achten n Girls, and welcome to the 16th meeting of the committee in 2014 Everyone present is asked to switch off mobile phones, another electronic equipment as they effect the broadcasting system. Some committee members may consult tablets during the meeting because we provide programme papers in digital format. If we could move on to agenda item one it is to consider whether to take items 4, 5 and private. Rwy'n ddweud, ddodd. Y gynnwys yma yn ei fath o'r seisio wrth iechydiau'r cychwynol i gbergwyr llwygol i gyrfaenedd a'r rhefnod. Rwy'n ddod, mae hi'n gyfyrdd y panel a'r seisio ffasgwyr yn ddod. I would like to welcome the first panel, and we have Sue Bruce, Chief Executive of City of Edinburgh Council, Elma Murray, Chief Executive of North Ayrshire Council, Dawson Lamont, Head of Exchequer and Revenues of Highland Council, and Sandra Black, Director of Finance and Corporate Services at Renfrewshire Council. Welcome and good morning. Would you like to make any opening remarks at all? I would like to make a few opening remarks, if that would be okay. I would like to pick up a couple of relevant points from the council's submission to the committee on the issue of welfare reform and particularly some of the issues that the council has been experiencing. I will touch on discretionary housing payments, which I am sure the committee will be interested in, and I have seen an increase from 500 a year to 4,500 a year in 2013 from what we had in the previous year. I also wanted to raise the committee's attention to the increased support and guidance that has been given to council tenants over the last year, which has now increased to over 5,000 visits, and that is made by our housing services staff. However, that has a positive impact on the relationship that we have with our tenants, which is improving as well because of the amount of day-to-day contact that we are having with them. To do that, we put in place a dedicated welfare reform team, and the committee may want to look at that a bit later on as well. The other point that I wanted to raise was about homelessness. We have seen an increase in homelessness over the last year of about 10 per cent, but particularly our homelessness assessment prevention and advice service, which is very much about preventing homelessness. We have seen a big increase in households approaching us about financial issues and also about issues on under-occupation. The last couple of points that I wanted to make to the committee were around social services. We have seen a big increase, surprisingly, in relation to welfare rights inquiries, but also, unfortunately, a big increase in destitution presentations, which we have been managing very carefully over the last year. On a positive note, because of the push towards digital by default, our library computer bookings have increased by around 15 per cent over the last year, a biggest uptake that we have had since 2007-08. Again, that is something that we are quite pleased to see, but not necessarily the background for people coming forward in that way. Thank you. Similar comments to those that Elma has made. One of the things that is noteworthy is probably recognising Edinburgh, as with other councils, is the partnership working across agencies who can work together to try and assist individuals who are finding challenges through the changes to welfare reform. Something that we were concerned about in Edinburgh was that our crisis grant allocation at the end of the last full financial year was just slightly higher than the Scottish average, whereas it was 73.2 per cent. We had a significantly larger amount of rent arrears as well to that that we had previously experienced, but, due to a wide-ranging homelessness prevention exercise in conjunction with partners, we managed to try and keep homeless presentations in a downward trend, notwithstanding if you just go out and have a look, there appear to be more people presenting with elements of destitution just on the streets of Edinburgh, and that is something that we are addressing with other partners. The strategy in the round is targeted at the prevention of hardship and worsening inequality. We are looking at effective responses to crisis need for housing, heat and food, and looking at effective support for vulnerable individuals and families. One of the things that has come through from our social services colleagues is concerned about a higher number of presentations on mental health issues. In the wider context of pressure on health and social care resources, that is something that we are concerned about. If you look at that kind of pressure, coupled with the pressure that we are seeing in other policy areas, such as unscheduled care presentations, that really is beginning to create a bit of a budget bottleneck. Thank you very much for that. Is there anything that you wish to add before Mr Lamont? Thank you, Chairman. I basically agree with the comments or I would have similar comments to colleagues on my left. The position of Highland, though, is probably a little unique in this, in that we are the only Scottish council, as members know, that is implementing universal credit at the moment. Because of that, you would expect us to know all the ins and outs of it. The one caveat that I would sound is that the implementation has been so slow. The volumes that we are dealing with so far are so slow. It is difficult to draw any firm conclusions in regard to the longer term. It is only when the scope and complexity of the cases that are being dealt with increase. Of course, we know that in June couples are going to be brought into the net, and then families later in the year. It is only really when these start to bite that we will have firm evidence on which to base what the requirements will be. We do have corporate measures in place, covering issues like homelessness. Money advice has been a big issue, but the concern of my council is really in relation to the cumulative effect of all those measures on the local economy, rather than universal credit, which is just one strand of the whole thing. Thank you, chairman. Thank you very much. If I could start off very briefly in terms of the areas of social care, we have very little evidence as yet, but a lot of anecdotal evidence around the impacts that welfare reform is causing in those areas. Ms Murray talked about more people coming forward, destitute, a rise in homelessness. Do your councils have any way of analysing the impacts of welfare reform on those other budgets that are not seen as being directly affected? Ms Bruce mentioned mental health. It is very difficult sometimes to track those things. Are you going to analyse those things as you move towards the budgetary period to ensure that the right amount of money is in place to deal with those matters? Can we start with Ms Bruce, please? Yes, convener. That is something that we are looking at, trying to understand the correlation between demands on services. That emphasises the need for us to work collegially with other agencies. Colleagues here from Citizens Advice and other similar agencies would help to provide the rounded picture, but certainly as we go forward in our budget preparations within the council for the next round of decisions later on this year, we are trying to understand in more detail the links between demands on services such as mental health and the pressures that we are seeing. One of the things that we have noticed is that it is coming back to the particular housing thing in publicly rented houses that are run by the council. We have noticed a 44 per cent number of those with under occupancy having rental areas, and that is a substantial rise in the previous trends that we have been seeing in Edinburgh. That is bringing with it the worries and the strains to families who are dealing with the pressures of those things. We are seeing that read across, so we are going to be doing more detail work with colleagues in social services and with the NHS to make sure that we understand where the common trends are. Obviously, those are rears, some of which will be dealt with by the mitigation measures that the Scottish Government is putting in place around increasing DHP. Those are rears have an effect on all tenants that you will be unable to invest in the housing stock. Is that correct? That is right. Recently, in the last series of policy and strategy committees, we have had deputations from the Lothian Anti-Bedram Tax Federation. What they are bringing to us are cases of individuals who are not necessarily managing to cope with the demands that are on them as individuals and having to find people who can advocate for them. One of the concerns is that individuals who do not make themselves known to public services or to groups that can assist are at risk of subsuming the pressures upon themselves. We need to be careful about that. The crisis grant payments have been high. That is something that I mentioned in the opening that the crisis grant payments in Edinburgh have been slightly ahead of the national average. We will have to keep an eye on being able to fund that, but also understanding what the drivers for those numbers are. Is Murray a similar picture? Would it be fair to say that the UK Government's welfare reforms are impacting not only on those folks who are reliant on some benefit payments, but others too, including council house tenants and the less money that there is to deal with capital budgets? Yes, absolutely. We are seeing changes in the way in which our housing stock is being let and a clear increase in the difficulty in letting stock, where we have three bedrooms, for example. That is a piece of work that we are undertaking just now. I think that it is fair to say that it is impacting on people who are not always just benefit claimants, but perhaps people who are in lower paid jobs and who are not quite reaching the threshold levels to be able to claim benefits. They are finding it quite difficult as well. Another aspect that the committee is likely to be interested in would be how food banks are working locally as well. We have had significant increases in vouchers that are being provided for people to make use of food banks as well. Although I do not have any absolute numbers for you today, we have had reports of people who, although they might be getting support from food banks, are struggling to then afford the energy to cook food and, in some cases, returning it. That is proving to be difficult locally as well. Can I mention one other area when you talked about social services? One of the other areas that I am mindful of is in relation to child protection. What we have seen over the years of the recession has been an increase in child protection referrals. That is not particularly alleviating at the moment. We are not having hard evidence on that at the moment, but we are starting to collect it. We believe that there are consequences from some of the hardships that people are facing through welfare reform and child protection, particularly in cases of neglect. Mr Lamont, have you got anything to add? Obviously, you have the universal credit pilot, as you have already mentioned. Is that adding to the woes in terms of renter years in Highland? I think, Chairman. It is probably too early to make that as a material point. I, for example, have looked at the food bank uptake in the Highlands. Going back to 2012, there were 3,458 adults and 1,035 children being fed by food banks. In the year ending 31 March 2014, the figures were 4,025, including 1,094 children. That is an increase of 14 per cent for reasons other than universal credit. On the point of council tax renter years, we have been fortunate in Highland in that our own HRA tenants have largely been protected by the payment of discretionary housing payments. However, that is to ignore those other social tenants where there is probably scope for further payments being made. Those measures, such as discretionary housing payments, are very welcome. They are certainly not a long-term solution to the issue, but they have had a beneficial effect on the council's own stock. We are continuing to work with other agencies and we are in close contact with other social landlords. Indeed, landlords generally, to indicate what assistance can be made available, particularly for vulnerable people. The Renfrewshire experience, please. Yes, in Renfrewshire we are experiencing similar symptoms to other councils, as described. I think that one of our major concerns is that we are dealing at the moment with a lot of the short-term impacts and obviously spending a lot of resource and time dealing with those. I am able to quote some of the statistics from our Renfrewshire perspective, but we do see some of those as symptoms of a much bigger, longer-term problem for the citizens of Renfrewshire, which we think will bring with it significant cost pressures for the future. We are aware that, for example, because of welfare changes and other employment issues in the area, we are aware of a 20 per cent forecast increase in child poverty across Scotland. As a council, we are very concerned about that. We have established a poverty commission in the Renfrewshire area, working with a range of community planning partners. We have people like Linda Dacastica, who is the director of public health, who sits in that, Sir Harry Burns, who has a wealth of experience in dealing with these issues. While we are resourcing and trying to deal with a lot of the short-term pressures around increases in advice services contracts, increases in food bank presentations, significant increases in DHP applications and associated rent arrears, the council also spent all of its welfare fund resources that were given to it by the Scottish Government and supplemented that by £150,000 of its own resources. We feel that we are doing everything that we can in the short-term to deal with the immediate issues that the council and Renfrewshire faces, but we are very concerned about the prospects for the future and the pressures that that brings to the public purse in the years to come. You mentioned the public purse and the UK Government's intention here in terms of welfare reform and obviously to save the Westminster Government money. Do you think that what we are saying, even with the mitigations that have been put in place by the Scottish Government, which is a form of cost-shunting, that there is further cost-shunting because you as a local authority are also having to put in additional resources to deal with the pressures that have put on because of these welfare reforms? There has certainly been significant additional cost pressures as a result of the welfare changes at a local level and I recognise the additional resources that the Scottish Government has put in. The sorts of issues that we are currently dealing with are the maintenance of the council tax reduction scheme to replace council tax benefit, the welfare fund top-up both at a national and a local level. I think that there are also issues that have not been mentioned yet in relation to support for job search activity in the area as a result of the application of sanctions for benefit claimants. The benefit admin subsidy at a local level has been cut by 25 per cent over the past three years. At the same time, we are seeing a 20-fold increase in the level of benefit changes at a local level. While our administration subsidy has been reduced by the UK Government, we have been expected to carry the burden of implementing all the changes at a local level. We are also dealing with the rent arrears issue, which is an additional cost pressure at a local level. In the long term, the financial sustainability of social housing over the long term must be a major concern both at a local and a national level. The discretionary housing payments both locally and nationally have been an additional pressure. Whether you describe it as cost shunting, we have experienced a significant additional cost pressure at a local level as a direct result of the welfare changes. I ask the panellists if there has been any contact with the UK Government in terms of the additional cost pressures. Have they been in touch with you to see what impacts their welfare reform policies are having on the ground? There has been a periodic dialogue between the leadership of the council and Lord Freud so that the issues that are experienced are continuing to be noted. It is important that the facts on the ground are conveyed to the decision makers on the policy. I should also point out that we do recognise that, where it is the law of the land, we do our best to implement it and mitigate the impact of the policy as we see it. If I might just broaden a bit, a point that is aligned a bit to something that Elma mentioned, we have noticed a bit of pressure on kinship carers. That has added just over a quarter of a million of pressure for us of people coming forward looking for more sports. It goes slightly beyond the people who are directly impacted by the policy to those who surround their caring network and so on. I think that all councils are making a huge effort in terms of employability, as Sandra mentioned, but also the provision of housing and trying to right-size the housing that we have for the population that we have. That requires a really different approach to how we fund and find land and so on to assemble the right resources to create the housing that we need. I think that looking at this policy is really important to look at it in the round with all those things around employability. In Edinburgh we have made big inroads in youth unemployment, but I appreciate that the economy that we have in Edinburgh is probably well suited to meet some of those challenges. It is just saying this in the round with all of the associated policy areas. I think that that is crucial. I probably do not have anything to add. To be honest, to what my colleagues who Bruce has said, I absolutely agree with everything that she has brought to your attention. I would just be saying the same again. We have had quite a lot of contact done, quite a lot of lobbying both at officer level and at member level, including meetings with Lord Freud. We have a corporate welfare reform group, which comprises officers and members at local level. We have regular meetings at that with a number of members of Parliament. Danny Alexander, John Thurso and Charles Kennedy have been regulars. We have also been involved in the COSLA lobbying, including meetings about local sports services in London. We do have in place now because we are a live universal credit site. We do have in place a service delivery agreement covering the two years up to March 15. I am pleased to say that we reached agreement only this morning with DWP on the funding for that after some fairly protracted negotiation. The funding is not over generous, but it is sufficient to deal with the marginal costs, if you like, of the additional work that the council is required to carry out under the support services that we provide for the department. Danny Alexander, getting a little bit extra attention because you are a pilot area for universal credit. Would that be fair to say? We are even more than a pilot, Chairman. We are a live site, and obviously they are keen for that to be a success. Alex Rowley, please. In terms of the bedroom tax and the DHP, is each council, can you confirm that your council is stating very clearly to people that if they apply for the DHP then they will not be liable to pay bedroom tax. It will be mitigated. I notice in the evidence that you have given, you do talk about some of the measures that you are taking to try and increase the uptake, because I understand that people have to apply. I wonder if you can give us an update on that in terms of what progress you are making and so far what the numbers are like in terms of the numbers of people that are applying or are not applying, perhaps more importantly. Liz Black. I was happy to respond on that question, chair. Renfrewshire has been working very hard through our housing services teams to ensure a maximum uptake on our discretionary housing payments. Between the council and its local RSLs we have, however, experienced on our own tenancies a 40 per cent level of no applications to the discretionary housing payments budget. Our local RSLs are experiencing 34 per cent of no uptake of discretionary housing payments. They have made no application to the council despite significant levels of engagement from our housing services staff with those tenants. One of the points that I wanted to make to the committee was that those tenants tend to be in the most deprived areas of the Renfrewshire geographical area. The other thing that I would say is that the discretionary housing payments budget for Renfrewshire was fully expanded in 2013-14. I wouldn't want to give you the impression that we didn't spend the resources that were available to us at their fullest level. The other point that I wanted to make was that the discretionary housing payments budgets at the moment are also there to support non-bedroom tax cases. They have been used for other financial needs for tenants requiring support. In 2013-14, in Renfrewshire, 22 per cent of our expenditure on DHP were non-bedroom tax cases. There is still a need for, at the moment, under the current arrangements for all tenants to make application, and for there then to be a financial assessment made as to whether we make an award of discretionary housing payments. One of the issues that we face at the moment is a perception that the bedroom tax problem has been removed from all tenants. At the moment, the experience in Renfrewshire is that that is not the case, because of the process that we are required to use to make DHP payments. My understanding, if you are talking to Fife Council, is that people who are liable for bedroom tax, the process has been very much simplified. The forms have been simplified. It is automatically approved, and that person will receive, or will not be liable for bedroom tax. Is that how you see it? We have simplified the process in similar ways. I think that the problem that we have is that we have difficulty getting tenants to make application. In that case, we are unable to make a payment. Mr Lamont, do you want to comment on the DHP bedroom tax issue? Similar comments in a way. We spent something like 78 per cent of our total. We did effectively neutralise the bedroom tax for our own council tenants, and we are continuing to work on others. We have a shortened application process. We are prepared to back date where appropriate, and we have done a fair bit of that. We are continuing to increase the publicity about DHPs in the area and working with our customers. Similar to what you have heard from colleagues, the council has fully expended its DHP and added to that as well. We have streamlined the process as far as we possibly can at this stage. It is fair to say that, for 2014-15, we are still awaiting final confirmation of all the funding that is available to ensure that we can in fact mitigate the full costs of all the likely claimants. We have a small number of claimants that currently do not engage with us, and we are working very hard. We have that down to just below 100, as the last report I received in the last day or so, and we are very pleased with that, but it is very much a work in progress for us and we are doing everything we possibly can to support people. Mrs Bruce. Yes, thanks. Just in relation to the application process, the regulations require there to be an application, obviously to be considered for DHP, but we are taking that not to necessarily mean a written application. If we are contacted verbally by a telephone, we will take that as an application. Equally, if we detect people in the system who we think are eligible and have not made an application, we will contact them to seek their permission for us to speak to them about applying a discretionary housing payment. If somebody applies during the course of 2014-15, we will seek to backdate that to the beginning of 1 April 2014 so that they are not disadvantaged and they are not being quick with their application. Mr Riley. I think that in terms of evidence, there is a whole load of stuff that clearly shows that local government is at the front line of this and it is possible that we are through it all today, but could I home in on housing? Again, I suspect that you are not able to give me the figures, but would you be able to provide to the committee some detail on your housing waiting lists, like the numbers, homelessness, transfer, medical etc. on your lists themselves and also perhaps some detail in terms of the housing programmes that you have in place in terms of housing build. I was interested that Mrs Black talked about the future financial sustainability of social housing and I was not sure what you meant on that so perhaps you can say a bit more about that, but really the thing I want to home in on is Shelter Scotland argued that basically we need a programme of 10,000 houses being built per year for social housing for rented housing. What is your view in terms of the general pressure that you are under in your area and is housing tenure leading to increased inequality and poverty in your area? I can certainly pick up on the issue about the financial sustainability. Our concerns are that the level of non-payment of rent in the last financial year has been masked to a certain extent by the application of discretionary housing payments to those rent accounts and also a device that the council has used locally which is referred to in our submission called the Council Tenants Assistance Fund which I know has been a subject of discussion at Scottish Government level. The bottom line is that the rent arrears for 2013 as a result of the application of both of those funds has meant that rent arrears have remained relatively stable between the end of 2012-13 and 13-14, so no significant increase. I think if those mechanisms were removed at any point in the future and I think at the moment they are seen as short term fixes then rent arrears would increase significantly certainly in rent for your own housing revenue account. When you add that to the potential introduction of direct payments under universal credit where universal credit and existing housing benefit is paid directly to the tenant rather than the landlord as exists at the moment you would see arrears getting potentially to such a level that the financial sustainability so the rent account which is ring fenced in local government and must stand in its own two feet financially that would become extremely difficult where expenditure would exceed income as a result of arrears and not only our ability to invest in the future investment in our housing stock but also our ability to repay the debt as a result of past investment would become a real problem for the housing revenue account and that's what I was referring to and I would imagine based on discussions with our local RSLs that they face similar problems particularly where they're extremely small housing associations and their capacity to deal with that in the short term is a real issue for them. Does anyone else have anything else to add there? Mr Lamont? I could simply add that in terms of the rural environment we are concerned also to increase the numbers of one and two bedroomed houses as a response effectively to universal credit it may not be an ideal situation in terms of flexibility of family circumstances and so on but that is an important issue and basically you need a healthy housing revenue account in order to have the funds to invest in that stock as well as the general stock. Just certainly we'll provide that information to you and we'll try and provide some kind of analysis about how it sits with the transient population of the students in Edinburgh so there's quite an active RSL environment in Edinburgh and there are issues in there about the level of rent in the private rented sector which means that the average price for householders is high in Edinburgh the percentage of properties under occupied as I've mentioned the council properties we've got stock of just under 20,000 of which just over 3,000 are impacted of which 44% have got arrears that rises through RSL properties to one which has of 448 properties there are 49 under occupied of which 100% have got arrears so there's a wide range of factors in there in terms of the differences that different landlords are facing so what we will do is bring that information back as well as the plans for house building there are for example two areas in Edinburgh and Muirhouse and Craig Miller which were cleared for new housing but 2007 were hit by the recession so there are large areas which are due to be built out and we're now seeking partnerships and so on to build those out but I would imagine that as a result of the change to this policy since those clearances were made if you like to make way for new houses we need to make sure that we've got enough houses that match the occupancy needs of the population that we have and understand that and build into that barrier free housing which links back to my earlier comment about pressure on health and social care budgets so that more people can live in that home in the right size of home with the right conditions as much of that information forward as we can Thank you, Mrs Murray Just to add to what Sue Bruce has said, we'll certainly bring back the information that Mr Rowley has asked for in terms of the council's work specifically around house building we did have a 10-year plan to build 500 houses over that period of 10 years which would be funded through a range of measures not least Government support but also the council's own house building support as well that is definitely coming under pressure now and we're undertaking a piece of work at the moment to look at what our house building plans can be but also what the shape of that house building and what the shape of the future stock should look like and I'm very happy to give that information to the committee once we've finished that piece of research Thank you Thank you, convener, good morning Just to follow on from the questioning from Malik Rowley I'm particularly interested in Sue Bruce's response in relation to the 100% arrears in the RSL section that you mentioned and within your own housing stock, Edinburgh City Council housing stock, the arrears that are there formed under occupancy Could the panel indicate why we're seeing those level of arrears when we're supposed to have discretionary housing payments in place because surely if the discretionary housing payments are being applied as they should be and I do recognise that there are people in Sandra Black outlined that almost 40% of those who may be entitled to DHP have not applied for it but why have we seen those levels of arrears and is it additional pressures rather than just under occupancy issue Mrs Bruce That's something that we're actually working on to understand and I should emphasise that there was a range all the way through so some RSLs have got 22% arrears relating to under occupied right up to one that's got 100% so there are different patterns of action going on and we need to understand I know that the council itself has got a no evictions policy for under occupancy and we've had to be careful to make sure that no evictions policy was related to under occupancy and not just seen as a blanket no evictions policy for maybe other reasons and we're working with our RSLs as closely as possible to understand why there are differences and to ensure that they are supported in rolling out the discretionary housing payments to bring back more information on that to you I was just going to add to Mr Wilson that as part of our DHP funding councils do actually make payments to not just RSLs but to private sector as well where applications are coming through so it's not a case that there isn't any of that money getting out there Mrs Black you wanted to come in as well Truly to stress that because of the council's local device we have reduced the rent arrears on our own housing revenue account DHP on its own would not have been sufficient to cover that so there has been a significant contribution from the council's own housing revenue account reserves which have reduced the arrears in the rentrish area Mr Lamont, do you want to add anything? At the end of April we had 588 council tenants affected by the bedroom tax in arrears but that is down by 2.6% on the similar figure in the previous year so the combination of DHPs plus the work that is being done to advise tenants the work being done by our housing colleagues as well is having an impact Given some of the figures referred this morning and Sandra Black outlined 100% of the DHP allocation funding has been used in terms of the applicants so far Ms Murray gave a figure of 78% of the DHP funding being used If the figures that you have quoted this morning are correct and there is an underclaiming of DHP what financial pressures does that put on the local authorities to ensure that every tenant that is entitled to discretionary housing payment actually receives that payment if you have already maximised the amount of money that is available at the present time Mrs Black first you said that last year you utilised all of the money last financial year do you want to... We did I understand there are still some resources at the Scottish Government level that have to be distributed and certainly the representations that my own council have been making is that the distribution of that resource should be directly linked to the under occupancy level within each council so we would hope to receive a higher level of discretionary housing payment budget in 1415 than we had in 1314 I think that the other point I would make is if we could come to agreement across Scotland about how to remove the need for an application from every tenant then that would go a substantial way towards alleviating the pressure not just on the council in terms of the administration of the process but also the pressure and distress that puts on individuals when they're contacted by the council to make that application so I think if we could remove the need for that and that was done on an all Scotland basis then that would be a substantial step forward for us anyone else want to add to that Mr Lamont sorry Chairman if I could just say I agree with my colleague Sandra on that I would also make the point that during 1314 we received the DHP funds incrementally and you know there is a natural caution in local authorities if there can be certainty of available funds at the earliest possible date there is probably as good a chance of spending that as there would otherwise be Thank you convener Just to follow up on the issue about the allocation of DHP to local authorities what's the panel's view on the additional formula that was used by Westminster in calculating the level of DHP that would be required by local authorities Mrs Black The original formula has changed slightly between 1314 and 1415 there is more recognition of the benefit changes that have taken place so there is a slightly greater recognition of under occupancy for example in the distribution of the UK resources but certainly from a renfrewsure perspective the distribution could be improved further we think it's based on statistics which are historical and doesn't take enough account of the demands that are in our communities for discretionary housing payments so we would like to see that shift take a further step forward Does anyone else wish to add to that Mr Lamont Sorry Clearly the rural dimension is important to Highland and to similar placed councils so I would ask that to continue to be taken into account Sir Lawson One final question that is the affair of some of the work that has been done by the voluntary sector the advice services and in particular the food banks that have been created throughout Scotland If the voluntary sector and the food banks were not there and not in place what additional financial pressures would that place on local authorities? Mrs Bruce I commented at the outset that we found that collegiate work with voluntary sector and other agencies extremely helpful that we have noticed an increase in demand on advice services for example and working collegiately with citizens advice and others housing associations, private landlords other parts of the voluntary sector extremely helpful so I think we haven't quantified what the difference would have been but I think the aggregate value of the voluntary sector in this is indisputable and we would look to continue those partnerships I think as well as the voluntary sector or voluntary agencies and food banks there are also credit unions which a number of us will be trying to push a lot harder at the end of the day if people don't have enough money then even a credit union isn't going to be able to deal with that but at least helping people to manage the money that they do have the most effective way is hugely important a number of councils my own included will have provided probably additional support by way of funding to citizens advice services demand as well and again I think that's hugely important for the future so I think trying to ask us to see what would it be like if we didn't have the voluntary sector is pretty difficult because we do and we are making probably much better use of the voluntary sector than we would have done in the past and the voluntary sector are definitely stepping up to the plate to work with us on this Chairman, I wouldn't underestimate the role of community planning in all of this, particularly at local level we work very closely in Highland with our CAB colleagues and all of the third sector and I think that is the only way forward when we are faced with the situation we are Mrs Black nothing to really add chair, I agree with the comments that have been made about the role of voluntary sector thank you very much still in mourning it feels like afternoon the impact I know one of the charities have brought out a report today about the impact on children that has obviously the poverty aspect of it can you describe what measures that you have put in place in your environment to try and eradicate the impacts on poverty on children Mrs Black I mentioned earlier one of the bigger issues that my own council has taken forward is the poverty commission which the focus is on child poverty levels in Renfrewshire which we are very concerned about it's still in its early stages the second meeting of the commission is this Friday and we are starting to look at the links between poverty and health and we are anticipating that there will be a range of actions and recommendations coming out of that that the council and its community planning partners will take forward over the longer term in the meantime Renfrewshire council over the last two years have been investing heavily in early years services we have two pilots running in Fergusley park and Linwood two of the most deprived areas in our constituency and the early signs of that are that that is proving successful it's a wrap around service around families and children who are living in poverty trying to pull together services both from the council from the community planning partners and from the voluntary sector to ensure a more holistic approach to supporting families whether it's through childcare arrangements kinship care debt advice employability services they're all in the one place at the one time at a school level and I'd certainly be happy to provide further information on that if that was required to delve further into that the evaluation of all that will that be taken to the group that you had mentioned earlier or how long will you take before you start evaluating that and take the good from it and move it elsewhere they are actually attending the commission meeting on Friday so we're very much linking the two initiatives together because we are very aware that the impacts of poverty start at a very early age and obviously determined to try and prevent that happening wherever possible so the results of these pilots are being evaluated on a constant basis that's been led by our director of education and the convener of education and certainly we're confident that we will be able to use that as part of informing the commission's findings we have a welfare reform core group which is developing a strategy similarly to that in Renfrewshire and the objectives are the prevention of hardship and worsening equality looking at effective responses to make crisis needs for housing heat and food sport vulnerable children families and extended families and to work as a partnership across the agencies to sustain Edinburgh's social economy so that is a work in progress and I can certainly send information on in relation to that we also have through the Edinburgh partnership which is a community planning partnership a poverty and equality themed working group and they've recently done a very detailed analysis of poverty and inequality in Edinburgh along with projections for the way we think that the trends are going over the next several years I'm actually separated from my ipad which has the details so I won't quote any numbers from memory but would be happy to send on that analysis as well from memory it does show an increase of the number of children expected to be living in officially designated poverty in Edinburgh by 2020 which is a concerning trend thank you chair a couple of points maybe add to what's already been said is concerned as any other area about the potential for an increase in child poverty when our starting position at the moment is that 25 per cent of the children that live in North Ayrshire are living in poverty across the community planning partnership we have we're in the middle of re-evaluating our inequality strategy to take some of the latest information more into account in our work and to direct our actions appropriately on the back of that so that's a work in progress just now within in relation to the benefits cap which started to kick in last year for us we had 69 households that were affected by the benefits cap but unfortunately those households contained 166 children we've done a lot of work to mitigate the impact on those children and the way in which that works in North Ayrshire is that there is an automatic referral the minute we understand that the benefits cap has been applied to our social service children and families and money matter service to make sure that they get immediate and appropriate support to support those families and children like Renfrewshire we've done a lot of work in our early years service and now have welfare advice officers that sit as a part of the early years service staff and go in and provide support to parents and carers in early years service and one of the initiatives that I'm not ashamed to say we pinched from Renfrewshire council this year was that we started to provide at a very practical level school meals during the school holidays Pinching that's exporting best practices at all Mr Lamont Our head of children's services is represented on our corporate welfare reform group that meets regularly like other councils we are committed to the early years What I would say is we have a real concern in Highland that children do require to be fed by food banks that just feels entirely wrong and it's interesting that at the end of December 13 the reason for 10% of family referrals to food banks according to the information I have was either benefit delays or changes so that's a big item Thank you Anne, do you want to come back? No, no, I think I'm fine, thanks Stuart McMillan, please I'll pose a question first of all just on food banks we have the figures from Mr Lamont regarding Highland of the other local authorities if you could send information regarding the numbers of people who are on food banks in new areas because there's no information within the submissions or else if you haven't the hand now that would be helpful The number of people fed during 2013-14 from the Paisley food bank was 4,590 that was a 700% increase on the previous year and the early indications from the first two months of 2014-15 would suggest that the 13-14 figures will double during 14-15 Anyone else have the figures to hand? Mrs Murray, please I can confirm to the committee that 4,345 food bank vouchers were issued between December 2012 and April 2014 so over a 15-month period 2,677 of those had been redeemed but 3,354 adults, 1,558 children had received food from food banks Again, when we look at the analysis of those those tend to be in the areas of most significant deprivation within North Ayrshire Have that figure to hand if we could get them I think that would be extremely useful Can I take John Wilson in for a very brief supplementary? Brief supplementary in that it's good to get figures on the number of food banks and the referrals to food banks Have any of the local authorities identified where there are gaps in the provision of food banks because not every area is covered by a food bank and I know that the significant cost can be incurred for those individuals to go to food banks Mr Lamont, probably a worse situation in terms of gaps in rural areas Chairman, I know that over the last 12 months or so some of those gaps have been filled in particular I know that Blyse would open four new food banks in Avymor, Keil, Fort William and Thurzo so the supply has been put in place to meet the demand and most recently there has been a food bank centre opened in Nairn so these are if that's one authority it must be replicated across the board I don't have information on gaps with me but I'm aware that the hours of opening is an issue as well in our existing food bank because it's running on a voluntary basis Mrs Maria and Mrs Bryse I have the exact numbers I do know that two new food banks have opened recently in different parts of the city bringing the total up as I understood it to four which of food banks standing alone but there are other agencies such as Cyrenians who provide a wide range of services which would include the distribution of food so it wouldn't be a stand alone food bank but we'll get that information as well I think that would be extremely useful and I think some of that information has already been supplied to the Parliament's welfare reform committee from some of your councils so it wouldn't take a great deal of work I don't think Certainly a number of months ago I had a members debate in the Parliament on the issue of food banks but certainly from what you've said today that the situation seems to have moved on for the worse unfortunately and in terms of the impact on your own council budgets so it certainly sounds different that there has been a further negative impact on your budgets Would that be a correct assessment? Mrs Bruce I think that things like loss of rental income are a concern if you just take housing alone but the pressure across the board is definitely tangible We're currently working on a plan in Edinburgh to remove £326 million from our revenue turnover by 2018 just to stand still and we're looking officers are making recommendations to create a headroom in that for space for new investment so there is pressure across the board on all budget areas and it's difficult to say how much of that percentage wise is attributed directly to something like welfare reform but there are definitely impacts I've mentioned health services, social services, mental health we've talked about kinship care income and so on and so forth so it's easy to see how the impact can spread Just to add that my own council is very keen to invest in the prevention agenda and the pressures that are on our budget both as a result of reductions in public expenditure and having to deal with these issues makes that incredibly difficult Perhaps if I could just add to what I said previously about food bank coverage I believe that there are also plans to launch further food bank projects in all nests, dingwall and Tain so clearly that's beginning to mop up the highland environment but there are pressures on my council's budget as well obviously and welfare reform in some respects has to be given priority treatment In terms of your budgets and the planning regarding the welfare reform did you have enough time to actually plan and adjust your budgets as a consequence of the welfare reform agenda? We're happy to accept one word answers here as well Mrs Bruce please I think local government is good at responding to things at short notice but we've certainly adjusted as we've gone along so there was an immediate response followed by an incremental adjustment I would agree with what Sue said from North Ayrshire's point of view we set up an officer working group to deal with this because we knew or we had an indication of what was coming down the line with welfare reform and I guess when you've worked in local government for a number of years you can make some assumptions about what some of the impacts are likely to be and then alter that accordingly as some of that happens in practice and some things become an actual impact and other things are perhaps not as bad as you'd perhaps envisage or some things might be worse so we do adjust as we go along so we've been running with this over two years now in terms of our officer working group and I would imagine most councils are in a similar position constantly adjusting and amending I think it's also important to recognise that local elected members in most councils if not all will be receiving regular reports so that they can alter and hone the approach that they've been taking towards managing this and mitigating it as best they can in their local areas My council resources committee is actually meeting today to look at creating a welfare fund, pulling together the different strands that we're spending on welfare issues what I would say is we think it's probably the calm before the storm at the moment universal credit will start to bite and probably bite first in the Inverness area I suppose that the timing of the additional cost pressures at a local level certainly with quite significant cuts in our budget has been most unhelpful but we are very concerned about if universal credit is implemented in 2016 then there are much more significant cost pressures that local government will have to deal with very briefly Mr McMillan I just want the final brief question have any of your local authorities made any direct representations to the UK Government regarding the welfare reform agenda and the impacts that it will have upon your budgets Meetings with UK ministers to emphasise the difficulties that we have and correspondence between the leader of the council and the UK Parliament but I don't have details of that with me Mr Lamont you've already explained some of your detail I indicated earlier Chairman we've met face to face with Lord Freud both at member level and at officer level and we've made representations through COSLA also Mrs Mary as well as meetings with Lord Freud David Mundell we have also been using our local MPs to lobby quite proactively on behalf of the council's area it's not the leader that's been writing to Lord Freud and David Mundell, it's actually been me on behalf of the administration of the council making sure that David Mundell and Lord Freud are fully up to date and they get almost a quarterly report from me on what's happening in North Ayrshire Mrs Bruce simple picture, contact being maintained with Lord Freud and Mr Mundell okay thank you Cameron Buchanan please very much, good morning can I take you back to your no evictions policy I'm well aware that Edinburgh is a no evictions policy do any other councils have it and also are there any other sanctions that you levy for people who are substantially in arrears what was your policy Mrs Mary as long as tenants are engaging with us and that policy was updated in the beginning of May which now says that as well as whether they're engaging with us if we believe that there are other actions that we can take to try and mitigate the impact of arrears and these are particularly in relation to under occupancy so we have that in place at the moment sorry what was the other part of your question are there any other sanctions that you levy if people are substantially in arrears obviously before we were dealing with under occupancy the council would have had a policy which dealt with evictions and we do still use that where the cause may be something other than under occupancy Mr Lamont please the same response chairman of this for North Ayrshire mrs Black is similar to the other councils and I think our approach is more to support and try and help people pay their rent arrears we believe if sanctions are applied that they will present elsewhere in the council either through social services or through our homelessness unit Mrs Bruce that or the same similar position thank you very much I think I'm right in saying that through universal credit tenants will become responsible for paying rent directly to councils what analysis have you done in terms of the likely impact that's going to have because obviously while the Scottish Government is in the position now of putting in place being able to put in place additional DHP to hopefully meet some of the shortfall that there has been that would be a secondary blow which is coming on the horizon for councils and what analysis have you done about the impact that's going to have on your rent arrears levels Mr Lamont you're beginning to experience this now thank you chairman yes frankly the numbers are so low though it's difficult to draw any real conclusions from them there will be an impact there is absolutely no doubt about that and in our council the emphasis is very much on giving people money advice where they need it well there's actually a stage before that there's financial education which needs to come into play but there's money advice which has to be given and we are in discussion with DWP about the likely impact we know that they are revising projections in terms of how the take up the transfer of case is going to go within our council we are very happy to share that with the Parliament but in fact when it becomes available in fact you have civil servants represented on our local group so that is quite useful as well civil servants don't always feed things into this committee though so we'd be very grateful to receive that from Highland Council Mrs Black please yes the first point I'd make is that there are significant levels I don't have the exact figures but it's well over half of our rental income the council's housing revenue account is paid directly through housing benefit either in full or in part so the tenants are not actively having to make rental payments to the council that's dealt with directly I think our experience of the impact of under occupancy if that was mapped over direct payments then the council would immediately have a significant issue in terms of the collection of rent because it is made much more difficult for tenants to actually pay their rent on time and in full in the way that is guaranteed at the moment through the housing benefit regulations I'm sleeping in that supplementary that you could elaborate on given that you can see this coming on the horizon what sort of proactive steps are you taking to engage with these tenants to ensure that measures are put in place which will allow them to be able to make these rental payments and you don't come to the point where universal credit is applied these direct payments are being made or not being made as is the case and you're then having to take action after the event we have invested already in our advice services provision in the council and we've moved away from a predominantly welfare rights focus where the focus was on maximising benefit uptake to us trying to introduce much more financial awareness amongst our tenants and provide budgeting, training and such like I do think there's an issue about timing though with the tenants at the moment many of them are currently dealing with the under occupancy issue and therefore I think it's a matter of timing in terms of when do you start that when do you prepare tenants what's the best time for that coupled with the whole uncertainty from the UK Government at the moment over the introduction of universal credit in 2016 but councils at this stage have no indication of what their go live date is and when it will affect their tenants directly I have an analysis of our forecast of the impact to hand but we'll send anything on but what we are doing is increasing our contact with tenants we're also working with tenants federations representatives we've got very detailed local knowledge of the families in their blocks or the area that they work in we're also taking an approach to this that the tenants who are facing these challenges are also customers and we're interested in being aware of the customer satisfaction levels in terms of the roundness of the service that we provide to them so it's not a one-dimensional service that we're providing to them we have other aspects of their efficiency to ensure that they're happy with so the increased focus on support to tenants working with tenants representative organisations ensuring that we understand that they are demanding a service of us as well as we're expecting income from them so it's kind of both sides of the story I think the first thing I would say is that early on councils did make representation to ministers about how the payment of rent would be impacted by the introduction of universal credit and there was a bit of early movement in relation to how quickly you could move to automatic payment to landlords so that has changed since the initial reforms were introduced within North Ayrshire over 60% of our housing tenants receive either full or part benefit payment so we do expect there to be a very significant impact on our rent levels but we have not estimated that as yet what we are doing just now to prepare for that is as you quite rightly said we've undertaken a very strong campaign of engagement with tenants to work very closely with us because as my colleague Sandra Black said earlier on it's better to try and get people to work with you rather than using perhaps sanctions away but further down the line and we do want to try and build up that strong relationship where people value their housing tenancy and the relationship that they have with the local council but as ever again taken from Sandra, timing is crucial and it's when do we actually talk with tenants about this and discuss it with them because it is the same people who have been impacted by universal credit who have been impacted by the welfare reforms so far across Scotland we do a lot of sharing on our communications work and our communications campaigns and that's been I think quite effective across Scotland in trying to help tenants understand what's happening to them and where to go for helping assistance and also building tenants confidence that we're there to help them as well and the other area that I wanted to touch on was around the Scottish Government's programme to build resilience for welfare reform programme which is looking at some initiatives and I know that councils are bidding into that to receive some funding and a number of us are looking at employability programmes because the ultimate aim for a number of us will be to try to help as many people who are not managing to get through welfare reforms as well as they might otherwise is because we want to get them into employment so the big issue for us, the end game for us is more about employability much obviously come 2016 the landscape may have changed some what but we'll leave that for another day there's been some focus in terms of the impact on social care budgets and the responses there seems to be from the responses I've looked at a lot of councils are saying they're not seeing a noticeable impact on social care budgets as against housing budgets but has there been any impact in terms of eligibility for services as a result of individuals welfare entitlements changing has there been anything that you've noticed in that respect because obviously a lot of the responses are looking at whether there have been an increase in pressures on social care budgets obviously if individuals entitlements and eligibility are altered that would have a reverse effect in terms of those people would no longer perhaps be eligible for money to be spent on them has that been something that's been picked up that actually is something that I don't have information on but I'll certainly go back and look at that but what we are seeing is substantially higher demand in areas like unscheduled care and we are looking at the causes of that you know we haven't had a hard winter there are things that we would have expected to have impacted on unscheduled care for example and the question we were asking actually in a discussion as recently as yesterday was about the ability of families to look after their extended families their older members of the family and so on and so forth so that's a piece of work that we're doing at the moment to understand the root causes and we're happy to share that with you for that Mrs Black sorry I don't have that information with me today if you can find that as well that would be useful Mr Lamond thank you Chairman again I'm aware of increased demand but we would have to get back to you on the details of that could I perhaps just mention about the sorry to go back but the impact of universal credit according to the figures we have at the moment and I would caution that this is only claimants with housing costs that are known to the council because under universal credit we're not entitled to know basically who is claiming it seven out of nine are in some kind of arrears with the rent so from the council's point of view there are two issues one is the speed of switchback payments getting those through and the second issue is the speed of getting people on to what's called personal budgeting support referrals the DWP have a gatekeeper role in that probably because they will only pay if it's a formal referral from them so that has been particularly slow although I'm bound to say there has been a good deal of co-operation in Inverness and they're prepared to consider some kind of local referral arrangement that will speed that up but I know it's something that will apply more widely I don't have the figures with me but I can say quite clearly that we do have increased demand for our children and family services and I mentioned the benefit cap earlier on this morning we're also seeing increased demand in relation to mental health so I'll get some figures and I can get those sent on to the committee very brief and final question we've focused on social care and housing budgets in the committee but during the course of the evidence one thing has struck me is that perhaps looking more widely at other budgets and one that is springing immediately to mind is the education budget given the impact this is likely to have on children and the potential need for additional educational support that could arise as a result is that an analysis that your councils have undertaken or are those figures that perhaps we could be provided with later because obviously that would be a significant budget that would be affected Is anyone having any analysis? Mrs Black It's not a specific analysis as such but certainly the programme that I referred to earlier in terms of families first and the wraparound services around children and families loving and poverty to the council last budget about £4.5 million of its own resources into that programme for two schools in its areas so if that's proven to be successful I think that would be indicative of the level of resource that is needed to support children in those circumstances moving forward Again I don't have that information to hand but I would ties in with the information that the inequality group have been doing around about the additional demand that we anticipate so happily send that information on as well Is anyone else wish to add anything? We have participated in the national money advice outcomes project and I believe that there will be recommendations there in relation to financial education Finally there was mention of problems with data sharing from the DWP to local authorities Is that causing you difficulties in terms of being able to plan Is that causing you difficulties in terms of being able to engage with folks who are badly affected by these welfare reforms Mrs Black Yes we've had some early indications of that through the move from DLA to PIP which started this year We were trying to work with DWP colleagues who sit in our welfare reform group in Renfrewshire to identify the individuals who would be affected by that change so that the council and particular social work services could make contact and support them through that process but unfortunately because of data protection legislation we were unable to share that data and that is a feature of some of the difficulties that we face between the two parts of the public sector Mr Lamont Chairman there is a balance between client confidentiality and operational practicalities that has to be struck It's fair to say that in the Inverness site we are working through some of these I think there will be some movement by DWP but there will be certain barriers that just won't go down so I think it's just something probably in the fullness of time that we have to learn to live with and accommodate one another Mrs Mary Yes we are experiencing those problems in relation to the migration to personal independence payments and it is impacting on our ability to support people properly in addition to that we also are experiencing difficulty in getting information around sanctions and the reasons and rationale for those sanctions which again impacts on our ability to support people that come to us particularly if they are destitute Thank you Mrs Bruce Nothing further to add If there are any other issues I'll bring those forward Can I thank you all very much for your evidence today that's extremely useful and provide us with this additional information that would be great obviously we are looking at the budgetary impacts on local government of the cost-shunting of welfare reform so any help that you can give us in that regard would be useful I suspend for a few minutes for a change of witnesses please Good morning again and I welcome you to this second session which is a round table session looking at the impacts of welfare reform on local government budgets if we could maybe go round the table and introduce ourselves and give us a wee bit of a description about your organisations I'll start I'm Kevin Stewart I'm the convener of the committee My name is Keith Trybill I'm policy manager at Sins of Ice Scotland representing the 81 citizen vice-pure across the country I'm MSP Bill Gray I work community food in Health Scotland which was set up 16 years ago for most of that work part of the Scottish consumer council which became consumer focus and for the past year we've been part of NHS Health Scotland John Wilson the MSP deputy convener of the committee I'm Rachael McRaeff I'm policy and research manager at Shelter Scotland which addresses to people in risk of homelessness or in bad housing My name is Alec Rowley and I'm an MSP for the County and Beath constituency I'm John Dickie head up the child poverty action group in Scotland there's two aspects to our work one is about influencing policy and the interests of low-income families and the view to preventing and eradicating child poverty and feeding into that and alongside that advice, information and training service where we support front-line workers across Scotland to ensure that they have the skills and the knowledge to maximise the incomes of families across Scotland I thought you'd missed me out there, sorry I'm McTaggart MSP for Glasgow region Delot Arnill from the Scottish League of Credit Unions we represent 31 volunteer-led community focus credit unions and collectively have around 34,000 members about 32 million in savings and about 21 million in loans Mark McDonald MSP member of the committee and MSP for Aberdeen Donside constituency I'm Francis Stewart I'm the Research and Policy Advisor with Oxfam Scotland obviously we're best known for our international work but we've also operated a domestic poverty programme in Scotland since 1996 that works in the same way as our development programme we don't do front-line service delivery but we support community groups to tackle poverty in India Thank you maybe if I could start the ball rolling by asking our guests here today what do you think is the impact of welfare reform on local government funding what are you finding on the ground in each of your areas the differences that there are with what I've called cost-shunting going on he wants to start the ball rolling I suppose looking at credit unions first of all from a membership perspective we've experienced an overall increase in membership across all of our credit unions I think interestingly there's been a move from members joining to save to now joining to borrow we experienced a similar surge of membership just after the initial credit crunch but that surge of membership was about people joining to save and that kind of culture shifted somewhat there were more accounts open last year than there were in the previous year and there's definitely been that increase in membership as a result of the increased media exposure that the credit unions have experienced although there appears to be a narrowing of the social demographic of the new members that are joining and we were nervous that there's an apparent reinforcing notion that credit unions are being again positioned as being for poor people and that has an insidious effect as credit unions continue to have exposure from a savings perspective overall there's an increase in the level of savings held as a result of the increased number of accounts that have been opened but there's also been an increase in the value and frequency of savings withdrawals from credit unions as well which suggests a lower retention of savings and an increase in the need to access money in a way that wasn't the general pattern of credit union behaviour from a lending perspective there's been an increase in the overall value of lending made by credit unions again as a consequence of the increased number of accounts that have opened there's also been an increase in the number and frequency of loan applications but there's also been an increase in the number of loan application rejections which is something that credit unions have historically struggled with credit unions are naturally minded to help all people all of the time and also from a credit union perspective in this climate of increased capital requirements credit unions are looking to mitigate the risk of bad debt by being more restrictive or prudent with their lending practices I give you an illustration of that a £1,000 loan made by a typical community credit union will learn about £64 in interest if that £1,000 loan request to be written off essentially cancels out 15 other good loans so there's a very small margin for credit unions to sustainably and successfully operate in there's also been an increase in the number of loan applications for payday type loans and that's again something that's causing concern and some tension within the credit union movement as to how best to react and to manage these new requests it's essentially a dilemma that what is the cause of payday loan requests and to quote the colleague Kezia Dugdale she often has referred to as the need for payday loans is sometimes a result of being too much months left at the end of the money and I think that encapsulates the dilemma that credit unions have in that particular space is the need for credit as a result of an unexpected occurrence or is the need for credit because there's not enough money to get through the calendar month and that's a real dilemma for credit unions to struggle with I'm really glad that you've managed to get that over to the committee but our main focus here is looking at local government and the impact of welfare reform on their budgets and how that is affecting your organisations and the welfare reform committee of Parliament is looking at a more rounded view of this but today we're trying to focus on that local government element is there any impact in terms of the changes in local government budgets and the impact of welfare reform on credit unions? Undoubtedly there will be and I suppose it is determined by the level of external funding that's required by individual credit unions and all other services that they do there is no one answer catch all the activities of individual credit unions will determine the level of external funding that they require so the answer to the question is short there will be an impact but it's relative to the individual location and the individual credit union in question Thank you Can I take Keith and then I'll take Alec Bowley Keith please Just to give you a bit of background these are just provisional figures but they say that Bureau dealt with over half a million 550,000 new issues last year which is a 9% increase on the previous year and off that over 200,000 were new benefits issues which is nearly 570 for every day but it's not just the numbers it's the types of cases we're seeing increasingly complex cases that are hard to deal with and increasingly people who are in crisis and desperation cases we wouldn't have seen a couple of years ago people having eaten cannot afford heating in other words they are very close to destitution in terms of local authorities the biggest increases we're seeing is in housing benefit issues it's 26% increase in the last year council tax arrears is 6% increase and 28% increase in local authority rent arrears issues so these are issues that we're having to deal with on behalf of clients but and the main funders off since the vice bureau are local authorities so we're having to deal with their cuts and making sure that we continue to work in partnership to work with their constituents and our clients and what's actually the benefit as the 2.5 million Scottish Government has given us and that's allowed us to see an extra 7,000 clients in the first 6 months of last year and that's more 8,000 issues that we wouldn't have seen if we had the same funding so that's had a big impact and in terms of the co-operation between yourselves and local authorities about funding do you find that there is a fair degree of co-operation or are there some local authorities that are more listening in terms of your needs than others there are a certain vice bureau in the 32 local authorities and there are 81 members so they all have their own individual agreements with or most of them have individual agreements with the local authority so there much depends on which local authority but we have been it is noticeable that local authorities have put in place proactive measures to make sure that people aren't evicted that the renters are dealt with they're going out to make sure people get DHPs helping their tenants has been a big help so far very brief I can is citizens advice the first portal call you find for people who are in trouble for many people it is and they often come in crisis where either they haven't managed to get help elsewhere or it is the first portal call we do get a lot of the for those from job centre plus as well which is an issue in that they're not dealing with but they should be dealing with then it gets passed on to citizens advice group thank you the floor I just wanted to pick up very briefly on the point about credit unions one of the impacts that I've seen from a number of authorities is they're trying to develop an alternative to the loan sharks the payday lenders and it's whether the capacity is actually there within credit unions and indeed whether credit unions are structured in such a way to be able to deal with that I mean my own credit union I think is 1% interest it takes certainly in discussions I've had with a number of companies like in Manchester as an example where the local authority they are involved with a company that's providing advice etc as well as loans but they're charging 40% and their argument is you can't go below that in terms of their levels of risk so I think local authorities Renfrew Sandra Black Renfrew's done a fair bit of work Glasgow has their own company I think that they've got set up local authorities are trying to direct money among case 5 substantial amounts of money to try and develop credit unions but the advice that we were getting was actually credit unions don't have the capacity or are structured properly to be able to meet that demand or meet the challenge if you like I think that's an interesting point and I think it's structure and capacity it's almost about inclination and cause and effect so what we're looking to tackle is an issue of a cheaper alternative to payday lending when in actual fact credit unions are looking at what is causing the need for payday lending so providing a cheaper alternative doesn't necessarily address the fundamental issue that there's insufficient disposable income to get through a calendar month and even providing that service at a cheaper rate continues to reduce the available disposable income of a member I guess on the impact that it's having on Oxfam's programme two years ago Oxfam didn't work with food banks we do not want to be in a position where we're working with food banks we now work with Weston Bartonshire community food share which operates three outlets Food Provision and Weston Bartonshire and at a UK level we work with the Truswell Trust the figures that we are seeing from them suggest in the past year we've had a five fold increase in food banks so it's gone from 14,000 people requiring food banks in 2012-13 to 71,000 in 2013-14 and Weston Bartonshire we saw over 3,000 people using their food banks so their food provision in the past year and I think the causes of that from both Weston Bartonshire and Truswell Trust are quite well known and they reinforce one another that that's from benefit delay that's from benefit changes that takes up about half of the reasons for using food banks it's also from low income some of that's from benefits the 1% uprating kicks in and the cost of living increases but it's also we're seeing people having to go to food banks so that's obviously the impact of the economic recession and low wages and I think you're absolutely right to say that's cost-shutting from UK Government that's from our perspective that's us having to pick up the pieces of UK Government's welfare reforms which we do not really want to be in a position that we're doing but we're having to do that because people need fed How much co-operation is there between yourselves and the local authorities to deal with the fallout from this situation? Oxfam, we don't do front-line service delivery so I think really the food bank providers are in a better position to talk about that I know there is good co-operation with Weston Bartonshire Community Food Chair and they do get some funding from local authorities so there is a collaboration in that area Please I'd just like to highlight the fact that although there's a very understandable focus on food banks and we heard that in the earlier evidence given from the local authorities I think it is quite important to see the impact in terms of the much longer established community responses to food poverty many of whom are being set up longer than the Scottish Parliament has so food co-operatives networks of these Edinburgh itself is a network of 36 community cafes weaning initiatives, lunch clubs all these kind of initiatives are experiencing the impact as well but not only that but actually their experience and their relationship with local authorities a long established relationship with local authorities in terms of buildings, personnel funding, whatever is actually being put at use at the moment to address the challenges the emergency food aid and I think it's important that we recognise both that there's an impact on some of these well established initiatives but actually there's a lot of potential in building responses through them because not only do they have that relationship as I say with local authorities but actually the work quite often closely with local credit unions and work closely with local citizens advice bureaus so we have local infrastructures that have a lot of potential and are well established but are fragile in the current economic circumstances as are a lot of people in the voluntary sector the co-operation between local government and some of the long existing long standing organisations has been good in terms of talking about resource or is it the case that sometimes local authorities are saying we are doing this and that's that I think the relationship is good in fact it's so good that a number of organisations are only too well aware of the difficult situation local authorities are in so they are worried but they're worried because they are well aware of the very serious challenges in the local authority faces and they do see them as a very key partner and are very concerned that there's any deterioration in that relationship at a time when actually the co-operation between the third sector and the local authority is more necessary than ever. Stuart McMillan. I'd mentioned that there were citizens advice offices in the 32 councils but that's not factual accurate. 30 out of the 32 sir. Right. In terms of the two where there are no more CABs what discussions or what activities will you undertake A with those local authorities to try to assist but also B with other organisations in those areas who actually are trying to deliver. The local authority in question are Inverclyde and South Airshire that don't have the citizens advice bureau. Most citizens advice bureau are community led organisations so we don't tend to set up CABs. They tend to be from the community and then they become CAB. It could be in those local authorities they have adequate advice provision that hasn't occurred but I know there are discussions regularly with those councils about whether they can access CAB services and so on so it's something we've thought about. Ross Murray-Brotchee, please. Thank you. Just a couple of comments. I think one thing I'd like to draw attention to actually is to talk about welfare reform. We're actually doing about two almost separate spheres. One is the reform of the welfare system, how benefits are paid, how they're assessed and we've heard about direct payments and we've heard about changes to personal independence payments but on top of all that and alongside all of that we're actually seeing major really significant cuts to the entitlement that people are getting and these two things together are certainly increasing demand on services like ours. People are worried and confused and anxious about the implications for them but also struggling to cope with the debt and with the additional pressures that's putting on their budgets. But there's a wider point here and I think particularly in relation to your overall question for this round table that certainly shelter Scotland's concern is that what we're seeing with the range of cuts that we're getting is that it's actually affecting the underlying causes of homelessness in particular. It's putting people more at risk in a position where they're more liable to some homeless but it's also and I think as you heard from your previous witnesses really affecting the capacity of local government and other agencies to respond to homelessness and their ability to deal with it when it happens and this is a serious and significant concern particularly in Scotland because Scotland over the last decade has made very significant progress in tackling homelessness and has a very clear agenda in fact a world leader in handling and tackling homelessness and we're beginning to see that there are big threats to Scotland's agenda in that respect we've heard a little bit from Edinburgh about an increase in rough sleeping this isn't something that we've been able to evidence across Scotland there isn't a collection and account but that certainly this kind of anecdotal evidence suggests that even at the very sharp end we're seeing an increase in homelessness one of the things it's difficult to really assess is how big a problem that's going to be because certainly from shelter's experience we'll struggle on they'll continue trying to pay their rent they'll access DHPs where they can until they reach the crisis point where they just can't continue and stay on top of their debt at which point homelessness will occur so I think actually use this expression before I think we see a lot of the problems at the moment are still in the post effectively Thank you, John Pick up on both points on the issue of food banks I think for us the challenge for government at every level including local government is to how to find out to learn from the experience of food banks to understand why people are in a situation where they're using emergency food provision to understand in more detail what the causes of that are and then use that in order to try and fix those bits of welfare social policy provision that are within their remit in terms of the we come at from a different angles we're not a food bank provider we're providing second year case work support so we're doing a whole lot of work at the moment to understand and analyse what are the emerging issues as a result of welfare reform changes in the benefits system what's interesting there is that picking up on France's point it's not necessarily individual benefits the big well known changes it's the way that benefits are being administered and the practical implementation of benefits policies so it's issues around sanctions increased use of sanctions it's issues around benefit delays and just delays in benefits being paved it's to do with changes in the way that benefit decisions can be reviewed so no longer people able to go directly to tribunal to appeal have to go back to the DWP or HMRC and ask for what's called a mandatory reconsideration whole lot of delays in that process with inadequate resources, inadequate incomes and when we're asking front line advisers on what the implications are for the families that they're facing very often one of the implications is those families have ended up having to use food banks in terms of what the implications are for local authorities I think there's a few there's one around ensuring that delivery of the Scotch welfare fund is working as effectively as possible because that's the other source of potential support for families and individuals when they're facing those benefit problems to make sure that that's the first part of call that people are getting what they're entitled to under crisis grants and community care grants I think there is an issue in terms of the on-going benefit delays and the current guidance around Scottish welfare fund which means that you can only get I think it's three grants 12 month period or one in a 28 day period where benefit delays are actually leading to people being in repeat crisis which potentially we could open up Scotch welfare fund to respond to that a bit more obviously as that has implications the other big implications around advice provision I think we've seen as a second tier provider huge increase in the demand for our second tier support our advice line support, our training our information resources real investment in advice and information in maximisation, welfare rights money advice Local authorities themselves, John as well I don't actually have a breakdown with me of what we can support local authority as well as independence as advice bureaus local welfare rights services other services what is coming through is that in over half of the cases that we're looking at whether there's been the needs for case work support from us is that it's actually to do with misinformation or maladministration now a big chunk of that is to do with DWP processing of benefits but actually in many cases it's to do with maybe wrong information being provided by local advisers local authority workers so it's an example of a mum of two who was given wrong advice by a local authority social worker ended up being over paid over £3,000 tax credits a whole lot of financial crisis that flowed on from that another example relating to housing benefits this was local authority parents of a severely disabled child and the local authority failed to apply disability premiums to their housing benefit which cost them £50 per week so there's a lot welcome the investment that's gone into improving advice and information supporting non-specialist advisers within local authorities and within their partner organisations to develop their awareness and their knowledge of welfare reform for the people they're working with but I think those kind of cases and examples just highlight how important that is and how much more there is potentially to be done to ensure that frontline local authority workers have at least they will have the basic knowledge of what implications of benefit changes might be for the families they're working with but also are able to signpost to the specialist advice and information services and continue to fund and support those specialist services to be able to deal with those kind of cases so that we're not reinforcing the damage that's been done by changes in the UK benefits Mark We heard earlier from local authorities that they're having some difficulty in reaching some members of their community who are what you define as the hard to reach obviously bracket and making them aware of their eligibility for example for DHP, things like that many of your organisations will probably have regular contact with these individuals certainly more regular contact than perhaps the local authority has Have local authorities made any attempt to engage yourselves in work to try and reach out to these communities and these individuals given that in many instances they maybe view your organisations as perhaps being people they can be more open with than perhaps the local authority You want to have a crack at that first Bill first Just briefly to say that my experience as local authorities have recognised that the voluntary sector is much closer to those that as you say could be called hard to reach or sometimes referred to them as rarely listened to I think it might be more appropriate and I think I'd go further in that working in the area of food that they also appreciate that food's often an incredibly useful medium for reaching groups because it does have so many different dimensions and qualities to it so I think there is very good experience around the country in that way of working Is it widespread or are there some local authorities are better than others and if so what's being done to maybe try and encourage? I think some local authorities are always better than others just as some parts of the voluntary sector are better than others and certainly ourselves like us are there to try and improve practice, share practice I think the voluntary sector certainly is at the forefront in terms of enthusiasm for sharing learning and developing practice I think again they'll have to recognise that that enthusiasm has to be maintained in a period when the actual budgets and the pressure on budgets is getting greater and greater Rosemary supporting people suggest that actually it's really one issue that they're dealing with and it's often a very complex array of issues and often a benefit or a disruption to their benefits or their eligibility can have a really severe impact across a whole range of areas so often it's finding who the right agency is and who it is that's already working with that family or that individual and building up their confidence to work with them and I think as John was saying provision of the secondary advice is really important in those circumstances so certainly we are in a position where we're providing secondary advice to people who are already working with families and advocates in other areas but perhaps don't have the housing expertise that we have and the money debt advice expertise that we have Keith Both citizens vice-pure are right on the front line they do play their role as an intermediary between local authorities and people that are needing support I think last year we dealt with maybe 4,000 new issues in DHPs and most of them will be making sure that people are applying for DHPs and helping to fill out the form and is there important that people who need support are connected with the local authority I think it's not just with DHPs it's with, as I mentioned, the Scottish welfare fund is that there was lower awareness of that as a means of support and it's increasing but they're still underspending there it's really important that local authorities are able to to reach these people for DHPs and the Scottish welfare fund Okay, thank you Alec wants to pick up my point I'll come back to you now Mike It's who Bruce made in terms of Edinburgh where she was saying that they really now are accepting that somebody phoning in and saying that they want to apply for DHPs in terms of bedroom tax would be fine would be acceptable so are you seeing a mix across Scotland in terms of the way local authorities are dealing with this because certainly the view the Parliament is that the monies are being made available and should be mitigating all the impact to bedroom tax We've tried to monitor the spending across local authorities using the Scottish Government money and then mapping that against the citizens of life experience and there have been occasions when people being not back when we know there's money there I mean told there's not enough but on the whole those seem to be dying away and I think our experience is that the money is getting out there but as we've heard from local authorities they're still struggling to find or speak to some people who are just not responding so it's their important that intermediars like ourselves play a role in making sure those people do get connected to local authorities I think it's a little bit difficult in the difficult position they've had an initial budget and they set policies to administer that budget and it was massively increased midway through the year and they've had to go back and I think local authorities are perhaps revisiting some of the earlier claims and seeing whether they can now be paid out there's also a problem about obviously about whether or not how the application process works and whether or not they're having to do eligibility tests so I think one of the things from looking at policies is that local authorities should really be learning from one another and trying to pick up areas of good practice and how they can administer DHPs but there's a wider point about DHPs and you're right in a way that the money is there and it should be available to really cancel out defects in the bedroom tax but I think as again as you heard from earlier witnesses it's not just there for the bedroom tax it's there for people on private rented sector and people who are being hit by a benefit cap and it should be available to help with anybody who's struggling to pay their rent but the other problem is that it's not a long-term fix this is something which can plug a gap for the next few years but actually local authorities and other landlords are needing to look longer term about people who are struggling to pay their rent because of the cuts how they can perhaps find more appropriate accommodation for them or access to other kinds of benefit or support Mark I'm wondering also as well an insane posting so I mean if I think of Woodside Community Centre in my constituency where there is the SNR, Credit Union and the local housing office both based in the same facility and obviously that allows for a degree of joint working to take place have you seen other examples and other authorities where there's an attempt to maybe try and bring some of these sorts of services together with local authority be it the Credit Union, the CAB or other elements of the voluntary sector so that people who are at the sharp end of welfare reform have a kind of almost a one-stop shop kind of service or at least a well-linked service because obviously if they're being passed from pillar to post it can be very demoralising and also quite expensive for them as well Also Foodshare there as well is there not? Yeah but indeed Who wants to pick up on that point? Dermott please So Marcus is actually one of our credit unions I should probably declare an interest as a member of St Mac or Credit Union since it's been mentioned now actually Sorry I think it's a good example where that joined up approach or partnership working can have real benefit to the people who need it most I think that the problem for credit unions is that they're often identified wrongly identified as being a solution to the wrong to a problem that they're not actually credit unions can only help when a capacity to save and or repay a credit commitment exists and often increasingly often the individuals presented to credit unions lack both capacities and therefore credit unions by default have no capacity to help that person so a credit unions can be part of the solution but only when the capacity of a member to either save and or repay borrowing already exists credit unions can't generate additional income which is often what's needed by the member rather than a capacity to save We're helping the long term maybe not in the short term crisis scenario but in the long term Yeah absolutely I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that the expectation of external stakeholders are often identified as the solution the person's signpost to deliver to and then feels disappointed that the credit union hasn't been able to offer the immediate solution to the crisis that they're currently facing In terms of joint sharing of offices and various other things is that useful in terms of the work that you do is that helping to get okay with their difficulties John I'm not sure in terms of joint sharing of offices but certainly working in partnership and integrating from our point of view in particular income maximisation services welfare rights, money advice services and a good example where Glasgow City Council working in partnership with NHS Glasgow and Clyde to integrate an income maximisation service into their their health service so that at that point where people are having a child and a run-up to that they're then being referred to income maximisation advice and that's ensuring that those families are getting the financial support they're entitled to at that point where they're suddenly incurring a whole lot of additional costs and under financial pressures and too often not getting the financial support they were entitled to so I think the first phase of that project the healthier, wealthier children project 2,500 households were referred for advice primarily from anti-natal and community child health health services to welfare rights income maximisation workers and that added to over £2 million to the incomes of those 2,500 households so it's a kind of example there a way of working that's within the health service but I think there's maybe ways of working there we can think about it within other statutory mainstream services where is it actually most families have a contact with clearly health service at the point of having a child but there's other education so which could we actually start thinking about how do we build in income maximisation money advice services to ensure that families are actually getting what they're entitled to as a system goes through such huge changes John John you had mentioned earlier one of my questions was about well we don't have huge pots of money but we do a direct service to the people in our communities without without extra funding what could the local government be doing better to help work with yourselves and I know that Rosemary had gave an example there about local authorities should be learning best practice from one another that really shouldn't be taking up any extra funding in a sense for that to happen but what the other projects that are here today without spending any money how would that relationship be bettered Keith if you want to go first I'm sure my answer to Mark McDonald's and your own question is pretty much the same to say the importance of partnership working and good signposting because we find that the more somebody signposted the less likely they are to then go on to the right place it's about making sure people get to the right place and having a preventative approach I'm aware of one local authority where if somebody has a notice of eviction then they're always sent to the citizens of iceberg and their details are always given to the citizens of iceberg so it's not left to them to sort it out and then somebody on the day they come to the citizens of iceberg is to make sure that that preventative approach is there and any approach where it's about prevention and making sure somebody gets advice at the right moment that they're when they're in crisis is to be welcomed and I don't think that takes a lot of money it's just about having good and efficient systems of signposting and everything Thank you Rosemary, please So you pick up on the point about prevention I think that is really, really is the key and it's not a new thing this is something that local government has been learning from and particularly in the area I'm interested in housing and homelessness it has been that's the big story we need to be focusing on prevention because it's no good somebody being evicted for rent arrears you just come back to the council and apply as homeless and it actually costs local authorities significant thousands and thousands of pounds to deal with somebody in that way and a long standing policy of shelters has been working with councils to say and other landlords to say evicting people for rent arrears is counterproductive you don't help that person you don't help them manage their money and their debt better so getting in there early giving them death advice to repay those arrears while staying in the tenancy is the best practice and the best approach so I think certainly prevention is very important but actually learning as well from lessons that we're seeing elsewhere so we've heard from Inverness today they're now implementing universal credit albeit on a very, very limited basis and it's only the simplest cases that are being seen but there's lessons coming out of that and we know that for example direct payments a feature of universal credit where the tenant will be paid directly their benefits rather than going straight to the landlord that's been trialled in Edinburgh and there's some extremely useful information come out of that trial with Dunedin-Chammore and I'd recommend to the committee to potentially have a look at that because I think one of the things that they've identified through that trial is the enormous resources that it's taken to get tenants to pay the rent and it's not easy to identify who it is who's more like you to pay because often you can get to know your tenants, you understand them and you may be able to identify people you think will have trouble paying, it's not always those people but certainly that housing association's found that it's taken up vast amounts of their time and resources to work with tenants to get them to pay rent now that's all stuff that we know now from that trial and I think it's how we share that information across Scotland so that local authorities and landlords across Scotland can be prepared when direct payments come in and gear it up so that we don't get to a crisis point because I think the welfare reform committee's already got it Francis, please Just on the point about joint working and an example from the voluntary sector I guess I mentioned earlier Weston Bartonshire community food share and they were very much born out of Clydebank independent resource centre which is a welfare rights and income maximisation centre in Clydebank and there's a lot of joint or cross referals between those services so that's a good example of those referals there's also examples from London I think and Tower Hamlets where there's welfare rights advisers in trusill trust food banks and I think some of their valuation of that has been positive I think we'd be careful about institutionalising that within having a one stop shop which is a food bank and there's already obviously great work being done that's advice and others so it's a case of linking those partners up rather than just creating new one stop shops I mean it's just to back up and reinforce this that our enthusiasm for preventative spend because I think I noted that at least one of the local authorities clearly stressed that and I just think there's a potential danger that whilst we do want to collaborate in terms of managing the crisis situation that we find ourselves in that that does nothing to dent that enthusiasm for a more preventative approach and just as one small example certainly I was talking to someone who manages a whole range of community initiatives in North Lanarkshire just yesterday and he was saying three of their food co-operatives deliberately meet in the same building at the same time as the local credit union so I think there's a lot of informal I echo the point about not necessarily a formal one stop shop but there's a lot of informal attempts to join up resources in a very positive way and in a very preventative manner One of the issues that I'm picking up is that all the good work that's been done by the people organisations around the table and others out with here and I think Francis mentioned the Clydebank independent advice centre it was mentioned earlier by Keith that there was a £2.5 million grant to citizens of advice Scotland and recognition of the advice services that were being delivered by the CEBs throughout Scotland one of the things that's come out of the review of the budgets of local government is the cuts that sometimes apply unfairly in some respects to the voluntary sector and particularly to the advice sector and I would like to seek the opinions of views of the individuals around the table as to whether or not all the work that you're doing in terms of providing direct front-line services, advice services and second tier advice services is there any indications at the present moment that local authorities are looking to cut back or reduce the amount of funding that your organisation receives I know if Derwent made reference to some of the work that's done by the credit unions and the support they receive from local authorities but what would be the impact if you would if you received a cut in relation to the financial support from local authorities? Yeah very quickly our group of credit unions the vast majority of them are not in receipt of direct local authority funding and therefore should the general local authority position change it may not have as direct an impact on our group of credit unions as it may have on others but I think just to supplement that credit unions are being encouraged to be something different and they can be something different and assist local authorities more in some of the immediate problems but in order for credit unions to do that the movement as a collective needs to upskill and that's partly to do with capacity, partly to do with the resource but entirely to do with the people involved in credit unions the leaders of credit unions, the volunteers and that's the type of advancement that our sector would need to undergo to be a bigger impact or provide a bigger impact on some of these social challenges The majority of local authorities so any cut would have automatically have a big impact on us our viewer funding has broadly been protected as of yet certainly isn't going up but it's maintaining viewer at the level need to be at the moment to give an example of what would happen you just have to look in England at the experience where cuts of impacts on the citizens advice were much more I believe and Birmingham they don't have a CAB anymore because of the local authority cuts I think they lost over a million pounds on funding so that's a sort of salutary example in Scotland CABs are increasingly project funded so they're being funded for projects other than their core work increasingly many local authorities are moving towards tendering processes other than automatic giving a grant and a lot of them are encouraging partnerships so getting partners to bids as a group rather than individually so while the monthly funding is holding steady there's a change and then that is more tendering more projects and more partnerships being encouraged Rosemary you wanted to come in there Just to say that part of a trend that we experienced over the last little while shelter is certainly preparing for reduced funding from local government for our services where we're looking at alternative means and particularly maximising voluntary income fundraising effectively and looking elsewhere looking particularly at foundations and trusts to support us in the work that we do in the future Alec Alec Could I maybe shift it a little bit Over the last few weeks I've had constituents come to me where they've been sanctioned and some of the sanctions just seem to be quite ridiculous and that process appealing that you talked about earlier but it strikes me what can it work going on to support individuals given that these sanctions seem to be something that's almost like being encouraged through the DWP sanctioning and in its effects Keith Do you have any evidence just recently to welfare reform on this issues? I'd say sanctions are probably our number one sort of campaigning issue at the moment because probably the number one was damaging issue for our clients I think I was just looking at statistics yesterday and it was something like 80,000 JSA sanctions were applied in Scotland last year and it's 228 per day and we've seen the impact in Bureau in terms of a 25% increase in JSA issues coming in JSA in Scotland and as you mentioned the reasons for sanctions often seem to be counterproductive people applying for 2-3 jobs, 19 said a 20 a week, not evidence in job searching not filling in your diary properly filling into 10 job centre plus interviews for example when you've got an actual interview with an employer but you didn't turn up to job centre plus people still getting sanctioned and people that aren't able to go online, they're trying we heard about library appointments people that just aren't able to do it they're trying but they're getting sanctioned they're not being able to do it and just quickly in terms of response next month we're having a sort of sanctions month we're training up all Bureau to make sure they're aware of all the sanctions process and what you can do to help your clients in terms of appealing mandatory reconsideration also understand this 23 Bureau preparing something called survival guides for local citizens so it's mapping out everywhere people can go locally to survive if they've got a sanction basically for food, furniture emergencies anywhere in the local authority so that's the level that it's gotten to, it's probably the number one cause of food parcel referrals and we're having to produce survival guides to make sure that people can survive on their sanctions Francis? Just to pick up on that, like Oxfam worked with a couple of our partners to work specifically on welfare reform but most of them don't but you only need to go have a tour of our different partners to see that sanctions is one of the top issues coming through them all even working with volunteers many of them have been sanctioned the DWP released statistics which I think Keith was probably referring to a couple of weeks ago I was looking at that the other day and that showed that since the claimant commitment was brought in in late October 2012 and the end of 2013 there was 97,000 sanctions applied in Scotland that was impacting on about 60,000 individuals that obviously doesn't take account of employment sport allowance sanctions which I think were about 3,000 so you're looking at 100,000 sanctions in Scotland in about 14 months that obviously raises huge questions about the role of the state and possibly forcing people into destitution and also their role in living up to their commitments under for example the universal declaration of human rights about a right to an adequate standard of living and access to food and the right to security when unemployed it also raises massive questions about who has been impacted and if you look at the UK data on jobseekers allowance sanctions that suggests 1 in 5 have a disability the massive majority are young men so I think 71% are men and about 56% of people are under 30 it also raises huge issues about the fairness of those sanctions and from the analysis that we've done it looks at about 48% of people who've questioned the jobseekers allowance sanctions or gone to appeal that's overturned so you've got about half of those sanctions being applied wrongly in terms of the response that data on sanctions is available for every job centre so you can look at an Aberdeen over 3000 people in a specific job centre of being sanctioned so you think that you should be able to get data from the DWP on people being sanctioned by area that sounded like it was difficult for local authorities to access that data but that should be something that you should be able to do better difficult for them to access and then they have the greater destitution cases coming to them for support Rosemary first please to add to what everybody has already said the knock on implications and again I'm speaking here from a housing perspective the ramifications for housing benefit is often stopped or interrupted when somebody is sanctioned there's no necessary reason why that has to happen and I think people wrongly assume housing benefit is stopped at the same time as GSA and that's just not the case but part of handling the claim income needs to be verified and it often is stopped and on top of the crisis that person is going through when they're only source of income for food et cetera is stopped and they're having to handle that they then need to go and restart their housing benefit it can automatically lead to renteries because you heard renteries figures here that often arrears can build up not because somebody's unable to pay but just that as we've talked already about processing delays with benefits mean that before you even get paid you can be a month or two in arrears now that has problems obviously that individual's carrying that debt and needs to pay it back but it also then has problems for local authorities and other landlords in their rent collection processes so that what we're creating here and the way the benefits are processed as well as the cuts on top of the cuts leads to problems for individuals and a particular time when they're most vulnerable some of the local authorities used to have immensely good figures in terms of getting housing benefit cases dealt with very very quickly are we seeing any changes in that front and does that have an effect on folks who are presenting themselves to you? I think certainly it's one of the factors that we'd want local authorities to be looking very carefully up but a word of caution perhaps for the future is when we do see and again we've looked at the universal credit being introduced universal credit will be handled centrally as I'm sure you know from Warrington local authorities will no longer have that information and I think particularly if your landlord is an RSL that RSL isn't going to have that connection with the local authority benefit officer to say what's going on with the claim they're going to have to go through and again we're anticipating problems there that lack of knowledge in itself may cause future difficulties and the joined upness of it John and then Jeremy please really just to reinforce the point that's been made already I think just how important it is that agencies, local authorities the partners who are working with the people who have been sanctioned that the first point calls to check whether they've been sanctioned correctly because so much of the sanctioning from our case evidence is actually just wrongly applied important to appeal those decisions important too because obviously sanctions get worse and worse second or third time you're sanctioned actually it becomes more and more so you might think you can put up with that after the first time but a real risk then if you're then sanctioned again another thing I suppose is just there's more and more discretion being built into the social security system which creates more difficulty in terms of how sanctions and how benefits are administered locally but potentially potentially creates opportunities I think at local level to work with DWP Job Centre Plus staff to try and influence the culture and to raise the issues where there's actually been decision making that's wrong where people for sanctions are either being applied either wrongly or their discussion has been used in such a way that actually could have been used in another way to avoid people being being sanctioned Jeremy and then Cameron please the impact of sanctions presents a significant dilemma for credit unions and that when a person finds himself without money they often make a request to the credit union to access credit and the dilemma for credit unions is how can a credit union responsibly lend to a person who can't demonstrate the capacity to repay that credit if that loan is made in good faith and unfortunately was to go bad further in habits the future capacity for credit unions to help more people and so the cycle continues so it's a significant dilemma that credit unions really struggle with Can I move it on you all mentioned one stop shops and how do people contact you do they come in physically or do they contact you online and do you treat them any differently if they come in online for instance go to the library who wants to deal with that in terms of the advice you get Rosemary we are expanding the options for people who come to us for advice we run a free national helpline that we also have hubs advice and support hubs within each of the major cities in Scotland but we recognise that not everybody can reach us in those ways particularly in rural areas of Scotland so we also have really excellent information online so people can access online information and we're also now beginning to to roll out a programme of kind of tech support so you can while you're online have an online live chat with an advisor as well excuse me do you find many people contact you online or more and more is this happening certainly we can track the number of people who are reading our advice pages and we are getting significant increases in traffic on those pages that relate to debt advice I recommend it for your web advice I use it in my office a lot excuse me what about the others do you see any difference if people come online rather than physically going into an office in terms of the Citizens Advice Bureau they're similar in answer to Rosemary actually we have a national advice line that's accessible to anybody in Scotland and as well our advice guide is increasingly used for self help I suppose at a local level it's really important that all local services and local authority are connected in some way so that if you go to one place you get connected on if that's the right place for you to go so it's really important that it's a one stop shop in the sense that organisations can recognise where the right place is for you to go if it's not them so to make sure that the person does get to the right place Francis please I mentioned earlier that Oxfam itself don't do front line delivery in Scotland but we work with community groups we work with about 10 community groups across Scotland and that's where they're based, they're based in the community so the vast majority of people that use them are coming through their doors and they're in the most deprived communities in Scotland so I think I don't have statistics at hand but I'd be very surprised if many people contacted them online I recognise we're getting push for time now but Stuart briefly thank you in terms of going forward what do you see the major challenges are going to be to each of your organisations but also to the effects upon the local authority to spend I'll add to that question somewhat and you can maybe answer both at once and that is that you'll be aware that UK ministers have refused to come to this Parliament to give evidence on this issue that Esther McVey is here soon what would you say to Esther McVey what would you ask her if you had the opportunity so if you could answer both Francis, can I start with you please? in terms of questions to Esther McVey like a Oxfam approach and a global sense is about people's human rights and I think a question perhaps to her is to what extent are many of the UK government's welfare reforms compatible with its commitments to those human rights so what was the first question? in terms of the local authority aspect of it I guess the challenge for our programme is and I think this has been alluded to by many already is about the trends are are not good and traditionally Oxfam's programme has always been trying to be more preventative trying to be upstream not just doing crisis interventions but if people need help people need help so trying to balance those two challenges is probably a challenge for our programme in terms of the question we probably make more of a statement which is that the credit union sector cannot be a distribution channel for a Westminster Government the essence of credit unions is independent autonomous organisations reflective of their own local community needs rather than a national distribution channel for welfare benefits in terms of our major challenge as a sector going forward it's about how do we adapt to the new challenges how do we move from or even should we move from a save and borrow philosophy to a deposit and withdraw function and that's an internal dilemma for the credit unions to resolve themselves On the bedroom text we've heard about the sort of administrative burden that puts on local authorities in terms of DHP going out dense flying and communicating with people we much prefer there to be proper exemptions in place so that the most vulnerable aren't affected at all rather than actually DHPs relying on the short term solution for the most vulnerable Sanctions I think there's major changes needed I think for it to be a proper deter there has to be a warning first not just to go straight to Sanction and there's major administrative problems in that we've mentioned personal independent payment briefly and I think that it could be a disaster waiting to happen USA is by far the biggest issue that people come to Bureau with and personal independence payment for a DLA is claimed by even more people so that I think 100 odd thousand sorry I can check that step will have to be reassessed so that's a potential problem especially considering the initial experiences offer are so poor in terms of people waiting months and months during assessment so universal credit online applications and direct payments are a big potential problem for us we fill out tens of thousands of forms on behalf of claimants each year but if that's moving to online what does that mean to citizen advice peer we're urgently trying to come out with local solutions for that and we're concerned about exemptions, direct payments and online applications the process of that whether it's too slow whether it actually help people that need support and finally just a general point about drop centre plus and DWP they need to provide more support to claimants we see tens of thousands of claimants that probably should have been the supporters by the drop centre but they're referred on to citizens advice peer so I think there needs to be a change of culture DWP to support people rather than trying to find them out for sanctioning Thank you Bill please In the Government's national food and drink policy the third sector is referred to as a remarkable legacy current resource for Scotland and I think that's very true I think however it's such a remarkable resource that actually almost threatens itself with how much it has to contribute many of the community food initiatives we work with do take the line that Francis referred to in terms of seeing food as a human right they're very much concerned with promoting social justice but equally they're engaged in tackling health inequalities they're engaged in tackling pursuing environmental justice as well and I could be just as likely appearing at a committee looking at the contribution of community food initiatives to the food needs the older people in the community to issues around mental health to issues around early years and I think it's that richness that these initiatives offer is also the danger because a lot of the initiatives tell us they worry about falling between agencies including funding agencies falling between various responsibilities from local authority health boards other departments falling between outcomes and as I say most dangerously falling between budgets I think that we have a wonderful resource and the real challenge is how do we maintain that and recognise it very pleased I suppose I'd remark that Scotland has got a really remarkable and unique political consensus around tackling poverty, preventing homelessness and that's been in evidence since the parliament was created and I think that as I opened by saying that I think we're beginning to see these external threats coming and potentially challenging the ability to deliver on that consensus at a local level and I think that my main message would be let's remember what actually we want to set out to achieve here and that certainly around prevention of homelessness we need to kind of retreat from that as an objective and we need to really understand how we can continue to focus on prevention and understand the implications of potentially some of the crisis responses that we've heard to that overall agenda. In terms of UK Government I suppose the key thing would be to review current approach to social security with a view to the commitments that this government continues to have and is under legislative duty to look in terms of what's the impact on child poverty and the biggest single driver in terms of driving up child poverty, the single biggest change in benefits has been the break between the operating of benefits and tax credits and inflation which kind of sometimes gets overlooked so that's a key thing we'd want to flag up and seek to change. Here in Scotland I think the big challenge is one is about sustaining the investment and the advice and information I think we've all said there has been real investment in the advice and information services and that has really helped but clearly there's still gaps, there's still people who are getting wrong advice, aren't getting advice when they could do and as a result are suffering more than they need to as a result of sanctioning or other benefit changes or benefit delays. The other key one is to ensure that the Scottish welfare fund is delivered in such a way as it genuinely is accessible and helps to meet crisis and the exceptional pressures that families too often face whether that's a result of benefit changes or for other reasons and then the third area or something that we've not actually picked up on so just take the opportunity is the issue of public transport a potential role for local government and government in Scotland and one of the key issues that's come through in the case work that we've been analysing is how much unaccessible or unaffordable public transport has been a factor in either being sanctioned being unable to get to job centre being unable to get to interviews and then in terms of then trying to claim hardship payments, having no money because you've been sanctioned people have been advised they should walk 13 miles having their interviews shifted to the middle of the day so they can get to the job centre and back again walk 13 miles there, walk 13 miles back I mean there's an issue around transport here which we haven't public transport and potential things can we be looking at in Scotland to ease some of those pressures to ensure that people are able to get themselves to job centres and to who? I'll talk to you more about that one afterwards thank you very much for your time today I know that many of you have given evidence to the welfare reform committee previously, I think it was good for us to be able to look at the local government aspects of welfare reform and the impacts there and the obvious cost shunting that's going on thank you, I suspend, we move into the private session