcome this bill. I think that it is high time that this Parliament sent out a loud and clear message from right across the chamber that we are determined to do something effective and with reasonable speed in tackling the level of child poverty in our country. We also welcome the report. I think that it is an excellent report from the Social Security Committee under Sandra White's chairmanship. In passing, I would say in recommendation 10, given the Scottish Government's intention to set up a poverty and inequality commission, I do not think that we should have a separate child poverty commission because I think that Alex Rowley is absolutely right. Tackling child poverty has to be part of a wider, broader and more comprehensive programme for tackling poverty across the board, although I have a lot of sympathy with the suggestion that the poverty and inequality commission should be placed on a statutory basis. We all know and we quote very often in this chamber the scale of child poverty, Presiding Officer, but I think that we should also remind ourselves of the cost to society of child poverty because the costs are as high as you could imagine. In a report published in August 2016, not that long ago, Solve UK poverty stated that the public service costs of poverty across the UK amounted to around £69 billion with identifiable knock-on effects of child poverty costing a further £6 billion and knock-on effects of adult poverty costing at least £2.7 billion. That gives a total cost of poverty in the UK of around £78 billion, a large proportion of what we spend publicly about £1 in every £5 spent on public services is spent to deal with the consequences of poverty in our society. I say to those who say that we cannot afford to deal with child poverty or poverty more generally, I say, look at the facts, look at the evidence, we cannot afford not to deal with child poverty and poverty in our society. I fully appreciate the motives of Adam Tomkins. I'm absolutely sure that he's motivated on the need like we all are to abolish child poverty, but I do fundamentally disagree with his analysis because the evidence does not back up the analysis. I would draw Adam Tomkins' attention and the chamber's attention, for example, to an excellent report produced by one of the first class quangos in Scotland called Health Scotland. They do a massive amount of first class research into poverty and in particular how to reduce health inequalities in Scotland. They produced an excellent report about 18 months to two years ago and it addressed the issue. This is the fundamental issue that we all have to address. What do we need to do to reduce and abolish child poverty and poverty more generally? They addressed the issue. What is the most effective way of reducing health inequalities in Scotland? When I heard about their report, I was expecting them to give a litany of action items to be taken by the national health service. Their evidence pointed to the conclusion that the single most effective measure that could be taken to reduce health inequalities was making the living wage mandatory for everybody in this country. Had we had the living wage, not the Tory living wage but the real living wage, that would very quickly start to reduce health inequalities. Similarly, in reducing educational attainment, we will not achieve our objectives in reducing educational attainment gaps if we do not, as a prerequisite, tackle the issue of child poverty. If a child is going to school hungry with an empty belly, there is no amount of tuition that can overcome the negative impact of an empty belly on that child's education. As a young grandfather, my wife and I take our grandchildren almost every Sunday to different activities. They are lucky because their parents, like their grandparents, can afford to do that. However, I look at other children and it might be something like soft play. For the four of us to go to soft play is about £15 a Sunday morning. If we are going to the pictures to see baby boss, that costs over £30. If you are having lunch, £50 if you are going to McDonalds. That is just one outing of a Sunday morning. However, if my grandchildren did not get that, their ability to have confidence and to explore the world and to read their books and to be able to mingle with other children and adults would be quite frankly severely restricted. However, how can any parent living on minimum wage or living with zero-hours contracts or living on benefit, there is no way on earth that these parents or poor grandparents can afford to do that for these children? Therefore, even if they are going to a very, very good school, they still will end up not doing as well as their peers because they do not have that support at home. I fundamentally disagree with Mr Tomkins. I see tackling a child poverty and poverty more generally as being initially and as a priority about putting cash in the pockets of the poor. If you do not have the cash, many of the other support services will not work to their full potential. That is why it is not just important to set targets. That is the easy bit for all of us. That is a dead easy thing to do. The reality is to put in place a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy at its core tackling child poverty with poverty more generally. Let me finish with this, Presiding Officer, but I was doing the job that Ms Constance is doing. I asked the question of my official. If we were, because if you look at the level of poverty and the definition of poverty, people living in poverty are defined as having 60 per cent or less of the median average household income. I posed the question. Supposing in Scotland we gave every family that comes into that category enough money to go up to the 60 per cent, how much would that cost every year? I was expecting a figure of £6 billion or £8 billion. It is not. It is £2 billion a year. I think that we should look at that. That is a gross figure, but the £2 billion would pay for itself. If you take away the cost of the poverty, the net figure is going to be a lot less than £2 billion a year. The key signal that we have to send out is that we are going to set targets. We can have an independent commission to monitor it. Yes, we can look at how we publish it and all the rest of it, but the key message that has to go out from this chamber is that we are actually going to do something about it and, once and for all, really tackle poverty, starting with child poverty in our society. I wonder if colleagues could address their microphones because, unfortunately, I missed some of what was otherwise an excellent speech by Mr Neil. No, thank you, Mr Neil. Thank you very much to Lane Smith for raising that point, which I was just going to mention. Even with Mr Neil's bellowing style, if you excuse my saying, sometimes people can miss it. To remind everyone that, for the benefit of everyone here and, of course, the official report, it is quite important to be fairly close to the microphone. I call Liz Smith to be followed by Richard Leonard. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I will try very hard to be close to the microphone. I suspect that there is no Government anywhere that would argue that there is an easy path when it comes to finding wholly effective policies to address poverty. Yet, for exactly the reasons that Alex Neil set out, and I obviously do not agree with his entire assessment, I think that he put it in a very important context, these policies are clearly crucial when it comes to supporting our most disadvantaged communities. For generations, policy makers have struggled to unscramble many of the complexities that surround poverty, including what many argue are the inadequate definitions that are so often tied to arbitrary income levels. Relative poverty, in particular, is hard to define. Of course, there is the on-going tension that I think that Alex Neil was getting at in his speech between the economic policy statistics and the social policy, which obviously has a much more subjective foundation. For that alone, I think that Alex Neil's speech was worth listening to. We all recognise very much what the symptoms are of social exclusion when they occur and the effects that they have and how they are linked to problems such as unemployment, poor housing, crime, educational difficulties and obviously low incomes. However, as my colleague Adam Tompkins rightly identified in his introduction, the most important focus for all of us—and I do not think that there is terribly much disagreement politically on this—must be the causes of poverty rather than just the symptoms, because we do not have any major concerns about the general direction of this bill, but we do not believe that it goes nearly far enough in addressing some of the concerns. Clare Adamson? I appreciate what the member is saying with regard to that, but I think that the problem that some of us in those benches have with what Mr Tompkins says is that he conflates the symptoms with the causes, whereas we believe that the symptoms are symptoms of poverty. The areas that he mentioned in particular—the attainment gap and in particular—is a symptom of poverty and not a cause. Liz Smith? I will come to the attainment gap in a minute, because I think that that is a very important part of policy. However, if we are going to deal with this properly, we do have to look at the root causes of poverty, because if we do not do that, I do not think that we are going to be able to take on board, as Alex Neil said at the end of his speech, so that we actually have to do something. That is not to forget about the symptoms either. Alex Rowley? I thank Liz Smith for giving way. The last Labour Government introduced tax credits, and as a result of that, over a million people, children in the UK were left to do poverty, 200,000 to those in Scotland. The evidence is clear that we are government intervenes and ensures that there is more income going into families than child poverty goes down. What is her view that 40,000 more children are in poverty in Scotland today than they were last year? Does she accept that that is something to do with government? Only to some extent, because I think that the key issue is not just about specific income levels, it is about the root causes that underpin that. You are not just going to get rid of poverty by lifting the income level, you actually have to deal with some of the underlying causes. I do not pretend for a minute that this is an easy topic. I do not think that anybody in this chamber pretends that it is an easy topic, because it is not. There are so many factors, as Clare Adamson reminded us. There are so many interlinks in this, but I do not think that. I think that there is a deficiency in the bill that it is not dealing with enough of the genuine underpinning of some of the causes. That is where we have to concentrate our energies. I wanted to talk about some of the educational policies that are very important in trying to address that. Let me start with the situation with the early years. To come back to what some MSP members are asking for, the evidence is important. One of the critical things about educational evidence is exactly what the early years are determined by. That is not just starting when they go into nursery school, that is even pre-nursery school. There is a lot of evidence there that the nature of the attainment gap, which we all want to address, starts early. That is why we believe, very fundamentally, that you have to focus the delivery of your early years service at these disadvantaged communities, not by the three and four years, although that is extremely welcome what the Scottish Government has done in that area, but focusing on some of the disadvantaged one and two-year-olds where we have specific issues. I have very little time left, but I also believe that when it comes to the literacy and numeracy that we have been talking about a very great deal in this chamber over the last few months, that is crucial, absolutely crucial in terms of raising the opportunities that young people have to be able to aspire to their education and to take that on and to acquire the skills that they need in later life. When it comes to the pupil equity fund, which we entirely agree is the right way forward, I really believe that that is an opportunity for schools, but it has to come from schools themselves. I hope that there will not be too many edicts from local authorities or from national government about how that money is spent, because I really do believe that it will be the headteachers who are the ones in the position to make the right decisions about what will best help there. Deputy Presiding Officer, I finish on the point that I think that this bill, in no way there is anything that we would disagree with in the basic principles, but I think that we can do a lot more to ensure that it has that robust stance that we all want to see, and that is why I think that we will be bringing forward a variety of amendments at stages 2 and 3. Richard Leonard, to be followed by Alison Johnstone. The number of children growing up in poverty in Scotland is rising, not falling. Relative child poverty up from 22 per cent of Scotland's children to 26 per cent in just 12 months. Absolute child poverty up from 21 per cent of children in Scotland to 24 per cent in 12 months. Over a quarter of a million children in Scotland today living in poverty, and almost 70 per cent of those children are in households in work, which is not, as I keep pointing out to the Government, not the sign of a resilient labour market but of a labour market mired in poverty pay, under-employment and insecure work. To the Conservative members, those are not lifestyle choices, those are economic impositions that people are facing. We rationally expect equal treatment before the law, so why should we accept such a huge irrational inequality? Why should we accept a society with a shameful contrast of unbridled private adult wealth on the one hand and public childhood destitution and squalor on the other? Visited on those children, visited not on those who have created these severe and capricious inequalities but upon those who, through a chance of birth, are simply born into it? We know the result. Horizon is limited. Life expectancy itself cuts cycles of poverty that pass from one generation to the next. That is what this Parliament needs to tackle and this bill provides us with a start. There is an emerging consensus, which I hope the cabinet secretary can join, that the time is passed when this Parliament can merely set targets. The time is passed when this Parliament can simply count the growth in child poverty. The time has come to end child poverty. The cabinet secretary told the Social Security Committee recently about a new socio-economic duty that she is contemplating, but the other duty here in this Parliament is our moral duty, our moral duty to act. That is why the committee containing members of the cabinet secretary's own party is demanding statutory interim targets on the face of the bill, not in regulations but on the face of the bill. That is why the committee is demanding tougher action to root out persistent poverty and the tougher definition of it too. It cannot be right either that in a household where there is an adult or child or both with a disability, material deprivation is so much worse, which is why we are also asking the Government to revise its calculation of the net income in such households. Neither can it be right that children from minority ethnic backgrounds are twice as likely to live in poverty than white kids. So we need robust delivery plans with a clear and traceable link to the Scottish Government's budget to tackle this and other inequalities. The committee also recommends, as we have heard, the establishment of a statutory commission to provide independent scrutiny and oversight of progress with powers to investigate and where necessary to call this or a future Scottish Government to account. Not a ministerial advisory group but an independent commission established by statute through this bill subject to a parliamentary power of appointment. As the child poverty action group spell out, the commission should have, and I quote them, members with expertise in measuring and understanding poverty. It should have members with expertise in engaging with those people experiencing or at risk of poverty and with an in-depth understanding of the causes and effects of child poverty. We talk in the bill about income after housing costs, and it is right that the bill focuses on statutory income targets. That is why Labour advances the case for increasing child benefit by £5 a week and already universal benefit, which would lift 30,000 children in Scotland out of poverty at a stroke. The economic condition that people find themselves in is not just pecuniary deprivation. There is a deprivation of power that comes with poverty as well, and this powerlessness leads to hopelessness and so on too often to acquiescence. It is not just economic growth that we need but a fundamental change in the wider organisation of the economy, not just a redistribution of wealth but a redistribution of power. Our demand, the Labour demand, is not simply to take the tears out of capitalism but to bring about a change that is much more radical than that, based upon transformed relations of power, built upon foundations of equality and democracy in our economy. Where government spending on housing, on education, on old-age pensions and social security is not viewed as a private burden but as a social investment. Where we create a truly civilised society which is productive but which shares its wealth with a sense of social justice and with a sense of social cohesion and solidarity of human spirit as well. And all of this standing on a rock of faith, that old Labour rock of faith of equality and the equal worth of all. I call Alison Johnstone to be followed by Tavish Scott. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. The main purpose of the bill that we debate today is to set in law a series of targets for the reduction of child poverty. And the challenge of achieving those targets was underscored earlier this year when the latest child poverty statistics revealed that there had been a 4 per cent rise in relative child poverty in just one year. And that, as we know, is a rise of 40,000 children to 260,000. Relative child poverty, as Smith touched on this, can be an opaque term, but Peter Townsend, Britain's leading expert on poverty, argues that it is when someone lives with, resources that are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are in effect excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities, the little trips out that some may take for granted and that Alex Neil described so well. That means that there are 260,000 children whose families can't afford to feed them the same breakfast that their classmates have every morning, and they struggle to concentrate at school as a result. It means that quarter of a million children aren't able to go on the school trips. Their peers get great educational benefit from. For constituency members in the chamber today, that is 3,500 children in your constituency. For regional members like myself, 32,500 children, that is the scale of the challenge that we face. Before I move on, I would like to remind us again why the bill is even needed. The statutory child poverty targets in the bill have existed before, but they were removed by the UK Government's welfare reform and work act last year in favour of measures relating to worklessness and educational attainment. While I agree that worklessness has a link to poverty, as indeed does educational attainment, the focus on worklessness implies that work is always a route out of poverty and that, as we have already heard in this debate, is simply not the case. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation released figures in December showing that one in every eight workers in the UK, that is 3.8 million people, is now living in poverty. A total of 2.6 million children across the UK are in poverty despite being in a working family. In Scotland, we have heard those figures bear repetition. 70 per cent of children live in households with at least one working adult, a 15 per cent increase over the years between 2010-11 to 2015-16. Child poverty is multifaceted, but the lack of an adequate income, whether that is from work, benefits or a mixture, remains its decisive characteristic and must remain central to any poverty measurement and any strategy to decrease child poverty. That is why the Greens warmly welcome the reinstating of those targets and why we will be supporting the principles of the bill at decision time later today. I will be bringing an amendment to the bill to ensure that the delivery plans cover five key areas recommended by the End Child Poverty Coalition. The first of those will relate to the full use of the social security system. We know that using social security benefits to boost the incomes of our poorest families can pool hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. We know that, and I think that Richard Leonard and Alex Rowley have touched on this. We know that, because it has been done before. It is just that it has been undone in recent years by the so-called welfare reform. The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that the projected increase in child poverty can entirely be laid out, explained by the direct impact of reforms to tax and benefits. The Institute for Fiscal Studies also argues that investment in child benefit and child tax credits between the mid-90s and 2010 was the key factor behind historically and internationally unprecedented reductions in child poverty and associated improvements in child wellbeing. We are now going backwards. By 2020, it is projected that child benefit will have lost 28 per cent of its value when compared to 2010. We can start to address that by adding an extra £5 to the benefit, as both the Child Poverty Action Group Scotland and the Scottish Greens have called for previously, and Pauline McNeill has called for this too today. We know that, when child benefit is paid, it goes to more intended target recipients than almost any other benefit, apart from the state pension, with 95 per cent of those eligible for it making a successful claim. While I very much welcome the significant improvements to early years grants announced on Tuesday, the Sure Start maternity grant only reaches around 50 per cent of eligible families, though I have no doubt that the Scottish Government will work hard to increase that. We know now that child benefit will get to those who need it and make a huge difference to child poverty. While I accept that the near universality of child benefit means that some of the additional spending would go to relatively well-off families with children not in poverty, there are a range of problems with a more means-tested equivalent. CPAG of commissioned research shows that such a move would cut child poverty by 14 per cent, lifting 30,000 children out of poverty, and that would very quickly go a long way to achieving the targets that the Scottish Government is setting. No wonder the idea has support not only from the child poverty action group, but also the poverty alliance, one parent family Scotland, the Church of Scotland and both the outgoing and new children and young people's commissioners. Food banks report that child benefit is very often the only source of income that families presenting to them have when their means-tested benefits and the system delivering them have failed. The Scottish Government talks of social security as an investment, and I agree with that approach wholeheartedly. Indeed, at around £250 million annually, a £5 top-up would be a significant investment. However, as we have heard from others, the University of Lothborough conservatively estimates that child poverty costs us £750 million a year, so that is an investment that we cannot afford to make. The targets in the bill represent a major challenge, one that we must rise to. We should be ashamed that, in such a wealthy country, so many of our children live below the average accepted standard. It is likely that, if they live in poverty, they will stay there, and their own children will experience poverty too. That is a cycle that we need to break. The bill needs to be clearer about how the targets are going to be achieved and to provide more policy tools to achieve them and break that cycle. Nonetheless, what we have today is potentially the beginning of the end-of-child poverty in Scotland, and I commend the Scottish Government for that ambition. I call Tavish Scott, who is followed by Ruth Maguire. I think that Alex Neil needs a stage, not a microphone when he is on his feet in that kind of form. At the outset, the Liberal Democrats support the legislation in front of us today. Secondly, my social liberalism is rather close to Alex Neil and Richard Leonard's than to the economic views of those on the other benches today. I do not say that in any politically aggressive way. I just think that the reality of the arguments is stronger on that side of the equation. They are for two reasons, and the two influences on me in this area of vitally important public policy are one, Sir Harry Burns, the former chief medical officer, who gave evidence to, I forget now which parliamentary committee I was on in either the last session or the session before, and he laid out in stark simple but incredibly elegant terms the crucial links between no job or, as Richard Leonard rightly said, poverty wages and a lack of educational attainment or rather educational failure, poor housing, health inequalities, pressure, stress, mental health issues, not just about for people of an older age but in this case of young people. Therefore, the need to address that in the round and to address the underlying reality of what that means for too, too many. As the cabinet secretary and many others around the chamber this afternoon have set it out, the ball statistics are, as Alison Johnson has effectively just said, scary, frightening, use whatever rhetorical word you want, particularly in seven days before an election. However, whatever it is, it cannot be good enough that there are so many, so many young Scots who are in that definition, if definition is the right word, of a set of circumstances that none of us, whatever side of the political equation we are on, can in any way find acceptable today. The second influence was, and Pauline McNeill rightly mentioned her, was Naomi Essenstadt, who is not an academic I take on on any basis whatsoever. She gave a tub-thumping speech at the SCDI forum back in a month or so ago. She wasn't particularly kind, I'll cabinet secretary have to forgive me for this, she wasn't particularly kind about things like the council tax freeze but that can be no surprise to anyone on the SNP benches. She also said some fundamental things about universalism and the challenge of what that actually means, as opposed to the choices that we can make in politics and where we should direct our resources, our efforts and our approach. Those people, people of not just Scottish importance but I would argue of international importance in their analysis of why poverty has to be addressed and how to address it and the reasons and underlying fundamental feelings of public policy at this time are to be listened to and this bill I hope is part of a series of measures that need to be taken in order to address exactly that. It's right that we seek to take forward legislation in this place to eradicate poverty. It's both philosophically right and it's right, of course, in practice. It cannot be at all acceptable that more than a quarter of young Scots live in relative poverty today. As various members have said today, an IFS, an Institute of Physical Studies forecast that says that by 2020, child poverty across the UK will rise by 50 per cent has to be utterly unacceptable to any Government of any political persuasion and there cannot be a response to that which says more of the same. Those are the challenges. There seem to be three points that should be addressed in terms of the specific measures that the Government is proposing in this bill. I'm not sure I necessarily have got this worked out yet. The first is on targets. As I, Neil, said, we can all pass targets and all Governments do it. Believe me, all Governments run them out. It's the easiest thing going. If you don't meet them, what then happens? I suppose that some of the response to that is what's happened on co2 emissions, where the Government has missed its targets, but without a shadow of a doubt, because of a range of parliamentary pressures, including, I'm sure, from their own side, that has started to move in the right direction. I wasn't sure about Adam Tomkin's analysis that more needed to be on the face of the bill, because, if I may have picked him up wrong and he's very happy to give away on this, if educational attainment targets are to be put onto the bill, and that's, I think, what he was hinting at in his, or maybe just said in his speech, why stop there? Why stop just with educational attainments targets on this kind of bill? You could, for example, have sports participation levels. You could certainly have fuel poverty targets, because, certainly in my part of the world, we absolutely know that fuel poverty comes down to a choice for too many families of heat versus food. You could also have house build completion targets based on building insulation challenges and building insulation standards. It just seems to me that, if you're going to amend this bill to widen out the targets, you need to be very conscious of where that argument goes in terms of the organisations in this usual case local government that you are laying that target on. It's not actually about this government or, for that matter, any government in here, but it is actually on the agency or body that will ultimately have to take forward that target. And then we haul ourselves, frankly, into a world of constant ministerial direction. Again, irrespective of who the government is, constant ministerial direction because Parliament's past a target means that if ex-local authority area, say Glasgow, does not achieve that standard, then what is the minister going to do about it? So I think in making those kind of proposals for stage 2 and 3 of this bill, members of Parliament need to be careful about analysing what they're setting themselves up for. The second year that I wanted to touch on is the proposal around independent commissions. In the briefings today, and all of them were, I thought, thoughtful and highly articulate, there seemed to be a commonality of view that an independent commission was the right way forward. Now, like Pauline McNeill, I have my doubts about yet another independent commission, and I hope that the government will really think about that very carefully indeed. Alec Neill made a sensible proposal that the poverty and inequality commission. You see when I mentioned Alec Neill's name there, did you hear the cry? I mean, he does bring tears to our eyes on so many occasions, but the poverty and inequality commission is indeed, sorry, I apologise, is indeed, I think, a worthy route forward in this area. The last point was just on the independence of local government. Now, the Scottish Government has every right to lay a duty on health boards after all, health boards hardly need to say this to ex-ministers of health, but health boards are in the beckon call of ministers, they do what they are told, it is literally the jump and how high type of scenario. Local government is, and it should be remembered, different from that. They have their own mandate, they have their own responsibilities, and they are also being told day in, day out at the moment that the number one priority of our government is educational attainment, is closing the attainment gap, is education. We need to be careful in public policy terms of now saying that the number one target is child poverty, and I just would like the government to slightly reflect on the challenges of the approach they want to take. Education fits into child poverty, what is the absolute criteria in that area. Today is a long overdue call to arms, Presiding Officer. The challenge is, as Alex Neil rightly said, getting things now done, but I just come to it with one final observation. We went through some of this, and you will remember, Deputy Presiding Officer, with medical inequalities some years back and the Arbuthnot formula, and all the challenges around that, and sensible proposals were made. Mike Rumbles will remember this about taking money from one health board area and moving it to another. Politics got in the way. Good luck. I've been a bit generous because we do have a little time in hand. Ruth McGuire followed by Gordon Lindhurst. Ms McGuire, please. The introduction of the child poverty bill, which contains ambitious statutory income targets and stringent reporting requirements at both national and local level, is a hugely important move and one that I, along with many others, welcome wholeheartedly. Achieving the four main targets in the bill would, to quote the child poverty action group, make a huge difference to the health, wellbeing and future prospects of tens of thousands of children across Scotland, because only by increasing the incomes of families at risk of poverty can lasting progress be made towards improving child wellbeing. For this reason, it's correct that these targets are based on net household income, quite simply, although there are many dimensions to poverty, income or lack of it is unequivocally at the heart of them all. This fact is widely recognised by stakeholders who have warmly welcomed the income-based focus of the bill. I share Peter Allen of Dundee City Council's disdain of the claim, which is often made by people in positions of privilege, that poverty of aspiration is worse than poverty of income. No, it's not. Rather, as he said to the Social Security Committee, the poverty of having no food and sending your bairns to bed cold with no food, sorry, having no money and sending your bairns to bed cold with no food, that is poverty. Whatever else the approach is about, it has to be about the money, but we know the issue is not just about money. The child poverty action group in Scotland has also stated its strong support for the four income-based targets, noting that those measures are internationally recognised as robust measures of child poverty and are the product of more than four decades of consultation and development by successive Governments at UK and Scotland level. It is also correct that the bill is target-focused, because although we are well aware that targets and measuring on their own do not solve a problem, they do create an unambiguous overarching national aspiration, focusing diverse minds, approaches and organisations on one clear, shared goal. At this point, I would like to quote Dr Margaret Hanna of NHS Fife, who, giving evidence to the Social Security Committee, said, For me, the target of addressing child poverty is an indicative target to mobilise us as a country towards something more ambitious on what is an intractable or difficult challenge. Similarly, Shelter Scotland recognised that the statutory income targets of the bill serve to focus the priorities and resources of policy makers at a national and local level. The four main income targets provide both a clear goal and a robust framework, in which all manner of more detailed and nuanced approaches towards tackling child poverty can be discussed and included. Those will be set out and scrutinised through the regular delivery plans, the first of which will be published by the Scottish Government before April 2018, with annual reports on progress also a requirement. Local authorities and health boards will also be required to produce annual local child poverty action reports outlining the work and action that they have done to reduce child poverty locally. In all of this, the bill will galvanise action and focus minds across all Scottish Government portfolios and all local authorities and health boards. It will allow us to build on the wide range of work already being done to tackle child poverty across Scotland from the attainment fund, the council tax reduction scheme and the Scottish baby box, to name a few things. It will provide an opportunity for Parliament to scrutinise and monitor the progress being made. As a member of the social security committee, I have heard extensive evidence in favour of interim targets and agree that they would be helpful. I am pleased that the committee's recent stage 1 report included the recommendation that interim targets should be on the face of the bill. However, any interim targets must be realistic and achievable, and crucially they must drive momentum towards our goal of eradicating child poverty. Lastly, it is worth reflecting again on why we were even here debating a child poverty Scotland bill in the first place. We are here because the UK Tories took the disgraceful decision to repeal the UK-wide income-based targets for child poverty and to remove the child poverty remit from the then social mobility and child poverty commission. As is so often the case when we discuss social security in this chamber, the contrast between the values and actions of this SNP Government and the Tory Government at Westminster couldn't be starker. As the Tories abandoned their child poverty targets and pushed countless more children and families into poverty, this SNP Scottish Government is introducing its own ambitious targets and signalling its unwavering commitment to eradicating child poverty. I am not surprised that the Tories were anxious to bury the figures when it comes to their plans for lifting people out of poverty. In 2010, the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition estimated that as many as 350,000 and 500,000 working adults could be moved out of poverty by changes to welfare, such as the introduction of universal credit. Far from reducing it by hundreds of thousands, the scandalous reality is that the Tories programme of welfare reform, which includes now the Calis-2 child cap, are dramatically increasing child poverty, with 1 million more children expected to be living in poverty by 2020. I shudder to think of the further cost to society at the hands of an unfettered right-wing Tory Government. At home, there will always be limitations to what the Scottish Government can achieve, with one hand effectively tied behind its back, shackled to a UK Tory Government whose hostile welfare policies are having a devastating impact on our communities. Too often it can feel like we might be running just to stand still. Much of our recent debate about social security in this chamber has been about mitigation and opposition from the bedroom tax to the two-child cap and rape clause. This is important if regrettable. I have to say that my ambitions for Scotland go far beyond mitigation and opposition. I do not underestimate the challenge that stands before us, and it is a task that has made all the more difficult with the Tory Government at Westminster pursuing frankly a cruel assault on low-income households families and pensioners. Child poverty, family income squeezed, pensions cut—this is the true cost of a Tory Government. As we debate the Child Poverty Act today, it strikes me now more than ever that there is a clear choice to be made next week between Tory MPs who will simply rubber-samp more devastating cuts to social security and SNP MPs who will oppose austerity and call for a fairer society for all. I think that we all know which will be more helpful as we pursue the aim of this bill. As a member of the Social Security Committee, I have had the opportunity of engaging with the finer details of the Child Poverty Bill and also to listen to the evidence presented to us by a number of organisations that do such important work in this area. We had organisations give evidence to us ranging from Inclusion Scotland, the Law Society of Scotland, to End Child Poverty among others. They have had their say on this bill and it is encouraging to note their broad support for it, and I thank them all for their input. As my colleague Liz Smith has already said in her very careful and reasoned speech, tackling child poverty is not an easy task for any Government. Poverty in itself is a complicated issue and can arise for a number of different reasons. It is something that can afflict any of us at any point in our lives. It is perhaps the complex nature of the issue that gives rise to varying views as to how it should be solved. The bill that we have before us, contrasted with some of the suggestions that we have heard today, indicates how difficult it is to arrive at an agreed position on how to improve the situation. What is clear is that, with 21 per cent of children living in a household in absolute poverty, 16 per cent points from the 5 per cent targets set for 2030 through this legislation, progress must be made. In order to really tackle the problem of child poverty, we cannot simply identify the numbers and then throw money at the problem without thinking about what lies at the heart of it. We must have credible and detailed plans for how we tackle it at its root. That includes a holistic approach that sees the Government facilitating the tools to give people that need it the helping hand up so that they can help themselves. I will give way to the member at that point. I thank the member very much for taking an intervention on that point. A number of Conservative speakers this afternoon have used this phrase, to discover what are the root causes of child poverty, as if it is in some way mysterious. I will just explain to you what the Institute of Fiscal Studies has said in a recent report. This is an intervention, so not a speech shot. An additional 1.2 million children will be pushed into relative poverty by 2021, and the reason for that, they are saying, is UK tax and benefit changes. The root cause that we are seeing here is actually a Tory Government. Would the member reflect on that? No, not at this stage, because I thought that you were asking a question rather than giving a speech. To return to my own speech, solving problems such as the attainment gap and worklessness are examples of those. We need to make sure that our young people from all backgrounds are equipped with the skills that will be vital for them throughout their life. Skills that will send them out justly confident into the world of work. Why not? I do not think that that was terribly gallant, but Ms White. I do not mind. I can be gallant as well. I just want to say to the member that you mentioned about the attainment gap, which seems to be what the Tories are pushing for. Do you not agree not just with me but with experts as well? If a child is not getting the right food, is not getting heat, then obviously for them to even go to school at all is a challenge. If people are not getting the right food, their brains won't develop the same. Surely you must recognise that. To reach attainment, you've got to have the right food and at least heat in your house. I meant no disrespect to the convener of the Social Security Committee by my response to her desire to make an intervention. I wouldn't wish my response to have been understood in that way. Of course, I agree with her because, as I have said, those issues relate to complex interplay of many factors. I don't disagree with what the convener has said at all. I would thank her for that intervention. I would say, continuing on from where I left off, that it is unacceptable that the percentage of primary 7 pupils from the most deprived areas performing well in numeracy dropped by more than 7 points between 2014 and 2016. Figures such as those do nothing to end the cycle of poverty in some of our most deprived communities. I am confident that closing and eventually ending the attainment gap could play a big part in meeting the targets that are set out, alongside other measures that others have referred to that clearly relate to the underlying causes of poverty. The Government also needs to regularly step back and assess the broad picture of what effects its measures are having in tackling child poverty. The risk in not doing so is that we reach 2030 and find that child poverty is unchanged or worse. At this stage, I wish to make some progress, so not at this point, thank you. The risk if we do not succeed on this is that we reach 2030 and find that child poverty is unchanged or worse, and that would be a waste of 13 years. I raised the issue of interim targets in the committee as did others, and the committee report has included the recommendation that interim targets should be on the face of the bill on a statutory footing. That, of course, is different than if those were simply included in a statutory instrument, because it helps aid our focus on them and gives them a greater immediacy. It provides the certainty that statutory instruments would not. They can be so easily hollowed out to defeat the purpose of primary legislation and render it ineffective. I acknowledge the cabinet secretary's comments on interim targets and agree that they must be considered carefully and not simply plucked from a particular point on a scale that works towards the end goal in 2030. Targets are important. They must be bold, but they must, as has already been said, also be credible. It is important that successive Governments between now and 2030 are accountable for the actions that they are taking to bring down child poverty. It is an issue that pervades political cycles and cannot simply be dropped beyond the next election whatever party happens to be in power. I hope that the Government takes on board the views of the committee when it comes to a statutory commission independent of government, one that has parliamentary oversight and is fully independent from government so that it can have the confidence of this Parliament to hold the Government to account. Deputy Presiding Officer, I will conclude by saying that the Scottish Conservatives are today pleased to support the principles of the bill before us in the hope that the measures to tackle child poverty are strengthened. Parties within the chamber are agreed on this on the end goal and I look forward to continuing to work with colleagues in the process of how we actually get there. We must be tough on child poverty and the causes of child poverty. As a member of the Social Security Committee, I would also like to thank all the witnesses who gave evidence to our committee, fellow committee members for their collaborative spirit and the committee clerks for all of their work and assistance. We live in a rich country. Scotland and Britain are rich countries. However, despite that, totally, unjustly and inexcusably, today hundreds of thousands of children on these islands will suffer the consequences of unnecessary man-made poverty. As David Heyman so powerfully put it recently, they will go to sleep at night in unheated rooms with little or nothing in their bellies. They will never get a birthday present. They will never get a Christmas present. No one will ever buy them an ice cream. No one will ever take them to see Star Wars. Their opportunities to give their best and make the most of their abilities will be needlessly curtailed and damaged. Every day will be a struggle to get by for them and for their families. In Britain right now, 4 million children live in poverty. IFS have stated that, under UK Government welfare reform and austerity, this figure will rise to 5 million, shockingly, around the same number of people as the population of Scotland. Presiding Officer, it doesn't have to be this way. So today, by progressing this child poverty bill through this Parliament, we can start another chapter in the process of trying to change the unacceptable reality that here in Scotland more than one in four children, approximately 260,000 children, are officially recognised as living in poverty. A figure that has increased by around 40,000 since 2014-15, principally as a result of UK Government policy. So I very much welcome the bill as a means to focus minds and policy makers by way of the income-based targets that the bill proposes and to introduce a set of robust reporting mechanisms. If passed by the will of Parliament, the bill will re-establish income targets on child poverty in Scotland after the UK Government regrettably repealed large parts of the child poverty act 2010. The enhanced targets in the proposed legislation are both suitably ambitious and realistic, and I support them as set out in the bill at section 1. While the bill alone will not eradicate the problem of child poverty, what it will meaningfully do is pave the way for more action to be taken to, in the words of end poverty action group, ensure that the scandal of child poverty remains high on the public and political agenda. In order to keep the issue on the public and political agenda, the committee heard strong and persuasive evidence from many witnesses that interim targets would aid focus and create greater immediacy, and so I welcome the cabinet secretary's commitment in her response to the committee's report to bring forward an amendment at stage 2 to place the principle of interim targets on the statutory footing. In order to meet interim and final income-based targets, I strongly support the Scottish Government's determination and intention for the bill to co-ordinate action to tackle poverty by the way of proposed delivery plans. Those will be pivotal in order to focus Scottish Government and multiagency action to achieve the targets and make the necessary difference to assist the children so unfairly affected. The delivery plans will also be crucial in order to adapt and deal with any further UK Government cuts or other unhelpful decisions that the UK Government might make on reserved issues. Given their importance, as a committee, we recommended that the Scottish Government consider evidence received about issues, concepts and strategies to be included in the delivery plans. Therefore, I welcome the cabinet secretary's commitment to bring forward an amendment at stage 2, setting out appropriate areas to be taken account of in the delivery plans, and make specific reference to the measurement framework and take budget considerations into account. When I made my first speech in this chamber around a year ago, I spoke of our unifying hope of a better Scotland. Despite some party political differences that are apparent, I believe that there is a unifying hope in the chamber today to get this right and for the legislation and resulting action to make the difference that is undoubtedly required. However, what will also be equally, and if not more important, is the continued need for as long as Scotland remains part of the UK for all of us to oppose destructive and unhelpful Westminster Government policy, which has most often been the cause of increases in child poverty in our time. In good faith, I ask all fellow MSPs of all parties to press whoever is the next UK Government to reverse austerity and welfare reform policies that are having a devastating effect on communities and increasing child poverty on these islands. I also press any UK Government to tackle low pay and insecure work, because the root causes of poverty are low pay, insecure work, welfare cuts and fiscal austerity, all of which lie primarily at the Westminster Parliament. It has been spoken about how not only is austerity and the cost of child poverty an ethical issue, but it also does not make any economic sense. The costs that have been identified by the child poverty action group are those of £29 billion a year, including policy interventions, long-term losses to the economy, lower educational attainment and poorer mental and physical health. It is in all of our interest to tackle child poverty in Scotland and beyond for ethical and economic reasons. Shelter Scotland has stated that the interconnected issues of poverty, homelessness, high housing costs and welfare changes must be addressed together if we are meaningfully to tackle them. I support the general principles of the bill, because it is an important and helpful step in the wider process of positive social economic change. If passed, the bill will send a message of intent and provide the foundations for ensuring a sustained focus at a Scottish Government level and at a local level. Child poverty is not an inevitability of a market-based economy. It is a result of ideological neoliberal economic policies that have been created by politicians on the right and encouraged by those with power and interests in preserving the status quo. To conclude, I believe that the bill can be part of a process of change and help to create a renewed shift in social consciousness towards creating a fairer society and a more compassionate society. The bill will help to refocus all of our efforts and remind us that we can tackle the man-made problem of child poverty in our communities and in our time with urgency and collective determination. Llanes Smith, by George Adam. Last Sunday, at a Jeremy Corbyn event in Glasgow, Ian Laverie, Labour's candidate for Wonsbeck, told us that, on a school visit in his constituency, he saw a young boy in detention. When he inquired as to why, he found out that his crime was taking a sandwich from a classmate's bag because he was so hungry. It really is unbelievable that we have to debate child poverty in the 21st century. However, the statistics in this report, the committee report shows that we do. The report tells us, and we have heard it from other members today, that over a quarter of children in Scotland in 2015-16 were living in relative poverty after housing costs, and that has increased from the previous year, and more than one in three children in Glasgow are currently living in poverty. I would like to commend the committee on the report, which is certainly a very worthy piece of work, but it lacks the real-life stories that lie behind the statistics and the passion that drives the determination to end child poverty. However, of course that may be because the bill under scrutiny is simply one that sets out targets and provides a framework for reporting, and as such it does not specify the policy actions or level of resources that will be needed to reduce levels of child poverty. I note the cabinet secretary's remarks earlier in the debate on the issue and also the committee convener's speech, which gave some more depth to the report. Since it seems that we are all agreed on the general principles of the bill that it should be supported, it is important today to consider exactly why we need targets and reporting, and also why Labour believes that we need a statutory duty to reduce child poverty. The Holyrood baby initiative is interesting, but I am sure that we all personally know Kirstie, one of the children in poverty in the working family. The Kirstie that I know is a smart wee eight-year-old. She is a talented singer. She has fantastic class reports, but the worry is whether that will be sustained as she goes through the school system, living in a family where her parents work hard but are struggling just to get by. Kirstie spent the first five years of her life sharing a bedroom with her parents in a private flat with no outside space. In that five years, there was not one offer of council housing, so they scrimped and they saved and they borrowed to buy a small two bedroom flat. Kirstie's dad works shifts in a factory and her mum can only work part-time in a shop because she cannot afford childcare. Kirstie's mum has no choice but to work Sundays and then to make that even worse, her employer has just taken away her Sunday allowance. It's a rare occurrence for Kirstie's mum and dad to have a day off together, so the right to family life isn't obvious for this hard-working family and holidays are a luxury that quite simply they can't afford. Originally, the family got welcome tax credits, but then the department made a mistake, but guess what? It's the family that have to pay it back, and that's affecting their already strange resources. Another current worry is that when Kirstie goes back to school after summer, she'll be in primary 4, so she's not going to get free school meals anymore. She's lucky that her mum breastfed her for a couple of years, giving her the best nutritional stat, and that she's had a good hot meal for the first three years. But now it's going to be a sandwich. Maybe this week, Kirstie's going to get to university. She's certainly clever enough and not having tuition fees in Scotland helps, but without grant funding it's just as likely that she'll have to try and get a job instead. In fact, research reported in Today's Herald tells us that teenagers from poorer families are less likely to apply for university due to concerns about debt. There are too many children living like Kirstie in this country, children whose parents work hard just to make ends meet and feed and clothe their family, and their immediate aspirations are to have a secure housing on annual holiday in the odd luxury, like a visit to the cinema or a meal out, as my colleague Alec Neill mentioned earlier on. For others, they don't even have a home, they're relying on food banks and charity shops to feed and clothe their family. Shelter Scotland says that they are appalled at the level of child poverty across Scotland and alarmed by the recent increase, and that more must be done by all partners to urgently address the causes, consequences and responses to poverty. Going back to the example of Kirstie, I would now like to mention a few areas that I think would make a big difference, providing all families with decent, secure and affordable housing with outside space for children to play as vital. Last year, there were nearly 6,000 Scottish children in homeless households in temporary accommodation, and that was an increase of 17 per cent on the year before. To address that, a Labour Government, if elected next week, would implement the most radical house-building programme since the war, and Scotland would gain the consequences of that. Labour would also extend free school meals for all primary children, something that I have personally long campaigned for, and colleagues in the chamber who have been here as long as I have will know that. Of course, that used to be SNP policy, but free school meals in primary 1 to 3 were only implemented due to the Tories and the Liberal coalition introducing it and passing on the Barnett consequentials. Of course, the Tories now unfortunately want to take that food out of the mouths of children. Childcare is another vital issue in tackling child poverty and allowing families to earn. The Scottish Government pledged to double free childcare in Scotland, very welcome, but private nurseries are saying that the scheme will fail if the rate offered to nurseries does not cover costs. Labour will give families what they need with flexible, all-age-year-round wraparound affordable childcare. As the rich go richer and they wonder where their next yacht is coming from, the poor grow poorer and they wonder where their next meal is coming from. That is a gap that is widening, with the wealthiest 1 per cent owning more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent, according to the Government's own wealth and assets in Scotland report published in February. We have the powers in this Parliament to tackle child poverty. This bill provides the tools to measure it and so now we just need the political will to eradicate the appalling reality of child poverty in our rich country. I am allowing fairly wide-ranging speeches that devy a little bit from the fact that it is a stage 1 bill, but I understand why. Can I then call George Adam to follow by Jamie Greene? As a member of the Social Security Committee, I welcome a stage 1 debate, because this bill that we are debating today is something that I am very passionate about, because I am sure that most in the chamber there is nothing I want more than to see the children of Scotland flourish and thrive. I want to see our children achieve their dreams and I am committed to not down any barriers that they may face as a result of their circumstances, family income or postcode. I want to be able to pass on a prosperous and fair country to my own children and grandchildren, unlike I like Neilam, a grandparent but obviously a wee bit younger than Mr Neill as well. I know that the future generations will not be negatively affected by the harsh and frankly unforgivable UK Tory cuts. In order to do that, we must ensure that every single child in Scotland is protected and given every opportunity to succeed, and we must break the often crippling cycles of poverty, hard-working families all too frequently find themselves trapped in. I agree that, when I like Neil said earlier on that just measuring poverty isn't enough, but I believe that this bill is a step in the right direction. I believe that we need to see where the area is and get the data. Many of the individuals that came to the committee actually stated that we needed to get that data. Often, in debates such as that, areas such as Paisley and Fergusley Park come to mind, and they are always regarded as areas of deprivation. Richard Leonard is, of course, correct when he says that there has been generations of issues with poverty in those areas, because that is true, because my family comes from Fergusley Park. My father got a trade and was able to work his way out of it, but many of his colleagues, friends and schoolmates are still there and have lived that life. I know them because they come and tell me they can't my father, and they tell me of their problems and things that have happened in their life as well. When you are talking about Elaine Smith's real life stories, for me, it is very real that we get this right, because those are people that my father grew up with, and now we are dealing with people that I have grown up with, and it is actually where my family comes from as well. I want to talk about getting away from areas such as Fergusley Park and being areas of deprivation and talking about how much they can give our communities, because it is a vibrant place to live as well. Since the Scottish National Party Government has come to power, we have already seen a whole host of policies and approaches that have contributed towards tackling child poverty. However, unfortunately, our hands remain tied behind our backs in the face of further UK austerity and cuts, which are pushing more people into poverty every single day. That is simply unacceptable. Like my colleagues who have spoken before me, I am appalled that in today's modern society, one in four children are living in relative poverty, and more than one million people live in relative poverty after they have paid their housing costs. Action must be taken, and the child poverty bill is a crucial step forward, but not the only thing that will make the difference as well. The Scottish Government is committed to taking great steps forward in tackling the issue, and the passing of the bill will mean that Scotland will be the only part of the UK with statutory targets on child poverty. Not only does the bill set out four headline targets the goal of eradicating child poverty by 2030, which is extremely ambitious, it holds every Government department most importantly responsible and places a duty on our ministers to publish child poverty delivery plans at regular intervals and to report on their progress annually. Tackling poverty is everyone's responsibility, and the bill recognises the importance of successful reporting mechanisms and clear co-operation across the country. The delivery plans will contain a baseline against which progress can be measured in calls and local authorities, partner health boards, community planning partners and wider organisations such as employers and housing providers to work in partnership on shared priorities in order to deliver real leadership and support towards the goal of eliminating child poverty once and for all. The four targets proposed in the consultation, such as the goal to dramatically half the number of children living in relative poverty, have received strong support from poverty experts across the UK, such as the child poverty action group and the poverty alliance, and are regarded as more challenging than those repealed by the UK Government as they take housing costs into account. The child poverty measurement framework already in place addresses the wide range of drivers of poverty alongside the impact poverty has on the lives of children and their families. The three P's, Pockets, Prospects and Places focus on maximising household resource and improving children's health and wellbeing through the provision of well-designed, sustainable and ultimately accessible places. The Government's new approach will build on and develop this area-supported network with emphasis that will continue to place on regular reporting. This reporting and information will provide us with valuable data where we need to address future Government policies to and inform us with the discussion and the decision making in the future. That, for me, is one of the fundamental parts of the bill. It provides us with the crucial data, what we do with it and what the Scottish Government does with it. That is the key to helping. That is how I believe, as Tavish Scott has already asked, and when we get things done with regard to child poverty. We are already dealing with it at the UK Government welfare reforms that we have already had a significant effect on people in my constituency. Fergusley, again, is one of the areas that is most affected by Tory austerity. Indeed, a child born in Fishton will live 16.4 years longer than a child born in Fergusley. It is essential that children in Scotland do not continue to be victims of the UK Conservative Party and are not penalised because of their postcode, household or circumstances from the minute they open their eyes and enter this world. The Scottish Government continues to protect our most valuable citizens and ensure that low incomes from power are mitigating some of the worst impacts of Tory cuts. As I said earlier, the bill and its intentions mean a lot to me. I have explained my background of which I am extremely proud of and how that can make a difference. The bill can be the one step on that journey that every child in Scotland gets the same start and opportunities in life, regardless of where they come from and regardless of where they are born. I am not offended by having your back to the chair throughout that, as I realise that you are merely attentive to Mr Adam's speech. Remind members not to sit with their back to the chair throughout the debate. I now call Jamie Greene to be followed by Clare Adamson. I am going to start by saying that I had pre-prepared a speech for today, but over the course of the afternoon I have sat and scribbled and rewritten the whole thing. It might make more sense in a moment when you hear what I have to say. Like some of the other members, I would like to start by sharing a story just to set the scene about why this debate is so important. I am going to set the scene. It is a tale of somebody growing up in a tenement flat in a fairly atypical council estate in Scotland. The family has an unemployed alcoholic father who more than often will drink the benefits payment the day that it arrives and a mother who cobbles together as many part-time jobs as she can to ensure that food is on the table, sometimes cash in hand. Dinner that night might be a pot noodle or it might be a handout from a local church. There are problems in the household with addiction, there are problems with domestic violence, there are problems with depression. Are these problems the by-product of their living conditions or is it the other way round? I will be honest with you, I do not know and I wish I knew the answer. Many families on this estate or scheme, as we call them, are unemployed. Apart from black market or cash in hand jobs, there are households where a whole generation has not and never has worked. People live in each other's houses and they live in each other's pockets. Whoever gets paid that day is home to the rest of the close. You could call it a community but it is also grimy, chaotic and sometimes dangerous. The child in the house is often the only one who cannot afford school trips, whose uniform is never quite as new as anyone else's and who turns up to school hungry. The same person who had to walk to school rather than get the bus because they had no money. The same child who never goes on holiday when their classmates do. The child whose teachers know they are having a difficult time at home but they are helplessly sympathetic. No matter how bad school is, it is still not home. I am sure that we can all imagine such a scene in our heads. It is normality to some people and if you do not know anything different or anything better, you accept what you have because that is how it has always been. Presiding Officer, that story is the story of my own childhood. I share it today with members because it is not a sob story. This is not an X Factor edition. I was taken by George Adam's speech today and sharing his own experiences with Paisley. Paisley is just a few miles up the road from where I grew up in Greenock. I want the chamber to hear that story because I want to approach the subject with the gravest of attitudes and a heartfelt intention that we must get this right as legislators. The Gibbs Hill estate in Greenock might have changed a lot since the 80s but it is still sad that we are having this debate today. Pauline McNeill. First of all, I commend the member on his courage. He brings on personal story, which I found quite emotional to listen to. I do not want to distract from that at all but today's Britain and the picture that has been painted about child poverty is one of which the child who cannot afford the school trip is the child whose family are in work. I acknowledge that that is the picture that we need to work out the answers to. Jamie Greene. I do accept that. That is why I said by sharing that experience that my mother worked as much as she could. We did have income. We were not entirely reliant on state welfare benefits. I do accept that there are families who are still struggling even though parents are working. I do not detract from that whatsoever. The reason that I mention it is that, for me to stand up here today and be partisan in any way, it is not the right thing to do given the subject matter. I have heard some contributions today, which I have been quite disappointed by knowing the members. The theme of Tory-bad SNP-good or this party-good policy-bad does not do the subject any justice whatsoever. If I can, let me talk briefly about the bill in the little time that I have. There are lots of words in it. There are lots of definitions and calculations, measurements, reports and targets, and they are all very well and good. Indeed, there are the foundations of the bill, but only one section talks about the delivery plan. It is not the job of legislation to define policy that is a matter, a political decision, indeed, for the Government of the day. It is interesting to note that the Social Security Committee acknowledges that the setting of targets alone will not reduce poverty. I am new to the legislative process, so I do not pretend to know the answer on how a bill addresses the root causes of poverty, but surely it must be about more than just income levels and how to measure them, surely. I do not have a problem with the concept of the bill, but it also says that the Scottish Government does not control all the levers that it needs to improve the lives of everyone in Scotland. In my view, education and health are devolved, and therefore I would like to see in later stages of the bill what has been done to, and I include things like closing the attainment gap, because good results at school do make a difference. I guarantee you that I would not be standing here today if they did not. We may not have had money when I was a child, but we had books. How will the bill address the real problem of long-term worklessness in a home? How will the bill ensure that funding for the third sector or local authority services that tackle alcoholism or drug abuse or domestic violence, that their funding will be protected or will be in place? How will the bill ensure that grass-roots activity to address poverty will be looked after? Will the bill be in the delivery plan? If it is, what recourse is available to us as a Parliament if those are not adequately and they are not independently measured? It is not just health and education that fixes the problem, just like it is not income that only defines poverty. I had much more to say, but I think that in the spirit of the debate today I just want to be clear that I have no interest in opposing for opposing's sake as we go through the stages of this bill, nor do I think that one party or another holds any magic wand that will eradicate it. There is goodwill and good ideas coming from every side, and I genuinely hope, and I do believe that this Parliament, even with our disagreements and our political posturing, can bring out the best of those ideas at stage 2, so that the end product is not just words on a paper, so that in 30 years' time an SNP does not have to stand up in this chamber and share his story because there simply is no need to. Thank you, Mr Greene. I call Clare Adamson. The last speaker in the open debate moved to closing speeches after that. You have been warned, Ms Adamson. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am not a member of the committee, but I would like to thank the convener and the members who have put together the stage 1 report for today and also all those who contributed to the consultation and the work of the committee and have contributed to their evidence sessions. I am sure that there were easy evidence sessions at any point. I would also like to commend some of the organisations that have provided briefings for today's debate, and I want to pick out a few of those examples from today. First, we are emphasising that 1 in 5 children experience poverty and that the Institute of Physical Studies has stated that there will be a 50 per cent increase in child poverty by 2020, absolutely startling statistics. We also welcome the fact that local government, community planning partnerships and community-based third sector organisations play a vital role in tackling those areas, and we welcome the fact that local authorities and health boards will be included in the legislative framework. Children and Young People's Commissioner Scotland has highlighted the rights of the children and the briefing that has looked at the UNCRC and highlighted the articles that are pertinent to the work of the committee at this stage. CPAC, who is very supportive of the aims of the bill, highlighted that the cost to the country of poverty is £29 billion a year. That is by quantifying policy interventions, long-term losses to the economy through lower education, well-attainment and the cost of poor mental and physical health. It was Tavish Scott who talked about the work that Harry Burns had done on health inequalities, highlighting those areas. 25 per cent of the children in North Lanarkshire, where I live and grew up, live in poverty. Inclusion Scotland has highlighted the disproportionate effect of poverty on families who are affected by disability. That includes children who are disabled but also the families who have a disabled parent. I look forward to some insight from the cabinet secretary on how she is going to tackle those particular issues for disabilities. I commend the work of the committee. I have already thanked it, but I said to Sandra White that she talked about the consensus that they were able to reach. I am delighted that that was able to be done, but I am a bit surprised that it is given the nature of some of the debate this afternoon, because there is an absolute gulf, it seems, between the Tory benches and perhaps every other party about what are the symptoms and the causes of poverty. Many of my colleagues say that the symptoms that the Tories seem to think are the causes of poverty. It is more complex than that. I hope that, if anything, we can move forward in an agreement that it is a very difficult thing to tackle. However, there was a lot of emphasis put on attainment in education. I just question how Mr Tomkins can exhort the actions of his colleagues in North Lanarkshire Council, who have supported Labour and in absolutely slashing the number of classroom assistants in North Lanarkshire, possibly 198 posts to go, and I question how that can possibly help with educational attainment in that area. We have also heard this afternoon that workless families, 60 per cent of the children are from families in working poverty. I cannot understand how the Tories can then argue that the two-child tax credit limit will do anything other than exacerbate the problem, along with its horrible rape clause. The DWP has estimated that 3,600 households in Scotland will be deptramentally impacted by the benefit cap, but Scotland has some opportunities. It is a modern, successful country with a wealth of talent and natural resources, and it is completely unacceptable that one in four of our children, irdbearns, grow up in poverty. I fully welcome the ambitions and the aims of the bill and wish the committee well in their stage 2 proceedings. I am particularly thankful that the bill has included the child poverty measurement framework, which I think is a huge step forward in having the ability to measure, to understand the drivers of poverty. Alex Rowley, thank you for taking an intervention. She highlighted today her one council where classroom assistants have been taking it. Does she agree that we need to look at a poverty impact assessment on every policy and budget decision that is being taken by the Scottish Government and every arm of that Government, including local government and health boards? A poverty impact assessment on every decision that is made financially? That would certainly help to inform people's decision making. When it comes to this area, Mr Rowley, I have heard you argue many times about the council tax freeze and its effect on the ability of local government to provide services. I mentioned that they are going to be included in this framework in the legislative programme, which is fantastic. However, Northlandshire Council could have raised £3.8 million in additional funding had it chosen to use the council tax to protect services that it has failed to do on this occasion. I think that I have run out of time. I want to congratulate the Scottish Government on some of the areas that it is already working on to tackle poverty in our areas. The £750 million attainment programme will help to close the gap. The £21 million programme includes £12.5 million from the European Social Fund to tackle poverty across Scotland. The fact that our primary 1 to primary 3 children are benefiting from health and justice free school meals, the introduction of the baby box and the fact that we have kept the educational maintenance allowance that supports children and students from poorer backgrounds to maintain their position in the education system. I think that that is one of the important points moving forward. We actually need to have this debate in here, and I commend the work of the Social Security Committee. However, we actually need to have this debate within the whole of our country. Poverty and inequality are the most important points that we need to make. We need to have this debate in here, and I commend the work of the Social Security Committee and the report that you have produced. However, we actually need to have this debate within the whole of our country. Poverty and inequality and the levels of poverty and inequality in Scotland are surely not acceptable to anyone in this chamber. How we tackle inequality and poverty are big, big questions with big, big challenges that are wider than the debate that we had here today. It is a debate that the whole of the country needs to have. I hope that, moving forward from stage 2 to stage 3, we will be able to widen that debate in communities across Scotland. The cabinet secretary talked about the UK Government, where it announced its intention to repeal significant parts of the Child Poverty Act in 2010. Jamie Greene made the point that we can take the politics out of here and SNP Goode Tory. Bad, I think, was how he put it. However, we have to acknowledge that Government can and should address poverty and inequality, and it is down to Government as to how much we do that or we do not do that. As I mentioned to Liz Smith, the last Labour Government cut child poverty in the UK by over a million. It was not by accident that that happened. It was because of the introduced policy that targeted poverty and lifted children out of poverty. Over this last year, I find it shocking that we have 40,000 more children in poverty in Scotland today than we did at this time last year. Projections moving forward are fairly bleak, so it is down to Government, and it is therefore down to politicians how we address that. Richard Leonard in his speech talked about the need to redistribute not just wealth in this country but power in this country. The offerings that come forward from political parties and I would urge those who are interested in how we tackle the bigger questions to look at the Labour Party manifesto that they are fighting this current election on, because in there is big ideas about how you redistribute power and wealth within the United Kingdom, and fundamentally that needs to happen. The committee, the UN conventions on the rights for children, noted when that decision was made that they had serious concern regarding the UK Government's repeal of the child poverty targets. It recommended that the UK set up clear accountability mechanisms for the eradication of child poverty, including re-establishing concrete targets within a set timeframe and measurable indicators. That's why I think that there is unity across this chamber today in terms of the bill that's been brought forward. Although a number of people have said, like Neil Richard Leonard and Pauline McNeill, that we've got to move beyond simply targets, because having targets is one thing, being able to address poverty is another, and therefore action speaks louder than words, action will speak louder than targets. 40,000 more children in poverty since last year in Scotland, 260,000 children in 2017 in Scotland living in poverty. The institute of fiscal studies are forecasting that a 50 per cent increase in child poverty across the United Kingdom by 2020. Under the Tories, the average household income in Scotland fell by over £600 in the last year. 467,000 Scottish people earning less than the living wage. We must move beyond targets, and that's why Labourers are saying that there should be a £10 living wage introduced across the whole of the UK. If you're serious about tackling poverty, you need to take the measures to be able to do that. 70 per cent of children living in poverty in Scotland are in a family where at least one person is in work. Is the question, what are we going to do about that? As Ben Macpherson made the point, we need to be able to, when we reach 2030, not simply say another target not met, because Governments say all colours are good at bringing forward targets and then not meeting them. I believe that we need, from Government and from all of us in this debate, some coherent proposals moving forward. The party of that is a coherent anti-poverty strategy that, despite all the other strategy documents that are there, they have not been pulled together. I repeat my request again to the Cabinet Secretary. Let's look at what a coherent anti-poverty strategy for Scotland would look like. Pauline McNeill raised the fact that a number of organisations plan and have put forward the idea of increasing the family allowance, child benefit, by £5 a week. Over the lifetime of this Parliament, if we reached that, we would lift 30,000 children out of poverty. There is a target. There is something as a direct result of a policy that we can introduce. I know that sometimes Government ministers, when they are no longer ministers, talk about what they should have done when they were ministers. Alex Neil, from his own speech today, says that the cost that he asks when a minister addresses those on lower income in Scotland would be £2 billion. I hope that the Social Security Committee will ask Mr Neil to give evidence on that proposal, because I think that it would be worth looking at. Let's look at what we need to do. On the question of an independent commission, Oxfarm has been absolutely clear. It says that it should be fully independent of Scottish Government, both in practice and in perception. The cabinet secretary needs to take that on board. There is unity within this chamber. We need an independent commission to ensure the scrutiny and make sure that those are not just targets but actions that will address poverty in Scotland. Adam Tomkins is pleased, Mr Tomkins. This has been a really good quality debate from all sides of the chamber that has included within it two really quite sparkling and memorable contributions from Alex Neil and from my friend and colleague Jamie Greene. I thought that Alex Neil's speech was brilliant, brilliantly wrong, but brilliant nonetheless. I want to go straight to the issues that Alex Neil and Jamie Greene were talking about, which I think is not just philosophically interesting, intellectually interesting, but very important in getting our anti-poverty strategies right. What is the relationship between not having enough money and between all of the other issues that we have been trying to talk about, including educational under-attainment, including the attainment gap, addiction, family breakdown and everything else? What is the cause of what? What is the effect of what? Which is the by-product, as Jamie Greene put it in his remarks? Jamie Greene said that he did not know what was the cause and what was the effect and I suppose that puts the finger on the issue that we are trying to grapple with from these benches on this bill. It is not our view that you can think only in terms of addiction and family breakdown and educational under-attainment and the rest, but it seems to be the Government's view that at least as far as this bill is concerned, you can think only about income. What we are saying is that thinking about either end of the question on its own isn't going to work unless you join it up and think about it altogether. The truth of this is encapsulated in the Government's own measurement framework on child poverty, which exists right now, which includes a significant array of 37 different indicators of child poverty that don't just focus on income. They talk about living wage and employment. These indicators talk about good health. They talk about mental health. They talk about eating enough fruit and veg. They talk about talking to your mum. They talk about housing. They talk about crime. They talk about drug misuse. An effective child poverty strategy, an effective anti-poverty strategy, whether it is about children, families or anybody else, isn't going to work if it focuses only on income. That's our point. Our point is not that we should do away with the income targets. We're not in a second. Our point is not that we should do away with the income targets. Our point is not that we should pass this bill only having taken these income targets out of the bill, but that on their own, these income targets will never be successful in achieving and delivering what the Government's own aspirations are of eradicating child poverty in Scotland by 2030. Alex Neil. I thank the member for taking an intervention. I'll refer again to the Health Scotland report. What it showed was in tackling health inequalities, for example, a basic decent income is a prerequisite to solving the problem but it's not the total solution. Clearly, you need other policies in relation to childcare, housing, health, education and all the rest of it, but if the people who are living in poverty don't get a decent basic income, the impact of all these other policies will be substantially diluted and we won't achieve our objective. Adam Tomkin. In that case, I think that the disagreement between us is actually really quite tiny, but my point is this that unless we add some of these broader concerns to this bill, this bill won't work. It won't achieve what it is setting out to achieve because we're not doing it at the moment. The Government's own statistics show that the percentage of P7 pupils from the most deprived areas who are performing well in numeracy is going down not up. It's gone down from 2014 to 2016 from 60 per cent to 54 per cent and a similar fall we see in the percentage of P7 pupils from deprived areas performing well in writing, gone down from 61 per cent to 56 per cent. We need to do more legally than we are currently doing to put obligations on the face of the Scottish statute book to require ministers to take steps to address these problems as well as the income issues that Alex Neil and others have rightly talked about. It's not a question of either or, it's a question of both and that is why, as I said, we will be seeking to amend this bill not to take anything out of it, not to take anything out of it, but to add to the bill legal requirements on ministers to take steps to close the attainment gap, to reduce the number of children in Scotland growing up in workers' households so that we can address not just the income of poverty, the lack of income that poor families suffer from, but some of the underlying drivers and causes of that too. Tavish Scott, who isn't here, asked if we're going to add education targets, why not add a whole host of other targets as well. We want to focus on education because there's a child poverty bill and there's clearly a relationship between children and young people and education. You don't have to take my word or the word of any Conservative member for any of this. Let me just quote to you two pieces of evidence that the Social Security Committee received. The first is from Peter Allen of Dundee City Council, who talked about the contributory factors. Those are his words, the contributory factors behind child poverty. Attainment issues, he said, will be one of those factors. Attainment issues are a contributory factor that contributes to child poverty. Strong targets associated with attainment issues would be more meaningful, he said, than waiting for five or ten years to see whether income measures have changed. Bill Scott, from Inclusion Scotland, said this. Disabled children are twice as likely as non-disabled children to leave school with no qualifications, regardless of the type of impairment that they have. There are disabled children with sensory impairments and physical impairments, but no intellectual impairment whatsoever who are leaving school with no qualifications. That makes their chances nill in the current job market. Unless we change that, he said, we will not change their future. When they become parents, they will be parents living in poverty and their children will be living in poverty, so we have to change the cycle. That is the force of the argument that we are trying to make from those benches. Focusing on income alone will fail to meet the laudable aspirations of this bill whose principles we support. If we are serious about tackling poverty in Scotland, and in particular in the context of this bill, if we are serious about tackling child poverty in Scotland, we need to think about educational underattainment and addictions and family breakdown and worklessness as well as focusing on income targets. If I have time, I will happily give way to Sandra White. Briefly, please, Ms White. Oh, thank you. I thank the member for taking the intervention. You continue to talk about attainment that you mentioned about Bill Scott and disabilities. Do you not think that taking DLA off of people and putting them when they go on to PIP has got something to do with poverty rather than attainment gap as well? The fact of the matter is that, under the current Parliament, and the Parliament that has just been dissolved for the general election, more is to be spent on disability benefits than on any previous Parliament in British history, more than £50 billion. Two final points very quickly on interim targets. I would very gently say to the cabinet secretary that I do not think that putting the detail of interim targets in secondary legislation is quite going to meet the concerns of the Social Security Committee, but that is an argument that we can have at stage 2. I do nonetheless welcome that she is at least willing to move on interim targets. The final thing that I would like to say by way of substance is a point that a few speakers have talked about, but which I did not have time to touch on in my opening remarks, which is the importance of amending section 10 of the bill so that the requirements on local authorities are not merely to look back on what they have done with regard to child poverty but to look forward also to what they propose to do over the coming period with regard to child poverty. Setting targets sends a message, Sandra White said in her speech, and that is a line that we took from evidence in the Social Security Committee. I agree with that setting targets does send a message. It is an important step, but I want to do so much more than that. I think that it is important not just to measure child poverty but to take concrete steps to tackle and reduce it, and the amendments that we will be seeking to make to this bill will be designed to help the Government realise those aspirations and not get in the way of them. Thank you, Mr Tomkins. Collin Andrew Constance, to close with the Government Cabinet Secretary till 5 o'clock, please. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. This has been a good debate across all benches, and I agree with Adam Tomkins on one thing, and that is the outstanding speeches today from Alec Neill and Jamie Greene. Although many of the aspects of today's debate are characterised by the technical underpinnings and the philosophy of statutory income targets and the processes around interim targets, delivery plans and parliamentary process, I will seek to answer those questions as much as I can within eight minutes. The point that I want to make is ultimately poverty and ultimately addressing poverty is about people and it is about children. Jamie Greene made me reflect on a favourite quote of mine from Jackie Rowland. She is a woman with a personal experience of poverty and, of course, she knows a lot about children as well. She says, poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised by fools. I think that what we probably all agree on is that poverty crushes the spirits of individuals and families and it can crush communities. The consequences of child poverty can last a lifetime. It stunts a young person's physical and mental wellbeing and can affect their life chances. Alex Neil rightly says that he cannot afford not to address child poverty. I agree wholeheartedly with that. We are all mostly, with the exception of the Tory benches, agreed on the centrality of income or the lack of income. That is not to say that that is the only aspect of poverty when there is poverty of opportunity and poverty of aspiration. Tavish Scott, in his own way, made the link between having that focus on internationally renowned legislative targets and how that links with a measurement framework. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation described the Government's measurement framework as a quantum leap forward. It covers all those issues that are both a cause and a consequence of poverty, disability, attainment, fuel poverty, rural poverty and drugs. Again, that is not an exhaustive list. Those measurements, which we are currently reviewing, can be better, but you will not necessarily want to put that framework or those measurements in statute, because a lot will happen between now and 2030. Our measurement framework needs to be flexible to respond to the issues of the time and the evidence. I know that we will come back to the issue of interim targets. I welcome that discourse with the committee. The interim targets will be statutory, anchored in the bill. My plea and my preference around regulations is that I want those targets for us to set the interim targets together and for them to be based on the very best of evidence that is available to us. In terms of the delivery plan, which is the overaction plan for the action, the delivery plan is not your measurement plan. The delivery plan is where it is about what we are going to do and how we take it beyond measuring poverty. Again, that needs to be responsive to what is happening today, what is happening next week, next year and between now and 2030. Tavish Scott and others, the convener of the committee, made the point that no target is perfect, but the statutory targets that we have are internationally renowned. They have been developed over decades and have overwhelming support from stakeholders. That does not mean that they will not change at some point in the future. The important point, and I think that all members would agree and have encapsulated that, is about the action. Members have questioned whether targets and legislation in itself are not enough. Of course, they are right to raise that question. The point that I want to make is that requiring government, me to measure, to report annually on progress invites a degree of scrutiny that ultimately leads to better action. We are not demuring from our responsibilities. I often talk about how, as a Government, we are fighting child poverty with one arm tied behind our back. However, irrespective of the constitutional settlement or the future of Scotland's constitution, what I want to do here and now in terms of the day job is to make sure that this arm is as strong as possible. Alex Rowley. Does she therefore agree that public bodies will be needed to meet and deliver on targets, where they are set in budget, should they have an impact assessment that describes what the impact will be in terms of poverty of their decisions? Yes, and I keep trying to tell you, Mr Rowley, that this is something that we already do and it is actually something that we could do better. Once we implement the socio-economic duty, a dormant part of legislation that was in legislation that your Government introduced, but the Government over there chose not to introduce, and the equality budget statement already has measurements of inclusive growth, because I think that that gets to the heart of the matter. I want, Presiding Officer, to stress about what it is that we can actually do, as opposed to pointing out some of the problems with the issues that we cannot address. Jamie Greene is right that health education is devolved. It is sad to say that many of the economic levers and equality legislation and other matters are not devolved, but I want to focus on what we can do in this place. Make no doubt about it, while child poverty north and south of the border is at scandalous levels, it is too high in Scotland, as it is too high in England, but child poverty used to be in Scotland at similar levels to the UK going back to the 90s. On every measurement today, child poverty in Scotland is lower than any of the UK home nations and is the UK as a whole. I would contend that that is the difference that this Parliament has made through many actions. Many actions are too many to mention. Of course, we can and we are going to have to do much more. While there is no silver bullet—I know what Alex Neil said about the big ideas—the touchstone issues of affordable housing, and our record on affordable housing is absolutely second to none. In our two terms of office, we delivered 65,000-plus affordable homes, thanks to the good office and leadership of Alex Neil. We want to step up that to 50,000 affordable homes over the lifetime of this Parliament. I am content, Presiding Officer, that in terms of the big touchstone issues, we look at how those issues can be anchored in the bill. In terms of the issue about the statutory commission, I have listened very carefully to what committee has been saying. I have been listening carefully to what our stakeholders have been saying. Of course, the Oxfam report is an exemplar report. I come to this first and foremost as a Parliamentarian before a minister. What members are describing sounds to me more like a parliamentary commission, and that is not in the business of government. The business of government is to deliver on our manifesto. We will, of course, come back to this issue at committee. Our plans are for a poverty and inequality commission to anchor that wider anti-poverty approach. It will, indeed, be full of experts in big brains and independent folk like Naomi Eisenstadt. You cannot say that Naomi Eisenstadt is not independent, but I am not currently persuaded of a statutory commission. I have to confess that, in part due to the financial costs around that, when every penny is a prisoner. Similarly, with topping up child benefit, it is not a bad idea. I am just not convinced that it is the best idea. If you are talking about £256 million per annum, I would want all that £256 million to go to poor kids who are under the proposals that I have seen from some stakeholders and the Labour Party. Only three out of every £10 would go to a child that would be considered to be in a poor household. I know that I am running out of time. It has been a good debate across the chamber, and we will come back to the many issues that have been raised today. I want to thank all members for their contribution. That concludes the stage 1 debate on the Child Poverty Scotland Bill. We now move to decision time, and there is just one question today. The question is that motion 5879 in the name of Angela Constance on stage 1 of the Child Poverty Scotland Bill be agreed. Are we all agreed? We are all agreed. That concludes decision time, and I close this meeting.