 Good morning and welcome to the seventh meeting of 2022 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. The first agenda item is to agree whether to take item 3 in private, which is consideration of today's evidence. Are we all agreed? That is agreed. The next agenda item is to continue taking evidence on women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. The evidence session will have an intersectional focus on disability. We have two witnesses who are joining us remotely and I welcome to the meeting Dr Pauline Nolan, head of leadership and civic partnership of Inclusion Scotland, and Jenny Miller, chief executive of PAMIS, promoting a more inclusive society. I welcome you both to the meeting and refer members to papers 1 and 2. I am now going to invite both of our witnesses to make brief opening statements, starting with Dr Pauline Nolan, please. Thank you very much. Without wanting to correct you, it is head of leadership and civic participation. Thank you for the introduction. Inclusion Scotland and I welcome the opportunity to contribute evidence to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civic Justice Committee about disabled women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. I am particularly glad to join you on International Women's Day to highlight some of the intersectional challenges that disabled women and women affected by disability have experienced over the past two years. I will briefly say a little bit about Inclusion Scotland. We are a disabled people's organisation led by disabled people ourselves. Inclusion Scotland works to achieve positive changes to policy and practice so that we disabled people are fully included throughout all Scottish societies equal citizens. We do that by influencing decision makers, supporting disabled people to be decision makers themselves and developing capacity and awareness and engagement of disabled people. We have a network of 50 disabled people's organisation members across Scotland and many partners, and we have a large reach through our things like our newsletter. We built up a strong reputation as an independent, non-party political representative organisation of disabled people across Scotland. I just wanted to, without going over the opening statement that my colleague Susie gave, because I had prepared a very similar opening statement, really wanted to open with the words of a disabled woman that I had the utmost respect for and still have the utmost respect for. This is a quotation taken from Glasgow Disability Alliance, one of our largest disabled people's organisation members. It is from Susan McInistry, who was their policy and participation officer and sadly died at the beginning of February, but she has for a long time been a very active intersectional disabled activist. Those are her thoughts about disabled women. We are individuals with skills, talents and life experience, filled with the kinds of ingenuity and adaptability that are essential attributes when living in a still and accessible world. Our human rights to safety, stability and the choices over how we live our lives are more than dry and burdensome obligations that must be grudginally met. They are an opportunity to bring a richness of talent and expertise to bear in meeting the challenges that we face nationally and globally. Until disability is seen as a rich and useful facet of human experience and not as an individual deficiency, that cannot happen. The person with the insight into how to tackle some of the critical social or environmental issues today might already exist but be trapped in a system that deprives them of the choice over when to use the toilet, let alone share their knowledge. That is a really powerful statement to begin with. I will close my opening statement by saying all the evidence that I present today, both from our own and GDA's surveys during the pandemic and the Falsat Society, along with Women's Bridges Group and Sisters of Freedom, which is a disabled women's organisation in the UK wide. Those that disabled women and women, including disabled people, caring for a disabled person, have been hit harder by Covid-19, not only because there may have been a greater risk of severe illness, but equally on more so because Covid-19 has supercharged the existing inequality that they already face and made new inequality likely. Now can we go to Jenny Miller, please? Good morning, and, as Pauline Smith said on International Women's Day, Pamys welcomes the opportunity to hashtag break the bias and provide evidence of the committee about women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. We are a charity that has, for 30 years, supported children, young people and adults with the profound learning and multiple disabilities and their families to lead healthy, valued and inclusive lives. Through our family support service and from academic research, we know that the main unpaid carers of this group of people are women and in many cases as lone parents. Their caring role is intense and complex, and even more so during this recent pandemic. Evidence tells us that high proportion of those unpaid carers face deterioration in physical and mental wellbeing. Their caring role is particularly prolonged, demanding and complex. Along with the many challenges that parallel care of the loved ones with complex medical needs, carers of children and adults with the profound learning and multiple disabilities present unique challenges for support services. First, they may be the most medically skilled group of unpaid carers, but their experience is that their knowledge and skills often go unrecognised among health and social care professionals. Second, there is an indication that there is a high percentage of women who are single-parent families, often caring for other children, some of whom also have additional support needs. Third, the overwhelming emotional experience of having a child diagnosed with life-limiting disabilities may be felt as unresolved trauma for many families, which lead to further triggering and difficulties, particularly related to the care of their child. However, there are no specialist support services existing to support and emotionally resource this group of family carers, particularly those managing such complex care. People with a profound learning and multiple disabilities require 24-7 care, and many carers are providing between 18 and 16 hours a day of this care. At worst, during the pandemic, we have seen unpaid carers providing round-the-clock support. Recent research by the Fraser of Allander Institute provides invaluable evidence on the role of this unique group of unpaid carers—a role for life that is unlike many other carer groups. The research highlights the savings to the taxpayer of this unpaid care. It would cost £114,000 per person per year to deliver the equivalent care. Those caring commitments restrict the family carers' ability to work, and many carers are living below the poverty line. We know that many women wish to return to work or end to work in employment, but the expectation and the norm is that they will fulfil this full-time carer role. We have heard from carers who have been told that they are the person's mother and therefore require to care for their child with complex disabilities, that they must co-ordinate the care of that child and that it is not the duty of the statutory bodies to support them to return to work by providing adequate care packages. Yet one mother also highlights that her right to be a mother is overtaken by the demand for her to be the physio, the nurse, the teacher, the occupational therapist, the speech and language therapist, the care assistant, leaving no time to be a mum to that child or, indeed, to her other children. That mum also highlighted the desire to remove herself from the poverty line, to provide for her family and to seek appropriate housing where she can afford her rising few bills. She has recently been supported to take up a part-time role in our charity, but the barriers that she faces in accessing this opportunity alongside the prejudices from statutory services that should be supporting her were enormous and remarkably she has navigated the benefits trap and the care package issues and with our flexibility in our working hours has been able to work. Would this be the same challenge for her daughter's dad, she asks, and this week when there was an issue with her daughter's care who was the first port of call, not the daughter's dad but her as the mother. We feel we need to challenge a widespread belief that the role of family care giver should be reserved for women while men are not required to make the same level of commitment and to uphold the rights of these women to have a liveable standard of living, a right to health and a right to work. Thank you very much for both of your opening statements. Obviously, there is a smaller panel than we have been having of late. It should be time for us to ask each question to both of our witnesses. It is a bit of time for supplementaries on those issues, so if members can indicate that they want a supplementary, they should stick to the same topic before we move on to the next question. That would be helpful. Members might want to indicate who they were wanting to hear from first. For witnesses, if you feel that you are not being brought in on something that you are keen to contribute on, if you put R in the chat. However, I get the feeling that today we will probably want to hear from both of you on each of the topics going through. We will now move to questions starting with Maggie Chapman, please. Thanks very much, Joe. Good morning Pauline and Jenny. Thank you very much for joining us this morning and for your opening remarks. The statements and testimony that you outlined and that you gave us are very powerful. Jenny, if I can come to you first, I am interested in exploring some of the physical and mental consequences of the pandemic that people had in their wellbeing. You talked about deterioration in both physical and mental wellbeing. Can you say a little bit more about the health impacts that you saw in the carers that you support? Yes, absolutely. Those quotes came prior to the pandemic and what the pandemic did was put a real spotlight. Families talked to us about feeling abandoned, isolated and invisible. The impact of having no support coming in and still, Maggie, there is no support. We have limited day services in a lot of areas. People who had five days a week care now have nothing or have two days a week, so families are absolutely exhausted. The really awful impact has been that we have seen families with suicidal tendencies because they just do not know where to go. They have children who they really love, but they are now having to think about putting into residential care because they are exhausted and they cannot cope. We know that there is a shortage in care providers. We know that we have a national crisis around social care provision, so their emotional wellbeing has deteriorated. Alongside that, we also noted a lot of physical deterioration because families are suddenly having to do all the moving and handling, all the lifting, and relatives midway in the pandemic had put on weight. There was no upgrading of equipment, so it had an enormous impact. The UK Covid research highlighted a percentage of families that felt that their health and physical wellbeing had declined as had their children's. One of the really awful images is the fact that families saw their children deteriorating their skills, their health and things that they could do before the pandemic because they have had no input. They are just not doing. It is really dramatic and it is still going on. Thank you very much for that, Jenny. Pauline, could I bring you in on this as well? What are the physical and mental consequences for disabled people and for the people around them? Our surveys show that disabled women's mental health deteriorated sharply since the pandemic and physical health too. Both have an impact on each other. Those with care responsibilities as Jenny's outlined felt undersupported or unsupported. To add to that, many disabled queer people and shielders felt abandoned and experienced extreme loneliness, isolation and depression. That is backed up by Sisters of Freedom, the disabled women's organisation. Our own survey, which was a big theme of the April 2020 survey that we did, showed that 56 per cent of disabled women reported finding social isolation difficult to cope with compared to 41.6 per cent of disabled women. Anxiety was highest among women overall, but particularly disabled women, with over half of disabled women reporting high anxiety. Sisters of Freedom said that they also felt let down by the public attitudes to social distancing and mask wearing. That impacted on their access to community and green spaces. That has been a long-term issue, so it continues to affect disabled women and women affected by disability. At the beginning of the pandemic, we know that disabled women were not accessing either preventative healthcare treatments or necessary treatment for their health conditions. They were either considering possible burden on their NHS and did not want to put others before themselves, or they had concerns and fears that they would catch Covid. We have heard from disabled women that some of the unofficial health treatments but are still important treatments that disabled women accessed by health and beauty shops and hairdressers also were shut down to them. Pain management techniques that disabled women had found work for them were no longer available. It has a huge impact on families as well. I think that my colleague Susie in the last session talked about disabled women and women carers of disabled children who were suddenly having to look after disabled children. He was supporting them with rising mental health conditions for themselves for the children because they were not getting outside, because they were not getting to their usual supports. The women themselves did not have the support to look after them, they did not have the respite services available. My youngest child not being at school is proving difficult for my mental health and my health. I am now struggling to care for her 24 hours a day. I normally have two nights respite for a week and one weekend daytime respite to rest in order to help me to pace and cope and keep on top of housework, etc. The stress and the extra required activity is making my symptoms worse. The additional struggles of getting shopping and access to medication have all had an impact. Thank you very much, Pauline. That is really helpful. I will leave it there for now. Thank you, convener, and thank you to the panel for the evidence that your organisations have given us in advance, but also for joining us here today, especially on International Women's Day. I think that it is particularly special that we are taking evidence on disabled women today, because, in order to break the bias for women in general, we have to look at us in all our glorious shapes and sizes. I am delighted to be joined by you all on our panel today. I can also point members to my register of interests as an employee of Inclusion Scotland from 2009 to 2015. I would also like to take a moment to remember Susan McKinlay and thank you, Pauline, for reading out that quote from Susan, who was an absolute powerhouse of the disability movement and a woman who shall be sorely, sorely missed. The evidence that you have already given us this morning, both of you, has been moving and stark. I have a couple of questions in a few areas. The first I have is probably for yourself, Pauline, if that is okay. It is lovely to see you again. I want to ask a little bit about the rights at risk report and the fact that you have highlighted a number of disabled people's human rights were breached and that we could be seeing a regression in the rights that disabled women have. Could you tell us a bit about that and what you think needs to be done to address it? Could you also set out what your aspirations for the new disability equality plan in that context would be? What is the scale of the challenge that we have and what do we need to do to improve circumstances and reverse the regression? Thanks, Pam. It is good to see you too. That is a big question that asks from the new disability equality plan. We are just starting to work on that with the Scottish Government and other disabled people's organisations in the Scottish independent living coalition. However, our rights at risk report was based on a survey that we conducted in April 2020 of over 800 disabled people. It really did show the mental health impacts that I just talked about above all, but it also showed that rights to article 19, rights to independent living, for example, where people were having women were having their social care support removed overnight with no discussion. A further survey later on that year showed that some of those people were still being charged for that social care support and that some women could no longer access their housing because they had no support in their own house and had to go and live with families and increase those reliant relationships, dependency relationships. If we are to tackle gender inequality in relation to social care support, we need sustained public investment in a modern nationwide infrastructure of social care support to protect, promote and ensure human rights and tackling inequalities for disabled people and eligibility criteria and care charging to be removed. Disabled women need to be involved in setting any ambitions for the new plan. It needs to be realistic. It needs to not go over things that are already happening or that have happened before, but it needs to look at ambitions that are achievable and can be done in co-design with disabled women and their supporters. The Sisters of freedom report states that, as well as setting out the rights to dignity and access to services to meet rights to independent living that all disabled people have, the UNCRPD, which has been brought into Scottish law, also recognises that disabled women are subject to multiple discrimination and that measures need to be undertaken to ensure that our rights are protected and advanced in society. We would like to know how policies such as the national care service bill will align with the incorporation of the UNCRPD article 19 to independent living and article 6 to non-discrimination against disabled women and girls. A immediate method of easing the strain of caring responsibility of women impacted by disability would be the Scottish Government's reopening of the independent living fund. That seems to be on the table, but, with the national care service, it is nowhere to be seen. Reopening it to new applications for people who need it and to extend what funds can be used for. The independent living fund enables disabled people to pay for care so that they can be supported in their homes and within their local communities. However, it was close to new applications in 2010. Reopening of the ILF could be done immediately and could provide much-needed support to people with high support needs and their carers. That is something that needs to be urgently added to all the work that is going on in the national care service and while they are working on other ways to improve social care support. Can I ask two further questions? It was just to ask whether you would carry out any analysis on the impact of shielding on disabled people's ability to continue to work during the pandemic. What sort of support has been put in place by employers to enable that? Yes. I will go to that on my evidence. I have 12 pages of evidence here. We did look at shielding. We did an additional survey of over 150 disabled people on their experiences of shielding. We found that disabled people, including disabled women, were concerned that they would lose their job. Around 1 in 10 respondents were concerned that they could lose their job as a result of the pandemic. Discriminatory work practices in the Government's failure to implement fair employment regulations led to unemployment, reduced work hours and reduced pay, that is from Sisters of Freedom. There has been a big failure to adapt to home working for disabled women, particularly for disabled women with caring responsibilities for looking after children and older people. Particularly in low-paid jobs and public facing jobs, I think. Is that helpful? Sorry, Pam. It is. Thank you. I have other questions, but not on this thing. Okay. Thank you. Alexander Stewart, please. Thank you, convener. I also welcome Pauline and Jenny to the meeting, and thank you for your comments and opening statements. We have heard and you have also given some ideas in your opening statements about the concerns that women have, particularly when it comes to their future financial security. We are well aware that disabled women found themselves during the pandemic or even prior to the pandemic in certain situations where they were having to deal with the cost of living, and that has only exacerbated during recent times. As we progress, it would be good to get a view from you on specific to disabled women, but it may be that also age came into that, depending on how old they were and what they were having to deal with their ethnic background, whether they were a lone parent and the impact that they might have had on their financial security and stability. We have heard a lot in the past about individuals saying that they have choices to make and that those choices might be eating or heating and how they manage that situation in circumstance. It would be good to get a view from Jenny to begin with and then Pauline on what your experiences of that are. Do you feel that any specific women with an individual background are more susceptible, are more in crisis because of that situation, where their financial security is challenged and is an everyday situation for them, having to manage their family, their lifestyle and their opportunities? We had last week a case of a mum who is rising fuel costs, so she is a lone parent with two children in a house that is incredibly cold and draughty. Her daughter requires 24-7 care and she needs eating in her room at all times. She has a variety of electrical equipment that needs to be run. She has to run the washing machine three or four times a day and her fuel costs have just gone from £286 to £874. She does not know how she is going to pay that and at the moment she is heating her daughter's room, the disabled daughter, but she and her other daughter are sitting with six jumpers and no heating. She is making those decisions about what she buys food-wise in order to ensure that she can pay for that heating, but she cannot pay for that heating. She is the mum who also wants to get out of that poverty trap and has been trying to get into employment, but there is the total expectation that she will be the person that will be delivering that care. I think that those lone parents, those women who are caring for really, really complex children, are absolutely in that poverty gap and they cannot see a way out of it. Thank you. Pauline, have you had similar experiences or other areas of this that you might want to comment on? Yes, you are right. The intersections of disability, gender, race, class, compound women's income poverty and increased their time poverty as well as impacting on their health. To say that there isn't enough data about those intersections of disabled women, what we do know is that nearly half of all those living in poverty in the UK are either disabled people or live in a household containing a disabled person. However, the official measure of poverty, i.e. households living on less than 60 per cent of median income, fails to take into account the additional costs that Jenny was just talking about associated with disability. In 2018, Scope found that Scots disabled people spent on average £632 a month on disability-related expenses. For example, additional heating, washing, taxis, special equipment and care costs. Those are the highest excess costs in the UK. Disabled people had on average £108,000 fewer savings than non-disabled people. However, once those costs are taken into account fully, half a million Scottish disabled people and their families are living in poverty. That is 48 per cent total of all people living in Scotland in poverty, despite making up only 22 per cent of the population. That is backed up by other research. Sisters of freedom found that the cost of living for disabled women increased while income decreased, and many disabled women were not eligible to access the Government's £20 uplift of universal credit. Other issues that were brought to the fore during the pandemic, such as access to technology, which was vital for the switch to home working and homeschooling children, was a particular problem for disabled women. Almost 40 per cent of disabled mothers reported that their children did not have access to the equipment that they needed to study at home, such as a computer printer, compared to 24.2 per cent of non-disabled mothers. That is from the Women's Budget Group, Falsit Society etc. report. Good morning and thank you, panel Jenny and Pauline, for coming along today and your opening statements, especially today on International Women's Day. My questions round, we've heard that the rates of domestic abuse and violence had increased through the pandemic for women. Was this the case for disabled women and, if so, whether the specific impacts on disabled women, if so, how did you feel that we could have addressed that? My question goes out to Jenny first. One of the things that we have seen is that intensity of caring role and from family support directors feeding back that lack of support. There was a case a couple of weeks ago where a father absolutely lost it because of the stress and strain within their household. I know that that family support director then spent a whole week trying to find appropriate support services that could go in and alleviate some of that stress. We haven't collected specific evidence. It's just, I guess, the case studies that we're picking up, but we know that family relationships break down when you have a child with really complex needs and a child with complex needs who communicates in a challenging way causes even more issues. I think that just not having any social support and not having any respite has definitely heightened the issues that families are facing. There have been a few cases where families have had to leave the family home where mothers have had to leave because of a breakdown in relationships, but it's just been really difficult for them to get any support. For some of those families, they're the ones that are now thinking about their child going into residential care because they can't cope anymore. Sorry Pam, that isn't a very good word. I suppose that we haven't got specific evidence, but it's just some of the cases that some of our family support directors are tackling at the moment. I think that parents have been left with more than one child that they've had to home school as well. On top of that complex caring role, I think that tensions have been incredibly high. On that, Jenny, you mentioned that tensions were high. Is there any examples or anything that you feel that could have been done more to address that? I think that families, I use the word felt invisible, felt completely out on a limb. Some families said that the only support that they had was the telephone calls from PAMIS. I think that people just sometimes wanted somebody to phone up and see how they were doing. Some of the complex communication that their children exhibit and children that are growing and transiting into adulthood, if you're alone, small lady looking after a very large sonnet is incredibly difficult and not even having any phone calls. I think that families get really tired. I've heard of families talking about the fact that they've needed their child to go into residential care because they're so tired that they don't even know what they're doing anymore. There just needs to be more support, but people also need an opportunity to get out of a house and living in small accommodation with nowhere to have private conversations is incredibly difficult. Pauline, do you have anything to add? Yeah, I'm backing up what Jenny said on the experiences, but also sisters of freedom did some research that I've spoken about. I talked about the dependency that disabled women have felt during the pandemic, dependency on others, and I think that's put a strain on family. The sisters of freedom pointed to a dramatic increase in calls to domestic violence health lines and support services, saying that many disabled women would find it much harder to flee dangerous situations or to find refuges or services that they need. That includes accessible refuges, which there weren't enough of in the first place to make that decision to leave. It's that care dependency relationship often. There are different forms of abuse that disabled women face in domestic abuse that diverge slightly from what you might call usual domestic abuse, such as medical abuse, abuse of medication, financial abuse and so on. Some of those issues were exacerbated for women with learning difficulties because a lot of the access to one-to-one advocates went away during the pandemic and women with other communication barriers. It's been a huge issue, but a lot has been needed to improve access to disabled women to domestic abuse services over many years. It's one of those issues that's been exacerbated by families being stuck in the home. My question was on the care dependency relationship and the situation that Pauline has just outlined, so I don't need to ask it. It's already been covered. Thank you for coming along and giving evidence. You've spoken in regards to disabled people facing additional restrictions on their activities and freedoms due to being at a higher risk of more severe impacts of coronavirus and needing to shield completely that feeling of more vulnerability to the exposure of the virus. Overall, disabled people during Covid were more likely to spend extended periods without leaving their home, especially women and those with unpaid care responsibilities. I was just looking at some research that was saying that the proportion of people who had not left a house to go for a walk or exercise or go shopping in the previous week before that was 16.6 per cent. However, that rose to 25.5 per cent of disabled women. However, ensuring that the clinically vulnerable people were isolating at home was an essential part of the coronavirus response, but going for extended periods of time without leaving the house could have significant impacts on mental and physical health. Data suggests that that is likely to have particularly impacted disabled people and disabled women. I would like to ask what are the views of the panel and are there lessons that can be learnt about the scenario that can help with anything in the future? Can I direct that first at Pauline? Disabled women and disabled people in general need to be involved. It's article 11 writes in the United Nations Convention on Disabled People to be involved in any measures that would be put in place for emergency situations. That would have potentially put them at less risk from both the virus and the measures to control it if we had been involved in emergency planning as it was when the pandemic came on. Emergency planning was happening at such a fast rate that there was no involvement of disabled people's organisations or disabled people in that emergency planning. Therefore, we believe that that has put disabled people and disabled women in particular at more risk to the pandemic and the restrictions that are put in place because of it. We absolutely, Karen, and it was one of our arguments all the way along that getting access to the outdoors, particularly for our group of people, was so important. Those tensions, as you mentioned, raised and rose in houses where people weren't getting out because they needed that activity. I think that there was just this blanket risk assessment. I know that, for some people living in shared accommodation and care homes, there was absolutely no opportunity to get out. We know that that did and has, and we will continue to have an impact on the health and wellbeing of people with complex needs and their family carers. The damage has been done and it will never be undone. One mum was saying the other day that I wanted to take my daughter out, and I was told categorically that I couldn't, but she said, in reality, when I go to the park with my daughter, nobody rushes up to chat to us anyway. It was far safer going out to a park, into an open space, giving her that opportunity to be out and to exercise than it would have been keeping her locked up indoors. I think that, as Pauline was saying, what we would have appreciated is more personalised risk assessments. There were recommendations from the Government that said, please do risk assessments and do them with individuals. We found that, when we did risk assessments with families, they absolutely understand the needs of their children and wanted to keep them safe. Their risk assessments minimised risks. There was no way that they could get rid of every risk, but I just wish that there had been more collaboration with organisations, as Pauline highlighted. That damage has been done, and we need to remember, if we are ever in that position again, just how important physical activity is for the wellbeing of everybody. It would have made a huge difference if we had enabled people to get out and about, particularly in that first lockdown, when the weather was reasonable. However, I think that this group of people were far more discriminated against and not able to do. As we all started going to the pub, they were still locked down. Thank you for that question. Absolutely. Thank you, Jenny. Pauline, would you like to come back in? Yes, there are a lot of disabled women still locked down, in fact. We need to go to those disabled women and disabled people about what the solutions are and what can be done to prevent their risk from catching Covid, because it is still an issue for a lot of disabled people. We also need decision makers and service providers to understand that disabled women's lives are complex. Both from their intersections with the other protected characteristics and where they live in the country and what supports they do and do not have, what poverty they face. It all needs to be brought in inclusively into the mix when looking at solutions and future planning. I want to follow up on one of the topics that you both started exploring with Alexander around financial security, particularly from the point of view of education and training. Jenny, you spoke about the poverty trap. Obviously, people do not have access to a range of employment options or have to curtail their paid work because of caring responsibilities. I suppose that there is also something about curtailing other development opportunities, skills development, training and education. I will come to you first and then to Pauline. If you could say a little bit more about the impacts on access to education, skills and training that care is and disabled people will have experienced during the pandemic. For the group of families that we support, many of them have given up very prestigious and well-paid jobs to take on their full-time caring role. It has been really depressing seeing the lack of confidence when they start applying for roles where they feel that they have lost so many skills. We are really interested in looking at providing a family care a job description because we are pretty sure that it would map to an SVQ level 5 in supervisory management because of all the jobs that they take part in, the care management, the financial management. There is a huge range of skills, but finding the time for them to attend training to be able to further their education to think about jobs is so difficult. It has to be so flexible. We are finding that the flexibility of courses and employment is not appropriate for people who have to at the drop of a hat take a child to hospital or provide emergency support. There needs to be real consideration. We are at the moment just putting in a funding application for empathetic employment and routes into empathetic employment and providing support and buddying for families who have managed to manoeuvre their way around the benefit system and the barriers, but to support each other back into routes into employment. I think that, as I highlighted at the beginning, the group of families that we support are probably some of the most skilled carers that we have. Can we look at how we translate the skills that they have developed into accredited vocational qualifications? We have certainly been looking at the clinical skills network in Scotland to talk about accrediting some of the invasive procedures that some of those families have learned on the job, because they are a highly skilled workforce. Sadly, many of them lose their children earlier in life, and they have a whole wealth of skills that we feel go untapped because they have not been given the possibilities and support to then think about employment. We, as employers, need to really consider how we support this group of people who are an absolute asset if you just provide the right conditions and you think about flexibility is absolutely key. Sorry, Maggie, but I have gone off on the tangent. I am a bit passionate about that one. No, no, thanks, Jenny. That is really helpful. Thank you. I think that the empathetic employment and the role that employers or the adaptations that employers need to be thinking about, I think more generally, inclusion is good for everybody, is not it? It is not just the people that it is maybe designed for. Pauline, do you want to come in on this as well? You also talked earlier about the need for the need for people to feel fulfilled and feel that they are able to do something that they want to do, not just to be stuck indoors, stuck at home. How have the people you work with and support felt through all of this? I spoke earlier about lack of digital support and lack of accessible equipment to get involved in education. It is one of those things, again, to coin the phrase that Glasgow Disability Alliance uses as a supercharged pre-epandemic, existing pre-epandemic inequalities in relation to access to work and qualifications. Also the cost of broadband has been a prohibitory barrier to disabled women. The juggling of work and social care cuts and childcare that is in our evidence are caring for relatives. There were issues with the inflexibility of the system as well of access to work, requiring wet signatures to endorse claims for access to work, which has been a big problem. Inclusion Scotland provides employment opportunities for disabled graduates and disabled people who have been out of work via paid internships, some parliamentary, some with the Scottish Government and others with the public sector. Those are highly successful because we couple it with training for employers. One of the things that needs to be done is to look at employer ability of employers rather than looking at disabled individuals' own deficiencies regarding work and education. Those employability programmes that have come along and said that this is what you need to access work do not always help when workplaces themselves are inaccessible, both in terms of physical access and attitudes to disabled people and disabled women, are victims of the dual intersectional bias against them in workplaces. The intersections of impairment will come with its own biases from employers and from educational establishments. Not enough is being done to address both the barriers. We do that training but we think that more needs to be done to train employers to become accessible employers. We have a lot of work to do, don't we? We have a lot of culture change to get on with. Stick in with employment first if that is okay and then have a question on social security. You have highlighted some of the significant barriers to employment that disabled women experience in general. What do you think will need to do specifically as a result of what we have seen in the pandemic and the kind of rolling back of rights that we have had from that? If you think about the Government's main initiatives on employment to do that, are there no-one left behind approach parental employability fund, the green jobs being targeted, the women and business centre and modern apprenticeships? Can you talk a little bit about the inclusion of disabled people and unpaid carers in those and what it would need in order for those to take account of disabled people's needs? Do you want to speak first, Pam? I think that something that Pauline said earlier was about that engagement with the people themselves. When we talked to the family carers, the project that we are looking at the empathetic route to employment is totally led and brought forward by family carers who have a passion and a drive to make sure that they can get back into the market. They come up with the most amazing, creative ways of getting over the barriers and managing their really complex lives. I think that we need to do far more engagement with the people themselves that require those services. Families will often say to us, we are not asking for the earth, we are just asking for someone to work with us in order for us to look at solutions. It is complicated and our other ask is often why not spend a day in their shoes—a day in the life of their experience—to really understand what it is that they have got to cope with, but certainly Caroline that is working with us has done a detailed step-by-step account of the barriers that she had to overcome in order to be able to get into employment. One of the biggest ones, which maybe feeds into your next question, was how do I make sure that I earn enough money to look after my child and come off the benefits because I know that once I have come off them, getting back will be really difficult and really complicated. She had to have many, many, many conversations with the benefits agencies in order to work out how she could do that in a way that meant that she was not destitute before she started working. I think that engagement with the people themselves is always something that gets me up to going to work. It is inspired by families and people with disabilities who absolutely know what the solutions are, but we just maybe need to think about how we make those a reality. I will come in if that is okay. Workplaces and educational establishments need to be more flexible in the approaches to including disabled people and disabled women in particular, but there is a need for social care support to be properly in place and for unmet needs to be met because if somebody cannot leave their house in the morning and cannot get on public transport in the morning, they have no opportunities to be involved in the programmes that you speak of. The programmes themselves, such as the call for employer ability, need to be more flexible and accessible. Another point to make on the topic is that a lot of disabled women work in jobs that were formally seen as unskilled, and those jobs became key work during the pandemic. Those key work roles need to be fully recognised, including on-paid carers and support workers, which are predominantly feminised, including all the public service low-paid sector, which disabled women had to go out and work in shops and were put at increased risk. We are probably due to danger money because of that increased risk to Covid-19. In terms of benefits, disabled people and disabled families need to have benefits uplifted to the point where they can afford to meet their additional costs. It is as simple as that. We have a benefit system that is focused on deficiency and seeing disabled people as scroungers for the last 10 years. We need to turn that round to give disabled people and disabled women opportunities to work, to take part in society, to take part in the communities. It is an investment. Thank you, convener. I was keen to understand a bit about the financial impact, if that is all right, of the pandemic, particularly on disabled women, but also on unpaid carers. I want to pick up a point that Jenny made earlier in her opening remarks about families being expected to pick it up when someone is being told that they are their mum. You should just do it. I recall that it would be nice to put it on record. When I finally got the social care and support that I needed, my mum said that I can now be your mum and not your carer. I think that it is incredibly important. I was 18, incidentally, so she has done that for 18 years. I think that it is really important that we do not just make assumptions about unpaid care. You could talk a little bit about, if that is okay, the financial impact of the pandemic and some of the support that was put in place, for example, the doubling of the carers allowance supplement and how helpful that might have been. Do you want to go through the first polling? I have already mentioned some of the financial impacts on disabled women. The uplift to carers allowance was still, I believe, below the rate at which the standard rates can put people into poverty. Although it was welcomed, I think that more needed to be done. There should be a focus on that in the upcoming carers strategy. I have talked about the impacts of poverty, so I will allow Denny to come in on that. The families that we supported, I guess what is happening at the moment, is that there was nowhere for them to spend some of their care packages because there were no services that were open. I think that the biggest issue at the moment is the total clawback, where somebody is told on a Monday that, by Friday, they are going to take back all the unclaimed money, which would be so useful if they could now find opportunities to have a respite from their caring roles. The impact for families was vast. Their heating bills, as we talked about, went through the roof. Many were not able to go back to work because they were caring five days a week—well, seven days a week—and there was no possibility to do that home working. I am amazed by some of the families that did manage to juggle some of that home working, but it was really difficult. I think that families have considered having to give up their work, particularly when there were some employers who were demanding that people worked set hours, which was almost impossible. One of the other bits is that, in order for them to be able to work, they need to have the right care, which I was going to bring in after the access to appropriate care. That ability to hand over the care to somebody that you are not convinced is going to deliver it in the same way that you will. It is also a real barrier to supporting people and getting back into employment, but the poverty that is going to be so stark is just this whole-feel crisis. We have families who do not know what to do. I feel really awful as an organisation. I am not even sure how to support them at the moment. We are having an emergency meeting this week with our board to talk about what we do to provide that support. I am sure that we will get in touch with Pauline to talk about what we do as organisations. Trebling somebody's monthly bills is just a recipe for disaster. Sorry, I am waffling there. No, I absolutely agree. I would like to come back in on that if that is okay. Yes, that is fine. We have a lived experience poverty group that is included in Scotland, but I am so aware of just so many people facing stark decisions at the moment that you talked of choosing what they do. The heating and use of fuel is an additional cost of a lot of disabled people and disabled women and families of disabled people. I really think that that needs to be looked at in the policy context, especially going forward, because the war in Ukraine is also adding to that, adding to what is already a fuel crisis. It is also the on-cost of accessing paid-for services that are increasing their crisis because of those increased bills. You will have disabled women who were unable to access the kind of paid-for beauty services that they needed to manage paying that we were told about last year because they were closed, but now it will be because they cannot afford to. I just wanted to go back to what my colleague Pam spoke about, apprenticeships. This week is also apprenticeship week, and I wanted to ask the question around access and take-up with apprenticeships for disabled people and how your links with organisations like Skills Development Scotland and Apprenticeship Scotland have links with those people. How is it working, and if it is not working, is it something that you are looking at? Very timely question, Pam. Is that for Jenny First? Yes, Jenny First. Yes, no, thank you. I have just made a note of those, because that is certainly in the project that we are looking at of how to get family carers back into employment. We were really keen to look at how we work with organisations to recognise the skills that these families have already developed and then accredit them so that they can look where they go. Our conversations will need to be back to the flexibility in how you support people into apprenticeships and skills training that enables them to carry on with their caring role. It would not be fantastic if these family carers were able to accredit the wealth of skills that they have developed through their caring role and that that is recognised and affirms, I suppose, the value that they have, but that is certainly something that we would hope to be developing as we go forward. I think that Glasgow Disability Alliance is publishing its report at the end of this week on the triple whammy of impacts on disabled women from the pandemic, from being disabled and having those barriers from being a woman and the Covid pandemic. They talk of employment opportunities dried up for disabled women job seekers as the job market has become more competitive. We do work with Skills Development Scotland. We are working on them at the moment on delivering training to the hotel and tourism industry on our employer ability training, just a short-term project that will hopefully have a big impact because it is an industry where a lot of disabled people are in employment and it is probably hidden. The number of disabled people who are in employment and face barriers is also to employment in that sector. A lot of disabled people's work in the past has also been segregated and we do not want to see that. That is why we do the employer ability training and internships to ensure that disabled people are included in mainstream work. As many of the projects in the past have value for disabled people, but they have been segregated from society and have allowed mainstream employers to not know what the barriers that they were placing for disabled people were. I have a bit more to ask Pauline. On that, I wanted to ask, obviously you are working with Skills Development Scotland. Do you think that there more needs to be done on promoting and making people aware that apprenticeships are there for accessible for all, including disabled people? They need to be more accessible, yes. More does need to be done. We are working and it is not me who is doing that work, so I cannot go into as much detail. However, I am very happy to follow up by my colleagues who are working in that area, Pam, if that would be helpful. Any further questions from any members? Okay, thanks very much. Jenny and Pauline, that has been really helpful. There are a number of areas that I think that the committee will want to consider how we can look further into to try and get the movement on some of those areas that you were talking about. That has been really helpful and it is good that we were able to have a bit more of an in-depth discussion around the topics, rather than always feeling that we were chasing our tails. Thank you both for your time. That brings the public part of our meeting to a close. The next meeting will be on Tuesday, 15 March. I now close the public part of this meeting. I move into private session for the final item on our agenda.