 Good morning, and welcome to the 17th meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. Our first item of business today is a decision to take items 4, 5 and 6 in private. Are we all a great? That's great, thank you very much. We now turn to our next item of business, which is an evidence session on our inquiry into low income and debt problems. Today we are taking evidence from Richard Dennis, the accountant in bankruptcy. Welcome to the committee this morning, and I thank you for joining us. Before I begin, can I remind everyone that broadcasting will operate your microphones? We have around about an hour for this session before we hear from the Scottish Commission on Social Security at around 10.30 a.m. I'll now hand over to Richard Dennis to make an opening statement. Over to yourself, Richard. Thanks. Thank you very much, convener, and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come and talk to the committee this morning. I want to start by giving a huge round of thanks to your technical committee who has spent the last half an hour to see how my technical issues are getting connected and that their support and their calmness was much appreciated. I might at least have all the details, figures and facts of my fingertips that the committee might want. I will promise to come back in writing with data as quickly as I can after today's session, where that's the case. People in unsustainable debt clearly need help, and my agency does really important work in terms of getting people a fresh start. I think that it's really been pleasing listening to the evidence that you've had from other contributors that, in spite of all the difficulties of running a public service through Covid, I don't think that any of your witnesses have suggested that the way my agency has been delivering the statutory debt solutions through the pandemic has been resulting in causing unnecessary concern or hardship to the people that we all want to help. However, I don't want to overplay our importance. If you look at the first quarter of this year, around 280 people a week entered a statutory debt solution. That adds up over time. 280 people a week, 1,000 a month, 12,000 a year, and we have about 50,000 people going through a statutory debt product at any one time. That's a significant share of families in unsustainable debt in Scotland, but it's a far smaller percentage of the people the committee is thinking about our best to help. We are part of the answer, but we are only a small part of the answer. I also wanted to say at the front that, at the moment, we haven't seen numbers of new personal insolvencies rising sharply. They are still well below pre-pandemic levels, even if not quite as low as they were right at the start of lockdown. While you might expect that it's too early to see the impacts of the cost of living crisis coming through in our numbers, it might be a bit more surprising that the economic impacts of the pandemic aren't coming through in terms of people entering statutory debt solutions. I was hoping, looking through the evidence, that I might have had something interesting to say about energy debt, which I suspect is very much on the committee's mind. It might be quite interesting to hear that, if you look at bankruptcies awarded so far this year, gas and electricity bills are not a significant share of the debts that are being covered, nor are they an increasing share. That is about less than 1 per cent of the value of debt that has been declared. Again, maybe this isn't unexpected. It is just too early because the big cost increases are just beginning to hit people now. What I can say and what you might want to pursue a bit later on is that, looking across last year, the average monthly payment in a DAS debt payment programme was around £160 a month, and in the average trust deed it was around £150 a month. Clearly, if you are looking at a £100 a month increase in energy costs alone, that is going to have a lot of significant implications for the viability of those payment plans, but maybe news coming from elsewhere might change those figures substantially later in the day. That is probably enough of an introduction for me. I will do my best to answer the committee's questions. Many thanks for those opening remarks, Richard. I am going to hand over to members now for questions and to kick us off this morning. We have Paul MacLennan. Good morning, convener. Good morning, Richard. Richard, just on about the review of the statutory debt solutions. Obviously, the review that is going on at the moment is stage two recommendations that have just been published. Are you aware of any timescales in times that are about introducing some of those recommendations? Quite a few of them would require primary legislation. As you will know, the Government announces primary legislation for the coming year in September. Were it to want to take forward some of those recommendations in that time frame, I think that we could indeed be ready to pursue a bill in the next year or two, should that be attractive to Government to do so. Just a lead on from them. Obviously, the next stage is stage three. Have you got a time frame for stage three? The minister's working group is meeting again this afternoon, where that will be one of the topics for discussion. The stakeholders have been quite clear that they want this to take the necessary time to get it right, so they are not looking about something quick. They are looking at a process that might well run for a year or so to do a fundamental strategic look. We will be talking to them again this afternoon about exactly how best to take that forward. Obviously, in stage three, it mentions some of the work that is likely to look at that. One of the key things that Kenny is talking about is an assessment of existing debt solutions to see if they are fit for purpose. He mentioned fuel poverty and so on. Is that going to come into the equation? Some evidence that we have been taking is moving away from additional debt solutions where there might have been issues around credit, where people are getting to see whether their expenditure exceeds their income. Is that going to play a part of that, or is that going to be a wider context in stage three review? It will certainly set the backgrounds and some of the context. I don't know if you have had a chance to go through stage two reviews. People are largely saying that we need to make adjustments and tweaks, but generally the whole community thinks that the solutions that we have got in Scotland are working quite well at present. Some of the witnesses have said that we have a world-class system, and it has been nice to look down south to see them copying some of our initiatives up here. They are hoping to introduce their government of debt early next year, so they are just moving to catch up to where we are. We have not really heard calls either in the stage two working groups or in the wider debate for fundamental reform, but I will be interested in the committee's views and whether the evidence that you have had also supports that conclusion that our system is broadly right at present. We will now move on to a theme roundabout balancing the interests of creditors and people with debt problems. I will hand over to Deputy Convener, Natalie Dawn, to kick us off with that. I want to focus on how do you feel statutory debt processes in Scotland should be designed to improve outcomes for people specifically on low incomes? The Child Poverty Action Group has stated that debt processes should support the Scottish Government's national mission on child poverty, but how do we make that a reality and achieve the correct balance there? Would an option for example be perhaps different processes in place for those on low incomes or those on benefits? To some extent, we have already said that the minimal asset process bankruptcy is specifically for those who have no surplus income. A lot of the categories that you have been talking about will fall into that category. In fact, if you are looking at the people running deficit budgets, etc., those are precisely the sorts of people that Matt bankruptcy and maybe the moratorium are there to help. Bankruptcy cannot be the answer for families that just don't have enough to live on. You cannot have a system designed that you go bankrupt, you get straight back into unsustainable debt, you go bankrupt, you get straight back into unsustainable debt. That does not work in the longer term. Bankruptcy has to be there as a sort of last resort for people who have got into a position where giving them a fresh start actually gives them a fresh start and gives them a chance to get their lives sorted out. It is a very significant step. It does have big implications. We cannot see it as the answer to whether people have enough income. I think that that is a question that needs to be addressed through other means, largely, I would suggest through the benefits system. Turning to private debt specifically, do you feel that lending companies and specifically those that are targeted at people on low incomes should have a legal obligation to ensure that anyone that they provide a loan to is both in a mentally fit state and in a realistic financial position where it is likely that they are in a position to repay any loan that is provided to them in the first place? On the second half of that, I think that the financial conduct authority regulation in essence delivers that through treating the customers fairly. The first half of that mental capacity in mental state is clearly absolutely on the money that debt and mental health are very strongly linked. I think that one of the more interesting initiatives that we should be looking to copy here are the special protections for people in mental health crisis circumstances from down south. Whether you can put a duty on a creditor to assess a debtor's mental state before making a loan, I think that that will require quite a lot further thought. I think that mental health issues can be exacerbated by both the debt and they can be brought on in the first place by debt. It is just a really tricky system and it seems like more and more this is exacerbating it and it is just figuring out how to tackle that. My last question is, do you feel that more retrospective protection should be given to individuals who were provided a loan when the company should have reasonably known or didn't make the efforts to confirm that there was no realistic chance that the individual would be in a position to repay the loan? In terms of looking at some private lenders, I know that some are cropping up recently. They are providing loans and they are doing very little background checks to make sure that the person's income is enough to cover it. Do you feel that there should be more retrospective protection in that way? You are getting a long way away from my area of responsibility here. Regardless of the state of the individual and the state of their income when they took out a loan, when you apply for a bankruptcy, if that bankruptcy is awarded, your loans are your debts are ridden off regardless of the circumstances in which you originally took them out unless it can be shown that there was fraud going on. Companies do not have an incentive to lend to people who cannot repay because people who run up unsustainable debts will come through my doors and those debts will be ridden off and the creditor will not get any money back. It is hard to see a business model that is in the company's interest to lend money unsustainably. One of my other reflections—I suspect that you want to come on to this—is that the evidence that you have heard from the debt advice charities and others is that the problems in pursuing debt are as much with the public sector as they are with the private sector. I suspect that that is partly the result of the FCA having been getting more and more muscular in terms of the way they have been cracking down on one area of poor lending after another. Payday loans have been very strongly regulated now. There is work going on on catalogue loans, there is work going on on high purchase loans. I think that the general duty of treating customers fairly is that the FCA deserves a lot of credit and that it has radically changed the marketplace in the past 10 years or so just by its very proactive approach to regulating where there are problems. No, absolutely. We have heard throughout the inquiry that the public debt seems to be more of a problem and I know that we are going to come on to that later. We have focused on that a lot in this inquiry and rightly so. There are just some little things about the private side that I still have problems with and yet in terms of some of those companies that are popping up—we have talked about it before—where people are buying their shoppings and spreading it over three amounts. They are incurring minimum payment charges on that and people that are getting those loans are already in a great deal of debt as it is. So something there, the checks aren't there somewhere along the line, but no, absolutely. Thank you for your comments and I am finished for this theme. Thank you, Natalie, and I will now hand over to Jeremy Balfour. Thank you and good morning. Thank you for coming along. I suppose that a couple of questions, just following on from the deputy communist questions, are managed. Do you know what is the percentage of public debt that people are coming to with bankruptcy? How much has it been led because of either rent-a-years or council tax? I do have some numbers with me. It would take me a while to pull them together. What I would say is that if you look at creditors who are pursuing bankruptcy across the last two or three years, creditor positions for bankruptcy are currently very, very low, but well over 60 per cent of those in the first three months of this year and the creditor was a council. Traditionally, HMRC are the other big creditor taking action against debtors. They are currently just restarting their debt collection work, so their numbers aren't in the figures for the last three, four, five months. But if you look back over the last two or three years, if you look at councils and HMRC together, you are probably up around the 65% to 70% of all creditor petitions coming from those two sources. The other big problem debt you'll get is DWP collecting overpayments of benefits and perhaps compared to other creditors, they are a relatively aggressive creditor in pursuing debt. That's helpful. Thank you for that. It is one of the issues that creditors are trying to secure the debt against other debts and so I'll almost go on forward with legal action to secure that. Is there any other way that we can stop people having to go to bankruptcy but at the same time protecting the creditor from a debt that they are entitled to at some point or would bankruptcy be the only way around that? I'm sorry to take this cop-out answer, but it does depend on the individual circumstances. A large category of people in unsustainable debt whose income is not going to allow them to repay that debt and they need to go bankrupt. They need a fresh start. There is another category of people who can, for example, use the debt arrangement scheme who can pay their debt back but just need time to do so. That scheme gives them protection from their creditors, gives them freedom from interest and charges and gives them an extended period of time to pay back the debt principle. It does very much depend on the circumstances of the individual. My final question is a bit further. Is there any way, particularly for public debts or local authorities in particular, any other way that local authorities could act without having to take forward putting someone into bankruptcy, particularly local authorities? Yes. I'm sure that if you have a COSLA or a local authority finance director in front of you, they will all talk about their moves to enhance their fairer collections policies. What they say to us is that they will quite often consider writing off debts when they realise that there is very little chance of that money being collected. If a debtor is not in a position to pay, there is no point in the local authority pursuing them. I'm sure that you will have heard from local authority advice services. Local authorities fund lots of work either through citizens advice or through their own service to help people. The closer their debt collecting and their advice providers can work together, the better the outcome, both for the individual and for the council. I think that if you would have talked to them about their fairer collection policy, you would start to see that coming through more and more. I'll now hand back to Paul MacLennan for a question to be followed by Emma Roddick. It is really just on the stage 2 working group report. One of the things is about the Protective Trusted. I noticed that there was a bit of debate about increasing the minimum debt level from 5,000. I just want to review what I'd say a little bit more on that, because I think that the exact wording would say that this remains a contentious issue with sharply opposing views. I'm just wondering if you can say a little bit more about that, if it's possible, just to try and understand what the thought process was on both sides of that. I don't want to put words into the working group's mouths, but I will try, and no doubt they will write in and correct me if I get it hopelessly wrong. I think that the two sides are that if you put the minimum debt level up, you close access to that product to a group of people. There may be people whose debts are just over 5,000 pounds for whom this is the right solution. However, if you look at running a trusted, if your debts are around 5,000 pounds, it is quite likely that the minimum contributions that you will make over the four or five year period will also come very close to 5,000 pounds. You are close to being able to pay off that debt through a debt arrangement scheme, for example. At the same time, running a debt solution has significant costs. If you were paying, say, £100 a month over four years—that's £4,800—it is likely that 80 per cent of that, 90 per cent of that will be consumed in the cost of the product, and very little will get back to creditors. Those who are thinking that you should put that debt level up a bit will be in the position that there might be a better alternative for someone who can afford that level of contribution. It is not hugely fair to creditors to see the sector, the administrators, taking that provision from the debtor and so little going back to the creditors. It is that balance of closing off access to this product that might be really valuable for certain people against getting the balance right across the sector. I think that I will need to read that back to understand and process that answer. It is a complicated picture, and that is why it is a polarising option at the moment. So far, we are really talking about how future policy will balance the needs of creditors and those in debt. I wonder where the balance is now. We have heard from people who have debt and low income that, even if they are successful in claiming social security, it can end up that most of their monthly payment ends up going towards paying off debt. Do you think that there is balance there in considering the interests of people who are in debt now, or are we a little too interested in making sure that creditors get their debt repaid, including interest? It is a difficult question. I think that there is a number of factors here. By the time people come through our doors, their debt is unsustainable and they are not going to be able to pay it back and they get that debt written off. For people going through the minimal asset process, nothing goes back to creditors. The debt is just written off. Is that harsh on creditors? Probably not because you cannot get blood out of a stone. In terms of what is happening before people come through our doors, I suspect that the debt advice agencies will have said pretty clearly that people should be seeking advice earlier than they do. Traditionally, it can be a year, 18 months or two years too late. During that period, the debtor has significant stress, the creditor has significant expense, nobody gets any money at the end. It would be helpful if we could do more to get better information available to people in clearer terms. My agency and others plan to do quite a lot on that in the next couple of years. If we looked again to see what we could do about reducing the stigma of bankruptcy, particularly over the pandemic, I think that there may have been a change in society in that people no longer assume that it is necessarily an individual's fault that they are in debt the way they did. Hopefully, we will see people more prepared to come forward and ask for help when they need it as a result of that. That bit about the balance between creditors and debtors before they come my way is a bit beyond my remit. The debt that you, convener, touched a little earlier on on the issue of mental health and the responsibility to freeze interest on debts owned by people suffering illness. Taking that further and looking at interest, which is being charged on debts that we at that point reasonably know are going to be paid only through social security, should there also be similar consideration given there? Again, once a customer comes through my doors into a statutory debt product, the debts are either ridden off or if a debt arrangement scheme, interest and charges are frozen. I think the more challenging question is how you allow somebody in a mental health crisis the time to deal with their debts. You will have noticed that the breathing space scheme down south which allows less time for the ordinary debtor than our moderatorium has special extended provisions for those in mental health crisis. I think that that is a very interesting initiative. I do not think that they have quite right. It is not being used very much yet, but I think that we can seek to learn from that in the way that it is going out in practice. It is certainly something that I think that we should be thinking about copying up here. Many thanks for that. I will hand over to Foisal Tauwdy for a question. Thank you, convener. Good morning. Given the current economic pressure, people are increasingly getting into debt just to live. The way that debt is recovered is leaving those people destitute. Do you think that the balance between creditor and debtor is right in this situation? Could you give me an example of the type of situation that you have in mind here? Well, the way people are, I mean, borrowing money, extra money, well, they are in debt already. Do you think that when they are taken in for bankruptcy or getting pressure, is the balance, is it the right amount or is it in this situation? I am not sure I can really provide an answer there. You know, one answer to that question is what is the right level of universal credit. Should we take forward a minimum income guarantee? These are just questions that are so far beyond my responsibility. I am not sure I can be in much help. What I could say is that we are clear that the purpose of bankruptcy is to take somebody who is in unsustainable debt, who can't escape from that debt themselves, and to give them a fresh start while bearing in mind the needs of creditors as well. Once people have got a fresh start, the last thing that we want is for them to fall straight back into unsustainable debt. But deciding whether or not they have enough income to live on is, unfortunately, nothing to do with the bankruptcy system. We will move on to some questions around about the mechanics of bankruptcy itself. To kick us off with them, I will go to my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy. Thank you, convener. Good morning to you, Richard. Thank you for the evidence that you have provided so far and also the information that you gave us in advance. I am interested, first of all, in the point about minimum income and bankruptcy and how much that leaves people with. I know that the fee has been lured to access the bankruptcy options, but it is still leaving some people unprotected. Could you say a little bit about the purpose of the fee and whether it is your understanding that that fee has become a barrier? Yes, I am happy to address the question of fees. Currently, the vast majority of people do not pay an upfront fee. The fee for the minimal asset to process bankruptcy, which I think is the group that the committee will be most interested in, is now £50, where people do pay a fee. Is that a barrier? It will be for some people. Getting together £50 can be a stretch, but bankruptcy is firstly quite a serious step to take. We want people to pause and think about it. Secondly, bankruptcy has to be funded. The fees down south are significantly above ours, so the current fee for full administration bankruptcy down south is £680 compared to our £150, and their DRO, which is the current of our amount, is 90 as opposed to our £50. I make a huge loss running bankruptcy cases. On a full administration bankruptcy, on average, I lose over £1,500 for every case, and the taxpayer very kindly picks that up for me. The Scottish Government very kindly sends across the money that we need to keep the system running. That is the question of balance. Clearly, you could abolish fees. You might expect that to see an increase in bankruptcies as a result. I would expect to see an increase in the support that I require to continue to administer them. I think that that is a political judgment. In reality, I do not have strong views on my early other. On how much you collect in fees, I note that the majority of people do not pay, but it would be interesting to know what that figure is. I have another question, which is still related to bankruptcy, but it is slightly different, so I will pause. Let me dig into my statistics that I have found with me. In the last year, only 19 per cent of MAP cases paid an application fee. So, four out of every five paid nothing. Do you collect figures as to how much money that means that you get from the total fees paid to you? For MAP bankruptcies, that would be a couple of hundred thousand, no more than that. The other thing, and forgive me if this is slightly outwith your remit, but I am interested in the issue that, when some people become bankrupt, it is a fresh start, and I can understand why it is a helpful option for people. It can often result in people being unable to get further borrowing. I am not suggesting that people should then get into a cycle of borrowing, but even things such as getting a mobile phone contact or a broadband contact can be really difficult. Those are things that are pretty essential, I think, and we have heard that from a lot of witnesses. Do you have any views about what we could do about that or how we could improve that situation for people? That is largely a question of how the credit reference agencies react to either unpaid debts or statutory debt solutions. I would say that the issue is much larger than just bankruptcy. Richard, we seem to have lost connection with yourself. We will suspend briefly until we can try to get Richard back. Thank you very much. I think that we managed to get you back, Richard. That is fantastic. Can you hear me okay? Yes, I apologise for that. I gather that the Scottish Government does not like your network. How ironic is that? I will hand back to yourself to finish up if you can for Pam's question. That would be great. You just remind me how much you heard, Ms Duncan. Welcome back. The question was about people's ability to borrow after they have been through the bankruptcy process, particularly in relation to things such as mobile phones or broadband and even so that it is not so much borrowing but getting credit, as it were. You said that it is an issue not only specifically related to bankruptcy, and you mentioned the credit reference agency. That is as much as I got. That would be the main point. It is about credit scores. The credit reference agencies will take into account mispayments, defaults and bankruptcies in different ways, at least when somebody goes bankrupt. They are starting the process of repairing that, although it takes seven years before bankruptcy fully comes off your credit reference report. You could legislate for that. There are countries in the world that run the credit reference agencies as public bodies. That will be quite a radical change. No, thank you. That is actually helpful. Do you have examples from anywhere else in the world where it is a seven-year average? Is it more or less? Where does it sit? I am afraid. I do not know. We can try and do some research. I have a network of international colleagues that I can ask. It may be some time before I can come back to you on that. Thank you. That is all my questions on this theme. Thanks, convener. Thanks very much for that, Pam. I will hand over to Jeremy Balfour for a question. Yeah, I think that most of my questions and questions have been covered, but the one area I just wanted to pursue briefly is that the evidence that we have taken over the last number of weeks is that, for many people, we are in a crisis situation at this moment of time, and that may get worse into the autumn and early next year. A lot of what you have been talking about is longer term, so it is primary legislation, more reviews and more recommendations. From your perspective, if there was a political will, what would be the quicker things that could be done in the immediate to make people's lives easier, or is there nothing in your opinion around bankruptcy that can be done in the short term to make things easier? Just going back on to some of the things that I said earlier, it tends to be quite a while between people falling into even a financial crisis and seeking advice and then ending up in a saturated debt product. We think that gap has got smaller, but in 2008, when the financial crash hit, it wasn't until 2010 that we started to see those numbers coming through in terms of bankruptcies. There are other factors involved in that, but partly that is because people take a while to get to grips with the fact that they need to seek help. I think that anything that we can do to convince people to go knocking down the doors of the advice agencies that they may or may not welcome me saying this sooner greatly improves their chance of getting a really workable and useful solution in place. I think that the system is quite good. If you can see a money advisor today, you can have a moratorium in place tomorrow. The system can already react that quickly, but it requires people taking the initiative to go and see debt advisors. The more we can make information clear, simple and accessible, the more we can make sure that the advice is there for them. I think that that might be the priority rather than necessarily trying to do anything overnight in legislative terms. As I think that we have demonstrated through at the start of the pandemic, when we need to, we can put legislative change in very quickly too. I wanted to ask a couple of questions with regard to debt enforcement. Last week, we had heard specifically about protections around bank balance accounts, and there was scope to increase the minimum protection balance in bank accounts of £1,000 providing that protection. I just wondered what your view was on that and your experience and how that should work. This comes down, I think, in reality to the council tax collection. There is scope to do something on bank arrestments if it was judged necessary and valuable. What you are doing is taking away a tool from councils to ensure council tax collection. The question is whether this is hitting those who cannot pay or those who will not pay. We do not want it hitting those who cannot pay. If your benefits happen to arrive on the wrong day and a bank arrestment arrives the following day, your benefits can be frozen in your bank account and you cannot access them. Now, one solution to that will be making it much easier to undo an unduly harsh bank arrestment, another way of addressing that would be by raising the level. We do not actually have the evidence that we need here. We do not know how many bank arrestments are successful. We know that there are over 200,000 a year, but anecdotally, less than 10 per cent of those actually hit a bank account, because the creditor has to guess where you have got your bank account when he serves his bank arrestment. We also hear from creditors that, as soon as the debtor picks up a phone and engages, they will not take enforcement action of that sort. However, the evidence is not there. It may well be that we are in a situation where it is judged sensible as a temporary measure while we find the right evidence to raise that level. That could be done relatively quickly. It would need primary legislation, our opportunities to do that if the committee and the Government think that that is a sensible thing to do. I wanted to come on to council tax debt specifically, because we have heard how enforcement can be both inflexible and harsh in terms of a collection. From your experience, what sort of levels of un-sustainable council tax debt to people that you are usually supporting come with? I do not know if you have a percentage of what that would usually look like. What would your views on how that could be reformed, especially for an earlier intervention, to prevent that significant council tax debt building up sometimes so that individuals are moving properties as well with that attached? I wondered what information you had on that. Just to correct something, I misspoke in my last answer. I was not saying that councils were necessarily unduly harsh in the use of bank arrestment. There is already a process that, if a bank arrestment hits your bank account, you can go to court to get that lifted if the court thinks that it is unduly harsh. Obviously, that is a court process. If you are a family living on benefits and your benefits are effectively frozen in your bank account, it takes time to go and get them unfrozen again, and you cannot really wait. The question is whether that process is right. I was not suggesting that the use of bank arrestment in itself was necessarily unduly harsh. Council tax is a significant debt in bankruptcies that we see, in a way that energy bills are not. I wonder if that is more about the choice that people make about which bills to pay than it is necessarily about the burden of the different impositions. I am not in a position to judge that. That is just to surmise that people pay their mobile phone bill because they need their mobile phone to be working next month. You might not pay your council tax for one particular month, because you think that the council probably will not do anything until the end of the year. Just because it appears quite so often does not necessarily mean that it is the root cause of the problem. Do you have any anecdotal evidence about what levels of council tax debt there usually is when someone begins a bankruptcy, or maybe you could provide the committee with that if you do not have it. I can provide that to the committee later. I have got it somewhere in my pack of numbers, but it will take me a while to find it. Thank you. I will hand back over to Natalie Dawn for some questions. Thank you. It is just following up on some issues raised by my colleague Miles Briggs. The AIB has stated that it will consult on changes to the law of diligence. Can I ask if we are aware of what the timescale of that is likely to be, and what issues it is likely to cover? Following on from the last question, I am thinking about earnings assessments. I know that you have just stated that there is a lack of evidence in relation to that. Can I ask if an evidence gathering session will go hand-in-hand with that consultation to make sure that we find the best outcomes? Yes, there are a number of things in there. It is easy to say a straight yes to the last one of those questions. The diligence working group report has been submitted to ministers and should be published very shortly. We will be hoping to take that forward in the same sort of timeframe as the stage 2 bankruptcy working group reports. The time of issues is covered. The papers that the group has asked for and considered are already on the website, so I am not saying anything that is not already in the public domain here. Is there quite a lot of need to make the system more modern and more efficient? There are some desired requirements in diligence legislation. If you want to take diligence against a ship, you have to nail your court papers and the main maths, which can be quite difficult in modern terms. There is quite a lot of work in making the process better and more efficient. They have done quite a lot of thinking about information disclosure orders, where there is some legislation already on the statute book, but we need to see the detailed regulations necessary to bring that in. I think that you can expect that to be one of the main thrusts of the work going forward. They have also decided that there are a number of other issues, for example, like the family home, where again there is legislation on the statute book that has not been brought into force, but they have decided that it is sensible to treat that alongside treatment of family home in bankruptcy and suggested that that is an issue that should be carried forward jointly in the stage 3, the bankruptcy review. Following on from that, my colleague Miles rightly raised the issue of raising the minimum protected balance. We have also heard calls for earnings arrangements to be more flexible and better co-ordinated. One of the points that has been highlighted is that there is no effort to assess individual circumstances prior to earnings harassment, for example, if they have children. Will further reforms to the process of earnings harassment feature as a core part of the consultation? In terms of the Administration of Conjoined Arrestments, I think that there is a significant scope for improving that. One of the areas that we will be looking at. The others are more complicated and I think that we need quite a bit of thought and some consultation. It is hard to expect a creditor to know the detailed individual circumstances of a debtor when they are going to court for earnings harassment. They are going to court for earnings harassment because the debtor is not co-operating in terms of paying the debt, so they are after a court order which will be directly directed from their salary. It is quite hard to put the burden on the creditor or even the court to assess the debtor's circumstances and adjust the level of the earnings harassment on that basis. Once an earnings harassment is in place—I apologise, I thought that you finished. Sorry, carry on. Your other question was about whether you would be made more flexible. Once an earnings harassment is in place, it is for the employer to administer it, so it deducts the relevant amount from the debtor's salary and sends it on to the creditor. If you are going to change that too often, it imposes significant burden on employers and we just need to balance that. The suggestion that the creditor and the debtor might come to an agreement to adjust the earnings harassment up or down on a regular basis puts a significant burden on the employer. That is something that we need to think through about how that impacts with payroll and other systems. Obviously, we know that this is heavily related to council tax debt, earnings harassment. I understand the difficulties with having creditors know everything about the circumstances of the individual. Would it make sense for more onus if local authorities are going to continue with a system of outsourcing of debt collection agencies? Would it be that there should be more onus on local authorities who know more details about an individual to provide that to the debt collection agencies so that that could then be worked out? You were talking earlier about that it works better when there is co-operation between the councils and the debt collection agencies. In that respect, would it be better for more onus to be on the local authority? In terms of determining their collections policy in which that is to chase, I think that the burden has to be very much on the local authority. I think that it is right that those councils who have gone a long way down the fairer collections approach are held up as a beacon that the others should be following. Councils tend to know their clients fairly well on both sides, on both their revenue and debt-chasing side and on the advice side. The closer they can pull together their own in-house people providing advice to those customers and the people chasing them for their debts, the better. I think that there is quite a lot that can be done well away from statute and control simply because it is in the council's best interests to make the right judgments here. If they are chasing the wrong debts, it will cost them money and they will not get anything back. We will take our last question to wind up the session from Pam Duncan-Glancy. Thank you, convener. It is really just to follow up the point about breathing space. Earlier on, you referenced the breathing space initiative down south. You said that there are things that we should look to in it but you also said that there were still things that you had questions about. Could you tell us a bit more about any of the questions that you have around it and whether or not you think something similar could work here? In terms of the main breathing space, I am personally very convinced that our moratorium is better than their breathing space. I can see that there is an argument around freezing of interests and charges, which would be nice to do, but whether freezing of interests and charges for six weeks make such a significant difference that the administrative cost and burden of the scheme imposes to do that, I rather doubt. A lot of my concerns are if you look at take-up. If you compare the take-up of breathing space down south to the numbers in the impact assessments when the policy was being put through Westminster, it has had less than 10 per cent of the numbers that they expected. That suggests that they have not got something quite right in the way that it is administered. I think that we have something to learn, which is the special provision that they have put in place for people in mental health crisis. I can see that there is an evil action in that. Again, it is not being used very much down south, which suggests that they have not got it quite right, but I think that we can learn a lot of lessons from them and come up with a good proposal for the committee and for the Scottish Government to think about whether we can bring it in a way that delivers greater benefits up here. Thank you for your time this morning, Richard. It would be very helpful to the committee if you can get back to us with the information that you so kindly said you would provide us with by 8 June, if possible, and that would allow us to have that information as soon as we need it. That concludes our penultimate formal oral evidence session on this inquiry before hearing from the Scottish Government. The committee will also be meeting with its experts by experience panel informally on 6 June to take stock of the evidence heard in this inquiry and hear their suggestions for improvements. I will suspend the meeting briefly for a changeover of witnesses and a comfort break, so we can come back in about five minutes. That would be fantastic. Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome back. We now have a short evidence session with the Scottish Commission on Social Security regarding the report on the draft disability assistance for working-age people, transitional provisions and miscellaneous amendment Scotland regulations 2022. Isn't that a mouthful? Those regulations deal with the transfer from disability living allowance to adult disability payment for adults of working age and those who have reached pension age since April 2013. The committee is going to invite the minister to give evidence on the regulations at a future meeting. This morning, I am pleased to welcome to the meeting Dr Sally Witcher, who is the chair of SCOS, and Dr Mark Simpson, who is a member of the commission. Welcome to you both. I will now hand over to Dr Witcher to make an opening statement. Thank you very much. We really welcome the opportunity to talk to you about the regulations this morning and our report. Those clearly are exceptionally complex regulations, as you no doubt noticed. I am in fact going to hand over to my colleague Mark to talk further about by way of an opening statement, because he was the lead drafter on the report. I would probably be best placed to take questions around the wider issues, whereas Mark will fill questions that are more detailed all the matters of technicality. I hope that that is acceptable to the committee. I will hand over to Mark, if that is all right with you. I am pleased to be here for my first meeting with the committee in its current form. You will know that the social security system at both UK and devolved levels includes various payments that are designed to support people with the extra costs that they encourage as a result of disability. Members will all be aware that disability living allowance played this rule for working-age people prior to 2013. At that point, a process began whereby it was replaced with personal independence payment at UK level. In turn, it is now being replaced by a disability payment in Scotland. The Scottish Government's priorities—indeed, it is mantra for the introduction of ADP as with the other new disability benefits—has always been that there has to be a safe and secure transition of cases from the Department for Work and Pensions over to Social Security Scotland. One of the things that has been really sent, although this safe and secure transition project, has been the maintenance of parity in the eligibility criteria for ADP and PIP. Indeed, we have seen the same thing between child disability payment and DLA, the exception that that has been for people with terminal illness. That essentially means that when people transfer from PIP to ADP, they can very easily get the same award without any complex reassessment of their entitlements. Where this all breaks down is that ADP has been introduced before migration from DLA to PIP has been completed. That leaves, at the minute, up to 30,000 adults in Scotland who are still receiving DLA. That is quite a significant problem from the point of view of the safe and secure transition, because DLA awards are made on a different basis to PIP awards. Therefore, they are made on a different basis to ADP awards. We give a couple of examples of that. Many people have received higher awards when they move from DLA to PIP, because it is possible to receive the enhanced daily living component without having any overnight care needs, which is in contrast to DLA. On the other hand, quite a lot of people have lost money at that point of transfer because they are able to walk more than 20 metres, which rules them out of the enhanced mobility component of PIP, whereas they could have received the equivalent component of DLA. Even the structure of the two payments differs somewhat. There are three rates of the DLA care component, but only two rates of the PIP or ADP daily living component. I know that we were in this point a wee bit, but the crucial thing about this set of regulations is that they are only necessary because there is no simple lift and drop of cases from DLA to ADP in the same way that there is from PIP to ADP, but the Scottish Government still wants the migration process to be as seamless as possible. That is essentially why those regulations are drafted to envisage interim award at the point of transfer, made at the same rate as the individual's previous DLA award. Only once that has been done and the case has been transferred from DWP to Social Security Scotland will a redetermination be made within one year to get the individual onto the rate of ADP that actually matches up with their impairment and its effect on their mobility and their daily living, as opposed to the rate that matches their previous DLA award. We said in our report that, as a commission, we think that this approach is broadly sensible. We did do some probing around how confident the Scottish Government was that it has competence within the Social Security Act to award ADP on the basis of a previous award from the DWP, rather than on Social Security Scotland's own evaluation of the individual's impairment and their life, and we were satisfied with the response to receive from that. We suggested that the initial award to people who are transferring from the lowest-rate care component of the DLA should be referred to as a transitional rate award rather than a lowest-rate award, just to emphasise the temporary nature of that award. Many of the people who receive that ultimately will not receive the daily living component at all once they have been redetermined and we are pleased that the Scottish Government accepted that recommendation. We are also pleased that people with terminal illnesses are exempt from this two-stage process, but rather they will receive their full award from the point of transfer. A number of issues remain. First among those is that, although it is not stipulated in the regulations that this is the case, for the time being, the intention is that this process will only be used to transfer people to the IDP if they have reported a change of circumstances to the DWP or if they request to move. When we received the Scottish Government's sponsor report a couple of weeks ago, there was still no decision on what the process would be for people who fall outside those groups and who are under 74 years old. It could be the same, it could be something different. We know that for people who are over 74, people who were 65 or older in 2013 are going to be on DLA even after their case transfers to Social Security Scotland, so those regulations will figure out on to me. We are expecting that the issues that arise from this will probably be more process-related than to do with the wording of the regulations themselves. There is no getting away from the fact that this is going to be complex. People are going to be confused about what is going on. There is a challenge of trying to make people aware that they might be better off on adult disability payment, bearing in mind that those people have not reallised at any point in the past nine years, that they might be better off on PIP than they are on DLA, so they have not asked for a transfer point. Will they know that it might be in their interests to ask for a transfer now? There is also a challenge of ensuring that people understand that their initial award is temporary, especially those who have already mentioned to move from the lowest rate care component through to the transitional rate deal 11 component of ADP. That forms part of a wider issue about how Social Security Scotland is going to fulfil the fact that, for the first time in its existence, it is facing the prospect of having to reduce or terminate significant numbers of existing reports. I am bearing in mind that the loss of a disability benefit has better consequences for passport entitlements. In some cases, for example, from the benefit cap, that could have a significant impact on people's lives, and that it is going to have to be handled carefully. There are communication challenges ahead, and there are relational challenges ahead in terms of users. We know that there is a review of ADP coming, and that there could, I suppose, be potential to kick some of those issues down the line by deferring and redetermining the problem, but that is not what the regulations envisage. Nor would that approach necessarily be risk free either. It might raise expectations that the review will result in certain outcomes, which are far from guaranteed. It could also be seen as unfair to people who have already moved from DLA to PEP and then on to ADP and who have lost money in that process, if others were protected from that. I suppose, by the way of the conclusion, that this is a relatively small but not insignificant group of people. Moving them on to ADP is always going to be a much better challenge than is the case for people who are already on PEP no matter how it was approached. We hope that our report has helped to eliminate some of the issues. I am sure that, at the very least, there is a loner of some of the acts that Anasallai says. We cannot wait to take any questions. Many thanks for that, Mark. As we only have a short amount of time left today for this session, as you have to leave for another meeting or that, I am going to ask members to ask their questions when I come to them all together in one, if we can do that. We are going to start with Paul MacLennan, please. Thank you, convener, and thank you, Mark. Mark, can you touch on the issue that is going to raise around communications? I just wonder if you can say a little bit about the tailored communications that is needed for those group of people, because I think that the most common theme disabling conditions are learning difficulties, mental health issues and arthritis. I am just wondering around what tailored communications you are thinking about then. I suppose, again, that it is any advice or any thoughts or concerns that you have around clients who might be able to access advice on whether they should be better off volunteering to move to ADP? The first part of that is more of Sally's area of expertise than mine. Do you want to speak to Sally and then I can take the advice issue? Yes, I will do my best. Clearly, from everything that Mark has already outlined, there are massive complexities here and some really big differences, and there will be certain groups that will have the particular need to understand the situation. In particular, what means to be considered are the areas of difference. It is people who currently get the lowest rate care component who need to understand the situation. There is a lot of communication to be done around the mobility component and issues around the enhanced rate. One concern that people are going to have is around the implications for motability and for cars, because losing those we know has a major impact. It was interesting to see in the response that the Government gave to our recommendations that they are looking at what they might do around that, which would be good if they can, but I think that they are going to need to act fairly quickly on that. There are also the implications around the fact that P-band ADP does not specify what time of day support is required. Again, it needs a bit of a drilling down to identify the people who that might affect, because for DLA it does specify night time care. There will be groups of people with mental health or cognitive impairments who may now become more likely to qualify for the enhanced rate of ADP. There are also issues around terminal illness. Obviously, where people have indicated that they are clear, they will be fast tracked, and that is very welcome. However, there are some differences in eligibility around that. ADP is more generous, so there may be a bit of a question about how you target people who may become eligible through ADP that won't. It is the group of people. I think that there is a challenge here about particularly the scope for people to voluntarily request transfer and how they understand the implications. I think that there is a challenge here about targeting and identifying, drilling down to a specific group. Some are more obvious than others, identifying third sector organisations and getting them up to speed and trying so that they are able to advise people appropriately. There are some major issues and real complexities for people transferring who are over pension age. That is, again, an area where some very careful communications are going to be required. Obviously, carers' benefits are passports depending on eligibility for those kinds of benefits. They may well not be affected, but they will certainly have questions about that, so I think that that possibly needs to be considered, too. In terms of support, there are some people who are definitely going to need support. There is an independent advocacy service available in Scotland, so there is a question here about how that plays into this, whether people can have access to that and at what point. I think that there may also be some questions about what DWP is communicating around all this, because those messages from DWP clearly need to match with what Social Security Scotland and Scottish Government are communicating. I think that we have raised points before, and we do again here, about what Social Security Scotland can be doing in relation to people who lose entitlements. There are some communications that are thought to be given around that, too. I think that, again, there are some challenges around how you communicate what Social Security Scotland can advise on and what it can't. In conclusion, there is a great deal to think about around the communications. There are challenges around people who, frankly, will anyway be transferred through later managed migration, who may not realise that that is happening, and they need to be made aware of that so that they do not inadvertently apply and then end up worse off. Basically, there are a bunch of people who are going to be worse off, and there are a bunch of people who are going to be better off or likely to be better off. How are you sure that those people know, in a timely fashion, that they receive support around that very complex situation? I think that, for me, there is a lot of work being undertaken on this. I think that there is something that we can discuss later on, but I think that there is something that we need to keep an eye on on this and get some further written information at the appropriate stage. Obviously, there is a lot of complex work that is being mentioned by Sally there, so we will discuss it later on. I think that there is a need for the committee to pick this up at a later stage. I am very complex. I will pass over to Natalie Dawn, who has a question to me for a big Jeremy Balfour. Thanks, convener, and good morning both. Thank you very much for your attendance this morning. As we have alluded to, many people have seen the rewards increase as a result of the transfer to ADP, but we are obviously concerned with those who have or will lose out. Can you expand on the different options that are presented for the transitional protection and what the challenges might be in providing for such schemes? I will go to Dr Simpson first. Thank you for the question. The second part of that is probably the bit to answer in as much as when you throw in any form of transitional action into the mix that you would immediately add as complexly and as cost in terms of the extra money that is being paid out in the award and the extra time that has to be spent dealing with it that the Social Security Scotland said. If I touched on the question of the forthcoming review in the opening statement, it is just supposed to reiterate a little bit. We know that the review is coming, but we do not know how long that is going to take. We do not know what it is going to recommend, and we do not know whether the Scottish Government has set up the recommendations. Hopes that there will be high in some quarters that things such as the 20 meter rule for the mobility component might be relaxed coming out of that, but that is far from guaranteed. It could be that there will be any form of transitional protection. All you really end up doing is deferring those reductions and deferring those difficult conversations. It is possible to argue that that is not a bad thing from the point of view of the individuals who are affected, but it might equally be possible to argue that it just drags things out and it increases possibly the shock when the law solved them if it is delayed further. That said, looking up the things that we actually do as possibilities in our report, if you keep someone on short-term assistance, it raises similar issues to that, but it is also worth noting that if the individual is no longer receiving any disability benefit but their only assistance, that might mean that they lose passport and awards as well, so that they become less of an air cost option. As I said before, the regulations have been allowed. Do not really allow for any of those, or either of those, to wait and see what the review says option. There are time limits set for the initial review. There is also set for the determination if that is challenged. That brings us on to the other things that we talked about. The Northern Ireland model is probably harder to replicate in Scotland. In Northern Ireland, people who ended up with a lower award compared to their previous DLA award received basically what was referred to as a supplementary payment, making up 75 per cent of the difference for a year. That could certainly be replicated in Scotland. The next step that Northern Ireland did was to also come to get for the loss of disability premium and other benefits, and since those other benefits are not developed, that would be harder for the Scottish Government to do. Nonetheless, you could, in principle, partly emulate that model. The final option that we talked about, which is more along the line of constitutional protection for universal credit, would basically mean that you hold the award at the level that is out of the point of transfer, but then you do not operate it. It would gradually fall behind whatever the operator award at that level is. Eventually, you move from the enhanced rates to the standard rate of either component. Eventually, the standard rate will catch up as it is operated at the level that you are getting. It allows for more of a gradual adjustment to the reduction of income, compared to the clip-edge drop in entitlement that would appear otherwise. We have not gone into a great detail on the feasibility of those, and our work would have just noted that those are models that are available, but, as I said, it is not in line with what is currently being proposed. It would be naive to think that there would not be challenges on that. Thank you very much for that. I have no further questions, convener. Thank you. I will hand over to Jeremy Balfour. Thank you both for the evidence that you have given so far and just to remind that I am in receipt of a PIP and will be transferred at some point. The quick question that I have is in regard to the back-dating of awards. I noticed you commented on that. Could you just give us a wee bit more information in regard to that reducibility, and what financial effect will that have on some claimants? Yes. When it comes to thinking about back-dating awards, those are slightly unusual circumstances, because, first of all, the individuals affected are moving from one agency to another, so the body with responsibility for its award is changing. It is also unusual in that, for the past two years, DWP has effectively suspended the migration of the L.A. claimants in Scotland on to PIP, and it did that at the request of the Scottish Government. It is possible that some people might have missed out on higher awards as a result of that. For that reason, there is a potential case in favour of back-dating awards as far as you can. Case against is obviously that Social Security Scotland is only taking on responsibility at a certain point in time. It might be uncomfortable for them to award a higher payment for the period in which DWP was responsible. It is also the case that the individuals have talked about, even though the general migration has been suspended, that they could still have requested to transfer to PIP if they thought that they were going to be better off. Although, as Sally was allowed to a few minutes ago, that is not necessarily easy for people to catch up on. It is an issue that we felt was worth exploring, but we do not necessarily take a view on the right decision. The worst-case scenario is that somebody has missed out on a higher PIP award for the past two years, but equally, the same individual could have missed out on that higher award for even longer. If the migration to ADP has not been coming up and they have just remained on the LA for longer, there is an optimistic way of looking at this, which is that the PIP to ADP in some cases might be what actually triggers people getting that higher award. I am done. I want to come in on the previous question, I think that Mark has covered that, as well as I could. I have nothing further to add on that one. Okay, if you want to come in on the previous question now quickly, that is okay if you want to do that. Okay. I just wanted to flag clearly decisions about options, our political decisions. They are not ones that Scots would necessarily be appropriate to comment on, but we also do not have the information. Clearly, there are things that are clearly ideal that would be potentially desirable in this scenario, but whether they are realistic or not is the challenge. It is about, for example, we do not know yet enough about the timing of the review of ADP to get a sense of what is practical and realistic around putting reviews on hold until that point. We do not know enough about the financial implications of the different options and we do not know enough about the delivery consequences. To explore that further, it requires a different type of investigation, which probably the committee is better placed than we are to undertake. All that we can do in this situation is to point out the possibilities that would require, or might require, will be worthy of further investigation. Thank you very much for that, Sally. I will move on to the final two questions that we have. The first is from Pam Duncan Glancy and then Miles Briggs. Good morning, Sally and good morning Mark. I just had to check the clock to check it still was morning, but it is indeed. Thanks very much for setting out what is a complex situation. I know that I myself have been trying to get to grips with the information that you provide in advance, so forgive me if some of that is out with your remit or misunderstood. The first question is a really simple one. For the 38,000 people who are on DLA in Scotland and yet to transfer to PIP, is it your understanding that leaving them to transfer to PIP as opposed to ADP would have taken longer than the process that set out those regulations? That is something that we have given an enormous thought to. What it would mean would be that the timetable I suppose would be, I would say, Social Security Scotland and Scottish Governments hands and it would be dependent on how long it took the DWP that process has obviously dragged on. I guess that at least this way you can say here is a window where we transfer everyone in Scotland and the Scottish Government can have some influence over that. I do not sense that that has been a huge part of the reason and it is more the Scottish Government's expectation that the process of getting on to ADP is going to be more claimant friendly than the process of getting on to PIP. That seems to me to be the more event factor here other than to do with timing. In developing or in looking at this process, we have obviously set this out in your evidence. There is a bit of policy divergence in that. You have got the 50m and the 20m rule interaction with ADP. In any of the solutions to address the transfer of individuals on DLA to ADP and in any of the solutions that you have outlined to address that particular problem, could those have been applied to the broader case transfer? Is there any reason why that means that they could not have—because it seems like we are creating—by definition on the basis of what you have set out, there are going to be two different systems in inequity, which means that some people will remain on a system that looks at 50m as opposed to 20m. If you are creating that anyway to deal with this case load of people, could we not have done the same to look at extending it to the others in addressing policies such as the 50m and 20m rule? If you have done it that way round, it would have looked the same when you flipped in terms of the unequal treatment dimension. What you would have had then would have been—if the ADP criteria had more closely matched the DLA criteria, but most people have already moved from DLA to PIP, then you have got a much larger number of people who are potentially going to have to go through that two-stage process, because they would need to be migrated and then predetermined against the new criteria. The process would have been the same, but the larger numbers of people would have been affected, so there would have been resource implications for that. We are getting into the realms of political decisions again about how much resource is going to be put into the transfer. Is there any reason why the Scottish Government or could the Scottish Government have created a lower rate ADP to transfer people on to basically mirror the DLA case load? Effectively, that is what they are doing, but I presume that you mean keeping the retainant as a permanent feature? Probably more a question for the review than for us, I presume. It would have been feasible technically, but, as I said in the opening remarks, the emphasis has been on maintaining party as a means of achieving the safe and secure transfer. It does raise the sort of factor of unequal treatment again, because you have got this relatively small group of people who are still on DLA who would benefit from that, whereas the people who are already moved to PIP would not, which may or may not be a decisive argument against the end of the day, but that has been the thinking that Sally wants to come in on this. Sally does want to come in, thank you. Yes, just briefly, I think that this is where questions around the timing of the review become important as well, because what comes out of that could mean a different design ADP, that's where the scope potentially would lie, for making these sort of bigger changes. They are clearly questions around affordability and other matters that in order to make this deliverable would need to be considered. I think that one of the risks, depending on the timing of that, is what you wouldn't want to see, is people effectively knocked off their entitlements to the enhanced rates at this point. Following the review, having it reinstated, that all starts to get a bit messy, but that's where you would position this. Technically, they can design this. Realistically, whether they can or not is potentially another matter, because all the constraints that we know about not only the ones that are mentioned around finance and delivery, but the DWP attitudes towards passporting start to creep in in some cases. Ultimately, lurking in the background, whatever comes out of the DWP green paper review, about the structuring of benefits and the timing of that, because that could throw a lot of questions about the whole enterprise in some ways. It would require a fundamental rethink, were they, for example, to go down the road of merging universal credit-type benefits with extra cost benefits, as is one of the options that was flagged in that green paper. Thank you. I have one further question, but I'll save it perhaps right to the commission. Okay. I do think that Mark wanted to come back in on this point as well, Mark, before I bring in Miles Briggs. No, I'm okay. I just wanted to flag the party issue. It's not just about the transfer, it's about the possible impact on passporting as well, isn't it? Is she there, but sadly, has that got over to her? Okay, great. Hand over to yourself, Miles. Thank you, convener. It was just a brief question with regards to platform 4 to see if there was any issues that she wanted to raise and looking at the theme around make creating a more flexible and person-centered approach, whether or not you think that's going to be achieved or if there's other things the committee need to hear and pursue on that as well. Well, I'll do the easy bit around part 4, which is that we're going to be talking about this a bit more in our next board meeting, so we don't have an awful lot to say on it right now. The bits that we had said previously were really dealing with some small drafting errors, and we bits of them on this very duplication. There's a bit more to do them now than there was at that stage, but I think we'll leave that until another day. Sally, you might be better placed to respond to the other question. Well, I'm not entirely sure that I am, because we are going to be looking at part 4 at our meeting next week. Clearly, if we have any further things to add to that, we will be writing to the minister and also the committee. We did an initial response in a very quick one because of timelines and the things that we raised were just immediate responses, but we would like to give that a bit more consideration, so we may come back to you on that. Regarding the question or the point about person centred, I may have misunderstood what you're getting at here and, if so, apologies, but part of the aim here is to ensure that the more supportive person centred approach that is required of Social Security Scotland in line with expectations in the charter is what people will be getting, and that was part of the reason for going down the road that they did, so that people weren't obliged to go through PIP assessments before. That may not be what you're getting at, but it seems to me to be a slightly different point. Apologies about my understanding. No problem, no further questions. Thank you so very much for that, and thank you both for coming along this morning and giving evidence to us. As always, your report and evidence will help us in our scrutiny function in this regard as well. Thank you both. I will now close the public meeting and move into private session. Thank you.