 Fy loedd, a chymae'n gweithio i'r 24 ymyrdd gyda'u gwestiynau sosial ac i ddechrau i'r ysgol i'r cymdeithasol. Yn ystod y gallu cyfrifio, rydw i'n gweld i'n 4 i 5, ac i'n gwych yn dechrau. Mae'n meddwl ydi'r gwirionedd? Dwi'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r ysgol i'r gwirionedd, ac i'n meddwl i'r ysgol i'r ysgol i'r is an evidence session on budget savings and reductions for 2022-23. On 7 September, John Swinney announced £500 million in-year reductions to the budget. Some of those are relevant to our remit, namely employability, education maintenance allowance, concessionary fares and rail fares and child poverty consequentials. I welcome to the meeting John Swinney, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery, who is also at the moment covering the finance brief. As officials, Julie Humphries, who is the deputy director tackling child poverty and financial wellbeing, and Michael Walker, who is the senior finance business partner of the Scottish Government. I will hand over to the Deputy First Minister to make an opening statement. Thank you very much, convener. I am grateful to the committee for the opportunity to discuss the emergency budget review and the underlying savings that are of interest to the committee. I set out to Parliament, as you have said, convener, on 7 September. The hard prioritisation choices that the Government has had to take with the pressures of inflation, placing a significant new burden within our budgets, a burden that was not planned for when the spending review was undertaken by the United Kingdom Government last autumn. People and businesses have also been deeply impacted by the cost of living crisis and this Government has vowed to do everything that we can to mitigate this crisis as far as possible. We must do that, while meeting the increased costs of public sector pay and balancing our public finances. My letter to the finance committee highlighted over £500 million in savings and re-forecasting that we have had to take forward. The options are challenging, but we must do that in order to move to balance our budget and to do everything we can to help those in need. That is, of course, the harsh reality of a fixed budget and limited fiscal powers. In addition, the majority of our spend cannot be changed at this stage of the financial year due to contractual and legal commitments. Therefore, there are limited options to make savings. I should also note that the 2022-23 element of our emergency budget review is part of normal financial management practices, with a number of savings arising as a result of natural demand. Formal scrutiny of budget changes will be undertaken through our normal budget revisions process, and impact assessments will of course be taken forward as part of the annual budgetary process. Notwithstanding the financial challenges that we are facing, the Government remains firmly focused on tackling and reducing child poverty and supporting strong and sustainable growth as part of the national strategy for economic transformation. Our 2022-23 budget continues to take forward key programmes and policies, such as the increase to the Scottish child payment to £25 per eligible child per week from 14 November, the fuel and security fund and widening access to the warmer homes fuel poverty programme. Finally, convener, I would note that I intend to publish the outcome of the emergency budget review in the week beginning 24 October. Further savings are likely to be required to balance the budget. I look forward to this morning's discussion and I am very happy to answer questions from the committee. Many thanks for that, Deputy First Minister. I will turn to members for questions. We do have questions grouped into a few themes. We have employability, education, maintenance allowance, concessionary fares and transport costs and cost of living consequentials in child poverty, but members also, as ever, have their own questions, which we will bring them in towards the end as well. To start us off, if members can direct the questions to the Deputy First Minister, he will bring in his officials when he decides to... To start us off, we have Pam Duncan-Glancy to be followed by Jeremy Balfour. Pam? Thank you, convener, and good morning. Thank you for coming this morning and also thank you for the information that you shared in advance. I know in the letter that we received recently that you said that you have taken decisions that you consider to have least impact. In relation to the employability service cuts, how have you carried out that assessment of impact? What organisations have you spoke to? In relation to the choices that we face, it is important that I re-emphasise a point that I made in my opening statement. At this stage in the financial year, the range of options that are available to me are rather limited because of the degree of contractual and legal commitments that are made in any circumstance during the financial year. However, when you get to the midpoint, the financial year, significant programmes have already been allocated and undertaken. The room for manoeuvre, the choices are quite limited once we get to this stage in the financial year. The second point that I would make is that in relation to the employability budget, the employability budget will increase in this financial year compared to what was planned. If my memory says that we are right, it will be of the order of a move from about £56 million to about £71 million. It is just that the scale of the increase is not going to be as great as we originally planned, so the budget was planned to go from about £56 million to about £120 million. I have regrettably had to remove £53 million to that budget given the fact that that was uncommitted expenditure. It was not legally committed to any organisations, so I felt that that was given the growth in the budget, given the fact that we are experiencing, at this stage, persistently low unemployment, that it was a budget saving that, on the balance of risk, was one that I could afford to take. Obviously, in those decisions, I ultimately have to take the decisions, and although it is one that I would have wanted to avoid, it brings forward a necessity that we have to confront. I appreciate that the opportunities that are available to you, particularly in year, are limited. Who did you speak with when considering what opportunities or what options you had? Which organisations did you engage in? I appreciate that you would have been in the short order, but did you speak to any organisations or people to discuss the potential impacts of cuts to those services, including, for example, disabled people, lone parents and women? Obviously, we carry out a great deal of discussion with organisations about the formulation of our budget priorities, so we have a good awareness of the issues. We are taking decisions about setting out the plans for expanding the range of employability services as part of the formulation of our wider programmes. We would engage with a range of organisations, so the Government has that knowledge of what is involved in those programmes. We also have strong monitoring information on the capacity of the existing programmes that will be untouched by those changes. There is still adequate capacity within the existing programmes to be able to deal with referrals of individuals. In our existing programmes that are untouched by those changes, there remains existing capacity within those programmes to support individuals who require employability assistance. On the basis of those assessments, I came to the conclusion that this was a saving that the Government could take and that we would be able to manage the implications of that, because we still had capacity within our existing programmes. I have one more question in this area. The process that you said that there is already a process there for you to engage with those organisations, but we heard in committee last week from the Scottish Human Rights Commission that that process was not a brilliant process. That is where my concerns lie. On a good day, we rely on processes to be really, really good. In a difficult day, and I am sure that the decisions that you were taking were difficult, if the process is not quite up to scratch, that makes it all the worse. Given that, and given some of the concerns that we also heard around the third sector and their concerns about the ability of the no-one-left-behind approach, for example, to have dealt with capacity in the first place, what could you do between now and when you bring the emergency budget to reassure those organisations that you will take account of their issues and needs and the people they represent? When I look at the way in which Government engages, there is extensive engagement with organisations in the formulation of our plans. At personal level, I am involved in some of those discussions, but my colleagues, the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, principally, takes forward a whole range of different discussions with organisations that will have an interest in the sphere of employability, as will the Minister for Employment. The Government generally has every opportunity to hear and to understand the perspectives of different organisations in that respect. Obviously, we will continue that dialogue. I will be talking to a range of different interested parties as I finalise issues around the emergency budget review. We have had a number of submissions from organisations about what should resources be available to assist with cost-aliving challenges, where they should best be deployed and where the committee will be familiar with the range of propositions that have come forward from organisations. We will certainly undertake that further dialogue. Obviously, in relation to the questions of equality impact assessments, those are carried out in relation to budget statements and budget programmes, and we will continue to do exactly that. Thank you very much for that, and we will now hand over to Jeremy Balfour. Good morning, and again, thank you very much for making the time this morning. I suppose just following on from the questions from Pam Clancy Duncan. In regard to the employability reduction, what will be the practical effect? You said that this is an increase in the budget that won't affect services that have been provided. I'm just trying to work out what the actual £56 million was planned to do if it's not going to affect direct services. My point to Pam Duncan-Glancy was that existing services are maintained, so the existing provision has been maintained. For example, the work that is undertaken in the employability and workforce skills programmes, no one left behind, the employability fair start of Scotland work, all remains in place. It's just a planned increase in expenditure is not taking place as a consequence of the pressures that we face. The employability budget lines were projected to increase from £56 million to £125 million, and they will instead increase from £56 million to £71 million. It's simply that an expansion of capacity has not been undertaken. The consequences of that are that what was planned here was for us to try to make greater inroads in supporting people who are currently economically inactive to become economically active. I take the view—it's not a university-held view—that people who are economically inactive require significant holistic support to assist them into employment. It is unlikely that that is going to be a straightforward journey. The labour market has plenty of opportunity within the labour market just now, but if people are economically inactive, there is likely to be a wider contextual challenge. What we had been planning to do was to expand some of that support, which by its nature is likely to be, if I put it into a per capita terms, a more expensive degree of intervention to try to make greater inroads into the economically inactive population. The budget restrictions that I have had to put in place are likely to mean that we won't be able to do as much of that as we wanted to do. That's helpful, and I agree with your analysis of the situation as well, Deputy First Minister. I suppose that the issue is that, particularly around disability, we are coming out of Covid, the number of disabled people who are unemployed has gone up compared to what it was before Covid. I'm actually across many other parts of the world, so it's not just a Scottish issue, but the number of disabled people who are employed in Scotland is much higher now, percentage-wise, than in, for example, England. I suppose that the concern that I have around this is that those who are particularly disabled, who are wanting to get back into employability, are not going to get these services. Is it your analysis that the figure is likely to grow wider, that more disabled people will be unemployed in the next six or nine months, because they're not getting that holistic support that we need to get into employability? I don't think that that will be the case, because if the answer that I gave to Pam Duncan-Glancy is that there remains capacity within our programmes to support individuals and to deal with referrals. Mr Balfour is correct that good progress has been made on narrowing the employability gap among disabled people. That progress has been made in the aftermath of Covid, in addition to that, our existing programmes, which remain unaffected by those changes, still have capacity to support individuals. I suppose that what I would have to concede is that the rate of progress might not be as fast as I would like to see in reducing the employability gap as a consequence, but as I have set out to the committee, I am faced with some very difficult choices to try to balance the budget in this financial year. Choices of this type are the ones that remain open to me. My final question is that you are coming back to the whole of the Parliament in two or three weeks' time with your budget. Obviously, there was the UK budget last week, which I think would have given some Barnett consequentials in regard to that. Has that in any way been able to, and I appreciate it in the early days of less than a week, but is there any mitigation now around those Barnett consequentials, which means that this cut or reduction that everybody wants to use might not have to now take place? The implications of the United Kingdom Government's mini-budget last Friday in Barnett consequentials for this financial year, and I stress that the conversation that we are having at the committee this morning is just about this financial year—a total of £35 million. That is as a consequence of the changes that are being made in stamp duty. That gives rise to that consequential. I have taken no decisions about that. Obviously, I am the least uncertain about whether or not the changes that were made last Friday will come to pass, given the fact that there is enormous market volatility being experienced, but that is the available impact on this financial year. I will be considering those questions as I formulate the provisions around the emergency budget review. I stress to Mr Balford just for completeness and accuracy that the emergency budget review will be looking at the issues around this financial year and the balancing of this year. Obviously, budget statements will be made later in the year in the normal sequence of events and accompanied by the normal level of forecasting that the Parliament would expect. Thank you very much for that. Pam, do you have a supplementary to that before you take us into the next section? I can run that on if that is helpful. Yes, that would be helpful, and then that will be followed by Maelsbergs after. Following on briefly before I move to the next bit from my colleague Jeremy Balford's question, I hear that you say that the current level of service will continue and that there will not be as big a scale of increase. That worries me, because the current level of service is still delivering quite high numbers of disabled people unemployed in Scotland. It concerns me that cutting that again and putting the money in the first place would have been helpful, taking it out now, is going to have serious consequences. The SHRC said last week that it was doing so was removing a poverty prevention method. I worry about the impacts of that on disabled people's poverty. Have you looked at that? Will you look at that with the emergency budget review? Do you have any indication as to the impact that that might have on the Scottish Government's targets to close the disability employment gap? Obviously, I look at all of that information, because as a member of the cabinet, I carry collective responsibility for the Government's objectives. The success of the Government's programmes and whatever area of policy that happens to me matters to me, so I want to ensure that we can be successful. I was heavily involved in the formulation of the child poverty delivery plan, for example, so those issues are very material to me in the conduct of policy. However, I come up against hard financial choices and I understand the concerns that people will have about the scale of increase not being as great as we would like. I think that that is a difficult context, a rational policy choice, because we have existing capacity, we have available capacity within existing programmes to support our endeavour, but we may not be able to put as much resource into that as we would like, given the financial pressures that we face. That is the dilemma that I am trying to square. Ultimately, I have a legal duty to balance the budget. There is an increase in financial pressure that comes from a number of different elements. It comes from the erosion of the value of our budget because of inflation, being more than double what was predicted to be. It undermines the value of our budget to the tune of £1.7 billion. Secondly, there is the necessity to resolve public sector pay claims, and they are coming in much higher than were anticipated in the budget. I have to find resources to balance all that. In that context, we have to consider policy choices. They might be difficult and have wider ramifications, but I am trying to do that in a way that protects programmes that still enable us to pursue the policy agenda to which we have committed ourselves. However, I will keep the issues very much under review. I appreciate the context in which the decisions have been taken. I have to say that I am not convinced that I am reassured that those decisions have fully taken into consideration a number of the priority groups, for example in the child poverty plan and people with protective characteristics. I do not think that I have heard that reassurance today, so I am afraid. I will move on to the next question, which is about education maintenance allowance. My question on that is that it looks like your budgeting for failure of uptake. The first question is, should we not be trying to encourage people to take up the money and benefits in which they are entitled? My second question is, if people do uptake it up and there is a higher than forecast, what are your plans to get money from elsewhere? On the first point, educational maintenance allowance is an entitlement, so should an individual apply for it, they must get it, regardless of the size of the budget. We do our level best to estimate the likely demand for education maintenance allowances. Historically, the budget line is underspent, so we are, in one of our obligations in terms of our approach to the management of the public finances, to make sure that we follow the guidance that budgets should be taught and realistic. In circumstances where I have got to try to allocate resources, because I am quite literally in a situation just now where I am having to take resources from one area of the Government's budget to allocate to another to pay public sector pay claims, for example, and I am having to find money to do that across different areas of Government. I have to make sure that there is budget clarity for accountable officers, that they have the necessary finance to spend. If I have, for example, £3 million in an education maintenance allowance budget line that I do not think I will require, I can take that away and put it somewhere else to address a public sector pay claim. That allows me to fulfil the obligations of support, the obligations of accountable officers within the Government. Obviously, that is us making a judgment based on the best evidence that we have available to us. Should the total costs for education maintenance allowances be greater, then that will be a financial pressure that I will have to address during the course of the financial year. However, all of those budgets are monitored on a daily basis, frankly, and the information is being provided to me to enable me to make judgments about where it is appropriate for us to reallocate expenditure to meet financial pressures. However, I stress the point that the education maintenance allowance is an entitlement, so if demand outstrips the £22 million provision that will be retained in the budget, I will have to find the resources to accommodate that. However, based on previous years' experience, that is an appropriate judgment to make. I want to carry on that further line of questioning that Pam Duncan Glancy started with. Do you think that cutting the EMA budget is consistent with also trying to improve uptake among those moving on from the Scottish child payment as well? Yes, because it is a demand-led budget, so whoever is entitled to it will get it. It is simply about making sure that with the degree of pressure that I am having to deal with in this financial year, I do not have money allocated into particular budget lines, where that money is unlikely to be required, but it is required in other budget lines. Important part of this, and I think that you have outlined this already to committee, is around projected underspends or projected lack of uptake of benefits that are currently available. In terms of this year's in-year spend, where other benefits, for example, best start grant, for example, is sitting at and whether or not such areas are also being earmarked as potential areas where there will be finance currently allocated but it will not be particularly spent in this year? There is no evidence that I have so far that I have made two decisions essentially on demand-led budgets, on education maintenance allowances and on concessionary travel. I do not have any evidence that allows me at this stage to make any other judgments about any other programmes, but, as I said in my last answer to Pam Duncan-Glancy, I am—those issues have been monitored on my behalf on a daily basis and, obviously, I will make further judgments on those points. Those are, of course, in the normal sequence of events, fairly regular changes that are made by government as we assess demand for particular programmes at either the autumn or the spring budget revisions. Those formal opportunities will be available to Parliament to consider the implications of any changes in demand. Thank you for that, and it would be helpful if you could provide that information to the committee as well. Some of our work, for example, we are trying to encourage uptake to see where that sits. Finally, in this section, a lot of people are seeking clarity now over how that will trickle down to other services. I wondered where protections are being expected by ministers, for example schemes around supporting young carers and what work has been undertaken around that. I have set out in my letter to the finance committee particular specific changes that are being made. If there are further changes to be made, I will do that transparently. I have been completely open with Parliament about that. There is no obligation of me to come to Parliament in September with the statement that I made. I could have left that all to the autumn budget revision, but I feel in the interest—I have a duty of candor to Parliament that Parliament should hear the issues and difficulties with which I am wrestling and that those should be set out to members of Parliament. If there are any further changes of that nature, then they will be set out in a similar fashion. Thank you very much. We will move on to a theme that we have already touched on regarding concessionary fares and transport costs, and to start us off, we will get Jeremy Balfour. I have a couple of questions on which I am okay, Deputy First Minister. First one is in regard to how did you make the decision to cut this particular budget and what effect would it have in regard to encouraging people to use public transport rather than necessarily their cars? The judgment that I was making here is essentially looking at the available data to us about the levels of usage of public transport in the current context. We fixed our budget. Obviously, concessionary travel is a crucial social and economic benefit within our society. We make our best estimates of what we reckon will be the uptake of the concessionary travel scheme. The data that is available to us as we look through the financial year, as we look at the degree to which people are returning to public transport in the aftermath of Covid—there is obviously a degree of nervousness or anxiety in relation to utilising public transport, and we made a judgment about where we think demand will eventually settle for this again. There is a degree of judgment involved here. Ultimately, if we find the budget line exceeds what I have predicted in this latest update, we will have to meet that cost from other areas within the budget, but I am hopeful that the steps that we have taken will be appropriate and will have the necessary accuracy about the predictions on the budget. If I could just pick up one particular scheme, Mark, for the new youth concessionary travel scheme, I say this as somebody who is a non-drivers. I use the bus a lot. It does amaze me at how many children are still not using it in Edinburgh because I have obviously put my fail in paying for it. I think that one of the reasons is because it is actually quite complicated to fill in. I say that as somebody who has tried three times to get it for my own children. There is variation across Scotland of how you apply and how easy it is to apply. I wonder, again, not necessarily for this budget, but looking forward, are there ways that the Scottish Government can look at applying for this easier because it does concern me, particularly those who struggle with internet or don't have a passport, are not necessarily picking up this and may be for people who need it more than perhaps others who have already applied for it? I am aware that there are different approaches taking different parts of the country about what support is available to people. For example, my own son, the arrangement for his national entitlement card was handled through the school and it was done very efficiently. It was a totally and completely straightforward process, absolutely no difficulty whatsoever. He is now using his national entitlement card with someone gusto. For a scheme that has only been open since January, really quite high levels have uptaken a relatively short space in time. We are obviously promoting awareness about the national entitlement card among young people and we would encourage them to take that up. We are making necessary judgments about the volume of usage that allows me to make the judgments that I have made about the size of the budget. Thank you, convener. Following on from that, the decision that you have come to in terms of the use of buses, did you look at the use during the Covid pandemic or did you look at comparable years before that? It strikes me and I am sure that you will appreciate it with your other hat in terms of Covid recovery. Disabled people and older people have been a bit more reticent to go back to using buses, so I would be worried if the amount was based only on very recent patronage. It is a combination of both that we have looked at. The earlier budget estimates were based—I think that it would be fair to say that they assumed a greater recovery in public transport patronage post-pandemic than was materialised. I stress again that that is an entitlement, so if it translates into more cost, I will have to address that issue in the course of further judgments that are made in the course of this financial year, which would simply add to the pressures that I am wrestling with at a different stage in the financial year. However, we are looking at the comparison between pre-Covid levels—Covid levels and, if I am to use the terminology, Covid recovery levels—to form the best estimate. I am not going to sit in front of the committee this morning and say that I am absolutely 100% confident that we have got that absolutely precise. We will continue to monitor that as the year progresses. If there is a need to put in further financial support, of course we will do that. I follow on to my questions that I had in addition to this particular area. Can I bring you back in on that? I have got members that have got additional questions. I will hand back over to Gerry Balfour, who is going to start us off on cost-of-living consequentials on tail poverty. Again, it is just wonderful that we get a wee bit more detail in regard to the £82 million. How was it going to be used in my first place? I am not sure that I could find my information within anything that I would like to do with it. If I had the £82 million, what was it going to be used for? The £82 million is a product of decisions taken by the United Kingdom Government that give rise to consequentials. Members will know that those consequentials come into our budget and they do not come in with a badge on them. They come in as consequentials and we decide the allocation that is made. We have a range of different measures that are provided in Scotland that are not provided in other parts of the United Kingdom that assist with the cost-of-living consequentials. We have allocated resources. The £82 million has essentially been allocated into the Scottish Government's budget to assist us in meeting the various elements of expenditure that we are putting in to support the programmes that we have to assist on the cost of living and other matters within our budget. I am not sure that I understand what the £82 million is. I appreciate that it goes into a big pot. I knew just right how that pot is spent, but it is hard for the committee and the Parliament to know the intended purpose if we do not know how that £82 million was going to be spent. Was it in regard to social security? Was it education? Presumably you had allocated £82 million to a particular Government department, a particular budget. I am just wondering where that is coming from. It does not come in with an intended purpose. It comes in as a consequential and the Government then decides how it is going to be spent. Essentially, for completeness, I have set out that in meeting the financial pressures that we are facing, we are allocating that in the wider budget management of the Scottish Government, which is dealing with a range of different requirements, whether that is on tackling child poverty, dealing with the cost of living, supporting individuals with their energy costs through elements such as the fuel security fund and the other measures of that type. Maybe just one more time. On practical levels, will it mean that a particular service has been affected? It is a reasonable amount of money, so if that means that a third sector charity will not be getting it, there will not be a particular project that will be now run. I appreciate the high level, but what consequence will it have for individuals in Scotland for the next six months? It means that a range of programmes are being funded that ordinarily would not have been able to be funded had we not allocated the money in the way that I am allocating priorities today within the Scottish Government's budget. Can you give us a list of those programmes? It does not really operate in that fashion because, as Mr Balfour said earlier on in his questions, the money comes into the wider pot of public finance, and from that I have to support a range of programmes. We would not be able to afford the budget provisions that we have if I was not allocating £82 million towards the range of programmes that are supported across the Scottish Government, but it does not come in badged in that particular fashion that enables me to say, well, £10 million of that, £82 million has gone towards this or that. It is part of the general financing of the Scottish Government's budget. All those issues are reconciled in the annual budget, the autumn budget revision and the spring budget revision. I think that I am a bit confused, but I am sure that others will pick that up. Thank you very much. We are now going to move on to questions that members have themselves. To start us off, we have Paul MacLennan and then to be followed by Natalie Dawn. Thank you, Deputy First Minister. You obviously mentioned at the start about the fiscal limitations. I know that I have asked you this before, but for the sake of the committee. On the discussions that you are having with the UK Government, on the fiscal framework, one mentioned about the budget being inflation-proofed. Just to see what discussions have had on that, as you mentioned, it is a £1.7 billion lesson. Of course, the Social Security Committee is very much demand-led. A lot of the services that we look at are very much demand-led. It is around about the ability for additional borrowing power, and what a difference that would make, particularly in regards to this budget, probably more than others. In relation to the current financial situation and the issues with which I am wrestling, I have written to the UK ministers various chancellers—we have had quite a few in the course of the last few weeks and might have more—to make the case that the effect of inflation has been to road the value of our budget, to make an appeal, as I have done with my counterparts in Wales and Northern Ireland, for there to be an uplift to budgets to deal with public sector pay pressures and the pressures of inflation. Why is that necessary? It is necessary, because unless there is a positive change in English public expenditure during a financial year, our budget does not change. We have essentially a fixed budget. Once the tax year starts, I am required by a law to set a tax rate that cannot be changed during a financial year, so that tax cannot change. We have resource borrowing powers that only extend—I think that I would characterise them as cash management resource borrowing powers—their powers do not allow them to accumulate our resource borrowing capacity. Essentially, we are dependent on the changes to budgets that are made in England. I have been writing a series of letters to ministers and ministers. We have been getting no response. I spoke to the chief secretary to the Treasury on Friday in the aftermath of the mini-budget. The chief secretary made it clear to me on Friday that he was insisting on the application of the current comprehensive spending review, so that means no uplift to budgets. I notice that, in news information overnight, the chief secretary has now written to White Hall departments, or is in the process of writing to White Hall departments, requiring reductions in expenditure. That is not an encouraging sign for what lies ahead in relation to future years expenditure. On the subject of additional borrowing, can you outline what difference that would make to yourself in terms of looking at this particular budget? As I said, we have talked to them about how that is led by demand. I am aware that there are other devolved Governments out with the UK that have those powers. What difference does that make to yourself in terms of how we look at some of the issues that we have been talking about today? As I said to Parliament already, if you look at the pay deals that we are having to put in place because of the effect of inflation, members of staff, public servants, are concerned about their financial situation, so they want some protection from inflation. I was involved extensively in the dialogue around the local government pay settlement, which I am glad we got to our conclusion. We estimate that we will have to find in the public purse £700 million more for pay than we anticipated. That is why I am having to make many of those changes to make sure that we can afford it. If we take the local government pay deal, the local government pay deal significantly enhances the position for staff on low incomes. Very significant increases in excess of 10 per cent in the pay for low-income members of staff, which I very much welcome. It still does not amount to an awful lot of money for those individuals, and nothing like what some very affluent people are going to get from the tax cuts that were announced last Friday, but it is welcome to progress nonetheless. Those decisions put financial strain on our budget. Those concerns are echoed by my counterparts in Wales and Northern Ireland who operate within exactly the same constraints. I am just to clarify. You mentioned that the inflation aspect was £1.7 billion on the budget. You are almost saying that the public sector pay increase was another £700 million, so you are talking about the £1.7 billion plus the £700 million? No, there are two slightly different numbers. It is important that the £1.7 billion is essentially the erosion of the value of our expenditure. The £700 million is hard money. That is money that has to be found. That is £2.4 billion. I think that I would pause about adding the two numbers together, Mr McLean, if you will forgive me. However, the point that I am making is that whatever we debate about the erosion of value, the £700 million has to be found in hard money in the budget, which has to balance by the end of the year, which we were not anticipating at the start of the financial year. That is the challenge that I am trying to resolve. Thank you for that, Deputy First Minister. I think that that clarifies that for us all. If we move to questions from Natalie Dawn to be followed by Emma Roddick. You mentioned the joint letter from yourself and the other devolved Governments to the Chancellor. In that letter, you talked about the need for the UK Government to provide more targeted action. Given that the UK Government holds the key fiscal levers in addition to key powers over energy and around 85 per cent welfare, what action do you think the UK Government needs to take now to help people? On the issue of energy costs, the two points that I will address in relation to energy costs and in relation to welfare are points that were made very powerfully by the statement from the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday evening, because, essentially, the International Monetary Fund argued for targeted intervention. That is one of the elements of weakness in what the UK Government is doing. The measures are not sufficiently or specifically targeted, and as a consequence of that, they are contributing to the financial volatility that we are experiencing. Obviously, people on low incomes are significantly disadvantaged in being able to cope with significant increases in energy bills compared with people who are more financially secure. On the energy cost provisions, we would have liked to have seen that much more firmly targeted on people in fuel poverty. We are now seeing extensive growth in levels of fuel poverty in Scotland as a consequence. On the wider questions about household income, a very straightforward, effective measure to tackle the issue and, of course, for which there is precedent, would be an expansion of universal credit. That is an intensely targeted measure. The Scottish child payment, which is a product of our intervention, is an intensely targeted payment on those who face financial challenges. Those would be some of the areas in which we could see more focused intervention by the UK Government, which would create much more targeted benefit for those who suffer the most. Thank you. We have talked this morning about reductions in spending, but you mentioned it yourself a second ago. The Scottish Government has highlighted its increase to and extension of the Scottish child payment. It is a key measure that the Government has taken to help families and to tackle child poverty. Is it not the case that, without full powers, the actions that the Scottish Government takes continue to be undermined by the UK Government's inaction or policies that actively undermine Scottish Government efforts to tackle child poverty? We face a situation where I am increasingly worried about this and I am even more worried about it having heard what I have heard being briefed from the Treasury last night about spending constraints. The consequence of the budget, the mini-budget last Friday, has been to loosen fiscal policy. I disagree with a large number of the measures and the approach that has been taken. I think that the way in which it has been taken has been disastrous because fiscal policy has been loosened and there has been no explanation about how it will be delivered in a sustainable way. I am not in any way surprised that the markets have responded the way that they have responded because it is just the absolute height of fiscal irresponsibility, fiscal irresponsibility. If the UK Government wants to recover from its fiscal irresponsibility, it has to tighten ffiscally and that will come on spending. That is a disaster for us because the block grant pays for the child payment. If the UK Government decides to tighten budgets affecting English departments, it will tighten the budget in Scotland. The point that Natalie Don puts to me is absolutely 100 per cent correct. The decisions taken by the UK Government ffiscally irresponsible last Friday will have to be rectified if they want to avoid a financial crash and, in so doing, they will tighten the budgets in Scotland and what we are facing just now, which is a consequence of raging inflation, which is again a product of fiscal irresponsibility, is going to be a much graver problem that we have to face in years to come as a consequence of those decisions. Over to Emma Roddick, who will be followed by Pam Duncan Glancy. Last week, we heard from CPag about a number of asks of yourself, including some mitigation measures. Professor Philip Alston knew a special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights who said that mitigation comes at a price and is not sustainable. Do you agree with that comment and can you give an indication of how much Scottish Government spending is currently going towards mitigation? I agree with one part of the statement, which is that mitigation comes at a price. The Scottish Government is meeting the costs of mitigation of a number of United Kingdom Government measures. I am not sure that I quite accept the point that it is not sustainable, because I view it as my duty to make it sustainable, because I want to protect people from the hardship that is inflicted on them as much as I possibly can do. However, I would accept that there are limits to fiscal sustainability, which is where I find myself quite close to at this particular moment. I have had to come to Parliament and I am obviously here at committee to explain the rationale for that, to deal with a level of financial pressure, which, if I do not address it now, I will be in danger of being unable to balance the budget this year. I have a record of fiscal responsibility. I believe in fiscal responsibility, so that is why we are doing what we are doing. Obviously, I am working to ensure that we operate in a sustainable fashion, because measures such as the Scottish child payment that I just discussed with Natalie Dawn, I view that as absolutely fundamental to the commitments that we can make to the most vulnerable in our society to support them through a really difficult period. The Scottish child payment is a fantastic intervention, but it would not be necessary if universal credit was at a credible level. We would not have to face that in our budget if universal credit was at a more credible level. In terms of quantifying the effects of mitigation, I would probably be safer saying that I should write to the committee about what an estimate of that calculation would be, but there are measures such as the child payment, which are being applied by the Scottish Government, totalling very close to £200 million. The updated forecast on the Scottish child payment is £219 million for this financial year. Some of that, of course, is because we have accelerated the payment or the bring forward of the increase to the 14th of November. That is one element. Ms Roddick will be familiar with the fact that the Government mitigates the bedroom tax, which is a critical measure in alleviating one of the more pernicious aspects of the UK welfare regime. There are a range of other measures that we take for, but for completeness I should probably write to the committee with a detailed answer on that point. Thank you very much for that. I think that it is clear from the fiscal announcement last week that the UK Government is going down a family enough very conservative path, cutting tax for high earners and uncapping bankers bonuses. Peter Kelly from the Poverty Alliance has told the committee that governing is about decisions. Is the Scottish Government making different priorities and different decisions? We are, but in so doing we are trying to do so in a way that protects the fundamental values that we believe in and the fundamental elements of our programme for government. Emma Roddick will be familiar with the programme for government that was set out just at the beginning of September. It is a programme that develops the thinking that emerged from the Government's manifesto in the 2021 election, which was based on essentially ensuring that we secure a fairer and a greener future for individuals in our society. Those priorities and those values were reinforced by the Bute House agreement with the Scottish Green Party and that now flows into the programme for government. We are setting that direction, which is about ensuring that we create a fairer society, that we make the transition to net zero, that we do so to create new and sustainable employment opportunities within Scotland. Those are the underpinning values and the decisions that I am taking are designed to protect that programme as much as I can do, but, clearly, by the nature of the decisions that I have had to take, that creates significant financial strain on the Scottish Government. It does sound difficult, and we are maybe getting to the point where it is impossible for a centre-left Government to be working within a fiscal framework set by a more right-wing Government elsewhere, while also mitigating a lot of its decisions. Is this a demonstration of why we require independence? I think that sums it up in a nutshell. I have a long track record in this Parliament and, as a minister, I serve for nine years as finance minister. I find myself very surprisingly back in the France area of activity. I have never seen financial strain and pressure, like I am seeing just now, and I am resting with. I do not use those words lightly. I managed through the financial crash, I managed through the years of austerity under George Osborne and Danny Alexander. I left the France brief in 2016 thinking that we had perhaps managed to mitigate the worst of austerity, and that was as nothing compared to what we are now resting with. The fundamental point that Emma Roddick puts to me is that, as a centre-left Government, believing in progressive values and wishing to secure a fairer and a greener future for our fellow human beings in this community finds that ever more difficult with an agenda that has been pursued. I would not accuse it of being conservative, because there are certain protections of core values that are associated with conservatism. I do not recognise that in the financial statement last Friday. Just a small amount of time left, but if we can, I would like to bring Pam Duncan Glancy back in with a quick question, then Miles Briggs. Thank you, convener. In the interest of brevetail resistance temptation to discuss the constitutional settlement that we have just touched on, we have spent some considerable time on that. One of the things that I have been trying to get from this morning, and I think that it is really important, is that, in the decisions that are taken, including in the decisions that you have said yourself should be ffiscally responsible, and I take the view that cuts to employability for disabled people and others are not particularly ffiscally responsible, because it will have an impact, of course, on the fiscal status. How can you reassure us this morning—and I haven't heard it so far—that you will involve organisations and groups such as the Women's Budget Group in your decisions, as well as longer-term budgeting processes? Will you make a commitment to do that today so that they can help you and provide the expertise so that you can make ffiscally responsible decisions, as well as decisions that do not further entwine gender equality? On the first observation that Pam Duncan Glancy makes, I take a very different view about the constitutional arguments, because I think that they are central to the dilemmas that I face, because I think that the analysis that Emma Roddick put to me is absolutely correct. I think that the ability of a Scottish Parliament to exercise the full range of powers that, for example, in Ireland yesterday, the Irish Government set out a budget diametrically different. I would love to debate those issues with you at length, but we do not have enough time, I think, to go into that. My questions were about the way in which you make the decisions in the budget that you currently control, so I would really appreciate some reassurance on the record, because there are a number of organisations looking for it. If we look at the comparative example on the Republic of Ireland, dramatically different decisions have been taken by an independent country in close proximity to us. It has made different constitutional choices, and I think that there is an important lesson for us in that comparison. I am very happy to engage with all groups as much as I can on those issues. I will listen to people's perspectives. I think that I have a track record of listening to different views. I have enjoyed, when I was Minister of Finance, my interaction with the women's budget group have huge respect for their work and have valued it enormously. However, I have to make this point bluntly to the committee that, if people are going to complain about the choices that I have made, they have to give me alternatives. First Minister, I think that those organisations would and have offered alternatives. I do not know that I would characterise it as complaining. I think that it is a plea to be involved in the process that witnesses last week and before have told us that it was quite opaque and untransparent and that they were not able to get involved in it. Is that reassurance that they will have a meaningful conversation with you around the budget going forward? I am not really talking about those organisations. I am talking about members of Parliament, because members of Parliament have got hard choices to make. It is just frankly not much use members of Parliament complaining about the choices that I have made and not giving me alternatives. I have mapped how I have been completely transparent with Parliament. There was no obligation of me to come to Parliament on 7 September with a statement about the financial position and to set out the range of changes. I could have just done it all in the background, done it in an autumn budget revision. There is very little public commentary about the autumn budget revisions. I could have just done that, but I did not. I came to Parliament openly and transparently and shared the problem with Parliament and shared my view of the solution. I think that it is then incumbent on members of Parliament if they do not like the solutions that I have come up with to tell me how I should do it differently. In the process, I will engage with all my other groups. I am very happy to listen to it, but, with respect, I have not heard a scintilla of alternatives about what I should be doing. I think that that is unfair, particularly given the cost of living plan that the Scottish Labour Party has put to the Government on several occasions around that. I will leave it there. Thank you, convener. In the two minutes that I think that we have left, I probably cannot have a debate about Barnett formula or budget negotiations between parties, but I wanted to specifically ask with regard to Social Security Scotland and the management around budgeting around that—about £301 million is operational expenditure. I wondered what discussions the Government is having around projected future spend to run the organisation as well. It is not just about Social Security Scotland, but we have to across all—this is implicit in the resource spending review—to carefully manage the size of the public sector workforce. The public sector workforce grew dramatically during Covid. We have to ensure that that is sustainable on an on-going basis. The discussions are on-going with all the elements of the public sector, frankly, about the levels of workforce, the commitments that need to be fulfilled, and the sustainability of budgets. That will be a priority on an on-going basis. As budgets are set, the committee will have the opportunity to scrutinise any decisions that flow from that as part of the management of the workforce and its size. Thank you very much, Deputy First Minister and two officials, for the very early start this morning. We will consider the evidence-heard agenda item 4. I suspend the meeting for a brief comfort break and to change over panels. Thank you very much. Welcome back. We now turn to our next item of business, which is the second of our pre-budget scrutiny sessions. Our scrutiny focus is on the resource spending review and its impact on poverty, as well as the forthcoming equalities and fair Scotland budget statement. This week, we are going to hear from two panels. I welcome to the meeting our first panel, who are both joining us remotely. We have Danny Boyle, who is the Senior Parliamentary and Policy Officer at Bemis, and we have Graham O'Neill, who is the Policy Manager at the Scottish Refugee Council. Thank you both for joining us today. A few housekeeping things before we kick off. If you wait for our broadcasting colleagues to turn your mic on before you start to speak, that would be helpful. I have the screen up in front of me. If you want to come in on a point, please type R in the chat box and we will make sure—or wave at me, there are just two of you, so that is quite easy. I can keep track of that. We have approximately 50 minutes or so for this panel at the moment, and I will invite members to come in town. If members can direct their question to one of the two panels to kick us off, that would be helpful. The first theme that we have is about the impact of rising cost of living. To start us off, I will bring in Deputy convener Natalie Dawn to be followed by Jeremy Balfour. Good morning to the panel, and thank you for your submissions that you have submitted previously to the committee. Starting with a fairly general question to open up the discussion this morning, could you advise how the rising cost of living is impacting your organisations and the individuals that you support? I will put that first to Dary Boyle. Good morning, committee. Can everybody hear me okay? Thank you very much. Apologies that we are not able to attend in person this morning. We have other meetings that we need to attend later on today, but thank you for the opportunity to come along. Always a pleasure to see my colleague Graham O'Neill from the Refugee Council. In short, the impact of the cost of living and inflation is significant, coming off the back of the social, economic and cultural impacts of the pandemic. It has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities, which affected the minority communities in Scotland, and it also has a significant impact on even us as organisations within the third sector. We are not any different from the impacts of the cost of living that affect a general population. However, in the circumstances of ethnic minority communities in Scotland, who would have been more vulnerable to the impacts of the cost of living crisis and the rising inflation mean that those impacts are exacerbated and have significantly more perilous outcomes for people who live in significant social and economic poverty. In short, the crisis is an existential crisis for many people. When lockdown first occurred in March 2020, we saw a significant increase in destitution. People unable to feed themselves, people unable to look after their families, and that has replicated, potentially, within that situation. It is very serious. It is important to hear a response from both of the panel members on that question, so I will turn to Graham O'Neill for that as well, please. Thank you, deputy convener, and thanks to the committee for inviting us to share evidence today. One of the points that Danny made—I just wanted to flawn from, hopefully—was that people within the refugee protection system, particularly the asylum system, are already in what we would describe as deliberate UK state severe poverty. I have articulated that in previous times to the committee and I touched upon it within the written evidence that we have provided. There has been, as we said in our recent evidence, a long-term degradation of the right to asylum by successive UK Governments, particularly the last few Conservative Governments of that right. That sadly reached its new nadir with the essentially the extinguishing of that right to seek asylum for the vast majority of refugees through the Nationality and Borders Act that was commenced in terms of asylum provisions on 28 June this year. What I am really describing is that there is systemic socioeconomic deprivation of rights to people seeking asylum within the UK so that, first of all, they are not allowed to work. Secondly, they are provided with what we would—we do not use this word lightly, but it is objectively a pittance to exist and survive on. If you are in what we would describe as institutional ex-hotel accommodation because it is not experienced as a hotel and there are 30,000 people and growing across the 90 plus thousand people in asylum accommodation across the UK who are in that type of accommodation, what they receive—people in hotels across Scotland at the moment, including Glasgow—is £1.24 per day per person. That goes for a child, £1.24 per day per person for that child. If you look at universal credit standard allowance, which is a low social security floor in our view anyway, people are way, way below that. That must be around 10-20 per cent of the universal credit standard allowance. However, if people are in the more traditional, conventional forms of accommodation within the asylum system—it is often called the jargon dispersal accommodation that flats within communities, which is better than being an institutional accommodation—they get £5.83 per person per day. We have shared that with the committee. That ranges, depending on the demographics in the family, around 40 per cent to 60 per cent of the value of the social security minimum, so that is the universal credit standard allowance. I do not say UK state sanction poverty pejoratively. I say it factually, because that is what it is. People cannot get out of it because they are denied the right to work, then people are entrapped. The consequence is that it has, for so many groups, the same for people who seek asylum. They are resilient individuals, but they are being tested, and some people cannot bear it. There has been an escalation in loss of life within the asylum system, so that is one of the tragic consequences of that. We have documented that in our evidence, and we think that the conditions for more of that are very much, sadly, still here across the UK. We have already moved between 10 per cent and 11 per cent in the headline rate, but as people around the committee will know, and as people who are experiencing poverty know, there is disproportionate impacts of the cost of living on the most vulnerable communities already. Then there are particular strands of spending that are essential like food, which are higher, frankly, than 10 per cent or 11 per cent in terms of the headline rate. It is a very severe impact. We are terrified of what we are going to be experiencing over this winter in the UK asylum system, including here in Scotland, because people simply do not have enough support already. The value of that inadequate support has been eroded still further by the cost of living increases. We think that it is a social emergency for the most vulnerable people, including, but not only people in the asylum system. We are seeing huge turbulence right now as the Deputy First Minister was articulating and the committee will be well aware, and that creates even greater uncertainty, too. As I said in my written evidence, the Home Office does not have the backs of people at this time—quite the opposite. Often they are pushing people to some of the most dangerous intersections of poverty that are imaginable within the UK. We urge the committee to play its part and, I am sure that it will, to articulate some of the depth of that poverty to the UK, particularly to the Home Office, and to encourage the Scottish Government to take more depth in very difficult circumstances to be fair to the Scottish Government in terms of its resources. I try to articulate this in the 10 actions that we have said for that Scottish social inclusion of refugees. We think that all of them are within the involve competence, and a lot of them do three things. They give presence and visibility to refugees across Scotland, so building up on some really good work that has been done in relation to Ukrainians. Secondly, we protect people. We have particular recommendations in there about protecting people such as exploitation survivors. In doing those 10 actions, we are also saying that that will prevent not only harm to people, but it could prevent escalation of unplanned costs as well through taking those actions. We have mentioned some of the particular issues that we would like to see priorities. The asylum system, and for many others such as people in the Afghan Bridgend hotels, in our view, are suffering organised abandonment by the UK state. We desperately need in those circumstances people in Scotland, the Scottish Government and the Scottish communities to come in there and not to abandon, but to be there with people so that they can contribute the way that people who are called refugees often want to do that. Ordinary people have extraordinary predicaments, and they have survived them. It is grim out there, but we can have the honest weight for it, and it is getting grimmer unless there is corresponding mitigation measures put in place. Ideally, the UK state starts to give a toss about the asylum system, because at the moment it is extinguishing it through the Nationality and Borders Act. Thanks very much, Groom. It does not make for easy listening. Somehow you managed to answer all three of my questions in your first response. I will give Danny an opportunity to come in on one of my later questions. Groom mentioned the steps that the Scottish Government is taking to increase support. We have been speaking this morning about the pressures that are facing the Scottish Government, which is working on a fixed budget with limited fiscal powers. However, it is clear that there is a difficult situation with any changes to one budget having to be taken from another. With that in mind, what would be your priorities going forward for increased support? To be honest, that is an incredibly difficult question to answer in the present circumstances, just to rewind slightly. I hope that you hear us loud and clear, but Graham has set out the social reality for human beings living in Scotland who are affected by punitive immigration designations that do not have the appropriate level of support attached to them. We were asked to come to the committee today to broadly answer three questions. How will the spending allocations for £23.24 set out in the spending review impact on poverty? If there are measures in the resource spending review that could increase poverty, what can be done to prevent that? What level of analysis do you expect to see in the £23.24 equality and favour Scotland budget? The reality is that circumstances have now outstretched our evidence and our ambition. The reality is that we face a completely unforeseen past-experience social impacts on some of our most vulnerable citizens who are supposed to be, in theory, protected under the racial provisions of international human rights law, racial provisions of colour, nationality and national origin. It is very clear that that is not in any way a shape or form being a consideration within the impacts of the UK mini budget or the broader budget. We outlined in our written submission to the best that we possibly could, where the resource spending review has made some semblance of strategic and specific interventions at minority ethnic communities in Scotland, translation services, pay disparity, mental health provision, disease prevention and the development of a quality strategy. However, the reality is in the short term, so from now until spring 2023, these communities and individuals and others across the UK and Scotland face an existential crisis. This is out of hand. We are both myself and Graham and colleagues across the third sector are extremely stretched in trying to respond to this. People are doing the best they can, but the situation is out of control. I have taken quite a lot of time here, so I am happy to pass back to the convener just now. Thank you, Deputy convener, but thank you both for setting out the reality on the ground, as it is at the moment, and your concerns going forward. I am going to bring in my colleague Jeremy Balfour to be followed by Pam Duncan Glancy. Thank you both for coming. I suppose that what we are trying to do today is, and I appreciate the situation that you are in today, but we have to look forward to next year's budget, and we have to remember that the Scottish budget will be here to screw to nice. We are here to screw to nice. UK, we are the Scottish Parliament, we are responsible for the decisions made here by our Parliament and by our Government. So, going forward, Danny, in regard to the budget for next year, which is what we are looking at today, not at the moment, what priorities would you want the Scottish Government to do for the next year's financial budget? Thanks for the question, Jeremy. I do not think that we can ignore the fact that the UK budget and the Scottish budget are inextricably linked and decisions made at Westminster have a direct impact on our fiscal independence or how we choose to spend our money in Scotland. Very singularly focused on the Scottish budget and what we have, we have called for a considerable period, but a much more strategic intervention with regard to race equality. It has been beneficial for the committee and other duty bearers more broadly. What are we talking about when we are talking about race? The positive duty within the Equality Act to take into consideration the impacts of decisions made by public services of our colour nationality, ethnic or national origin in Scotland, their multi-generational communities, their newer migrant communities, their refugees and asylum seekers, and the variation of circumstances. The Parliament has heard relentlessly across multiple committees of the continual structural inequality that affects people from different racial provisions. We outlined that, within the resource vendor reviewers, some specific minor mitigations, as I said, around translation services and others, but what we have called for and what would be highly beneficial moving forward would be something to replicate the sort of intervention that was made with the rural communities transformation game. We have called for a race equality framework in the action plans and the multiple policy levers that need to be influenced in order to transform that as for a race equality transformational investment scheme, and the fiscal budget to achieve that would have to be considered and reflected. There are things that we are not doing, which we could do. However, all of that is bound by the present reality. Annie, I will now move to a question from Pam Duncan-Glancy. Thank you, convener, and thank you both for the evidence that you have given so far and also the evidence that you have submitted in advance. I have to say that most of my questions have been covered in terms of the cost of living questions that I had, with the exception of one which is, so thank you for all that. How have your organisations been affected, so as well as your membership, but also your organisation has been affected by the cost of living crisis? Oh, sorry, convener, forgive me. I will start with Graham, if that is okay. Yes, significantly. In fact, Pam, for the question, I think that because we are working like Annie and many other first sector bodies at the front line of people who are already have to make survival decisions rather than having choices, the systems that were in place for them are trying to come back and re-emerge after the Covid pandemic restrictions have eased, including for ourselves as a front line organisation providing services to refugees. There has been a real challenge for us to try and make sure that we can still have the same quality and better contact with people. We have put in now a national helpline for all people who are seeking international protection, who are in Scotland and are looking to try to access it, but that is about signposting. It is about getting that contact, getting details and then signposting, and of course that signposting can lead to and will lead to us taking on the case and escalating and leading the case, especially in relation to people trying to access the asylum system itself. However, that has been an important part of our learning, which is to try to make ourselves more accessible in the kind of post-Covid phase that we are in. We also, as you would hope and expect, are now starting to get out and about in our working very much within where people are at. If it is people through our Afghan citizens information service and then we have some outreach work that they do through our integration workers with Afghan families within the bridging hotels in Scotland, we are doing the same as much as we can, because there are a lot of people in terms of the Ukraine residents who are in hotels as well as the elsewhere, and we are also doing the same as much as we can within the want to bear we are putting at the asylum institutional accommodation, such as there is a particular place that you think is highly inappropriate in Glasgow, but that many families in the asylum system are being put into and the thing is deeply inappropriate accommodation for families and also pregnant women and new mothers who are in there. We are working at re-emerging and reconfiguring—it is a bit of a pretentious term, but we are reconfiguring our services to try and make sure that we get the same quality and breadth of provision. However, one of the things that I did not really get a chance to say earlier, I just wanted to say it in terms of priorities. This comes through some of the work that we are doing now. We would really like to see the Scottish Government build refugees into its child poverty action plan, working specifically with local authorities and health boards legal duty to prepare and review, on an annual basis, its child poverty action plans. That is a specific thing that flows out of one of the provisions that we mentioned in our 10 actions that we submitted to the committee around poverty. It might be as later on, if it is, I will park it, but there is definitely an issue around concessionary travel as well, which is an absolutely essential measure in our opinion and in many other campaigners' provision that would be life changing for many people in the asylum process. We would like to see, for all the income groups, because we think that transport and access to transport is a social justice issue, and especially across the living social emergency. It has important, wider positive effects, not only mental wellbeing but also in terms of employment opportunities and being able to commute in childcare and all the rest of it. For people in the asylum process, going back to what I mentioned earlier, who cannot work, who do not get access to mainstream social security, Scottish child payment for example, then those individuals would be a transformative measure now. We have been disappointed with some of our discussions with Transport Scotland specifically in relation to a national pilot of that type of scheme to build up the evidence for inclusion to national entitlement card. I just wanted to flag up those two, because those are two issues that have really hit us very clearly since we've re-emerged from Covid and we've started to get out and about child poverty and poverty more broadly and the cost of living social emergency. Related to that is transport and specifically access to free bus travel. We really want the Scottish Government on Transport Scotland to revisit that over the coming year for the new budget because the demand that will come from people in the asylum process and the Welsh Refugee Council pilot showed that will be very strong. We think that it would help to mitigate some of the Scottish Government's rationale for saying that we need to reduce some concession to travel, because the demand wasn't there. For people in the asylum process, I can guarantee that the Welsh Refugee Council stuff shows that the demand will overwhelmingly be there and it will have wider positive benefits for people. It has a significant partner organisation, but we are, like many other first sector bodies, working with refugees very much out and about across Scotland. It is across Scotland now, not only in Glasgow, given, as I said in a written evidence, that we have protection populations across the country and that will continue. Thank you for that, Graeme. Dani, are you able to respond as well, and in particular, on the impact of the cost of living crisis on your organisation? Thanks very much. I would like to address two points. First point on the direct impact on our organisation. The second point is responding to Graeme on the child poverty action plan. What could potentially be our ambition with regard to devolved social security powers to mitigate issues such as no recourse to public funds? First of all, on the cost of living crisis on our organisation, I will take the opportunity to outline the reality for BEMIS staff and employees and our members. That is replicated, and that might be replicated across the third sector. Ironically, we work within a domain that has equalities and human rights. Our core funding comes from the Scottish Government, from the Equalities and Human Rights budget. That budget has been largely stagnant for over a decade. I think that it is increased by maybe one or two million between 2010 to 2022, which, as we know, would effectively be a significant real-terms budget cut for people who are working on the front line to support communities through long-term race equality ambitions, island processes and the pandemic, now into a cost of living crisis. In terms of the third sector and my colleagues, that is a largely non-unionised workforce. It is a third sector workforce. There is no immediate union that you can enjoy to collectively bargain for progression and all the sort of things that we see positively coming from teachers' unions and railway workers' unions. Those are people who are working on the front line with regard to equalities and human rights and working with some of the most vulnerable people in challenges in the Scottish society. The cost of living crisis for people in that environment who are employed in that environment is significant. There is no clear pathway to increasing people's wages or keeping up with the cost of living crisis because there is no mechanism for collective bargaining. That will have an impact on everybody's motivation for mental health. All the things that we know are affected when people are put into financial hardship and that obviously then has an impact on people's work. That is worthy of the committee being aware of that and noting that. Maybe the question from the Scottish Government how it intends to increase the equalities and human rights budget for core funding, for equalities and human rights organisations to reflect the cost of living crisis. At present, our compatriot organisations have six-month funding, so we have funding now from October until March. That goes against the principles of giving people stability and recognition and being able to plan progressively for the future. The budget decisions not only impact everybody, but impact people who need our services and the impact people providing the services. That is the reality of where we are at the moment. In terms of the broader ambitions that could be progressed via the scheme acknowledged by the child poverty action plan and the provision of social security in a devolved setting, we have been clear in our written submission on the future of social security in Scotland that we need to have a much clearer understanding of how many children, especially but how many people are affected by the purity of immigration designation, no recourse to public funds in Scotland and how do we use our devolved powers and our devolved social security to bypass immigration restrictions in order to provide support to people who require it via education, devolved via health and to make sure that everybody, as much as possible, can be encapsulated into our social security system for those who need it most. Thank you for that. I appreciate that I've known for the questions at this point. Thank you very much. We'll head into our next set of questions and I'll hand over to my colleague Emma Roddick, who will be followed by Miles Briggs. Emma. Thank you, convener. My questions are for yourself, Danny. We heard earlier from the Deputy First Minister around issues with actions here very much depending on when and whether we get money from decisions made down south and how much money that is. The UK fiscal announcement last week will, of course, have massive implications in many ways. What's your take on the human rights implications of it? Beyond comprehension. We can only tell the directors, but we don't know what the impacts will be. The closest thing that we have as a comparison is the immediate impact of lockdown in March 2020. We saw an existential growth in destitution, isolation and mental health impacts on the ethnic minority communities in Scotland, and, in particular, on those who suffer. Again, Graeme Pocker, it's not a personal opinion, it's a fact, it's a fact of law, but it's an institutionally racist immigration system. Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination outlines clearly that preventing access to the same level of support that the general population and other people have on the basis of colour, nationality and international origin is a form of institutional racism, and that's what our immigration designations are, particularly the implementation of a no recourse to public funds. In the coming period, and again, what was outlined earlier as reality has now surpassed evidence and expectation, this is an existential threat to people's lives. We wrote to the Secretary of State for Scotland and we wrote to the First Minister, and I'll just repeat what we outlined, and some of this is complicated because it cuts across reserved and devolved powers. Those who will be impacted by the mini-budget and the cost of living and inflation are those subjected to no recourse to public funds. Disproportion at the number of ethnic minority people in precarious employment, zero hours contract, small business holders and students, asylum seekers and newly arrived refugee families and individuals, elderly ethnic minority people, single parents and mothers. The outcomes of that will be people will struggle to feed themselves in their families, people and families will struggle to keep warm, leading to an increase in significant ill health, people will suffer significant mental health, burden and trauma, people will fall into significant and irretrievable debt, affecting them and their children's life chances in future. Most vulnerable through ill health and frailty may not get through the winter and isolation and loneliness will increase significantly. That's the reality at present at what we're facing. There's minor mitigation being put in place by UK and Scottish Government. It won't be enough. That's the impact of budget statements that don't take into consideration people's lives, which are human rights. Thank you for that comprehensive answer. The priorities of the spending review here, particularly the ones around child poverty and the climate crisis, are things that the committee has heard before, which have a particular effect on minority ethnic communities, particularly those who are single parents. Budgets are about decisions and prioritising. Do you feel that the prioritisation of those issues is something that you support? Is it a contrast with last week's announcement? The prioritisation of protecting children and parents and families will always be supported. However, it would be beneficial also to hear Graham's position on this and the Scottish Refugee Council's expertise. People subjected to no recourse to public funds and purit of immigration designations who are in theory supposed to be protected by the UK and the Scottish Government's signature and incorporation of the international convention and the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination are not appropriately reflected within those policy decisions and we covered it within our written submission. Those catch-all, including increasing the £25 to £25 child payment, will include some or maybe even the vast majority of ethnic minority families in Scotland who are incredibly diverse in and of themselves, but I will not cover everybody. We are sort of banging our heads off a brick wall talking about this issue and no recourse to public funds and those who are most vulnerable, most susceptible to destitution, who were acutely affected by lockdown and who are not able to access self-isolation support grants and all the mitigation measures that are put in place by the UK and the Scottish Government are not included in that. They will continue to be isolated and facing significant and existential threats. In our written submission, we put forward ideas about how we share information from the DWP and Social Security Scotland to ensure that everybody who can access something can access something. That is not in place at the moment, but there are people in Scotland who do not have access to that support and we need to know who they are. We know what anecdote they are because we speak to them and we engage with them, but we do not know it as a stake. We do not know it as the mechanisms of the state and the state are supposed to be there to protect these people regardless of their immigration designation, and we do not have that at present. What I am going to ask is that we have questions to come from Miles Briggs and Pam Duncan-Glancy and in the interest of time if they could roll their questions one after the other and we will finish up with Pam. Miles Briggs, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. I wanted to ask two questions, one with regards to partner organisations within local government especially and not just within this current budget year, but previous ones where local government have seen cuts to their budget, a decision by the Scottish ministers to do that, and in what way would a flat cash allocation to local authorities impact on your organisation and the services that local government helped deliver? Graham, do you want to come in on that? Thanks, Miles. Before I answer that, I just wanted to just fall in very briefly from what Danny was saying there about no recourse to public funds, that we would have hoped and expected to see no recourse to public funds because it is such a broad and highly restrictive regime within the budget statement and we would look to see that there next year because that is people who are, when we use the phrase, most vulnerable, we are in the most vulnerable socioeconomic and equal predicament and they literally have nothing often. That has repercussions, including on to local authorities. I try to segue over to local authorities. I am not an accountant, I am not a technical expert with finance but to me I read that a flat cash in terms of jargon, but strike news, is basically in a cost of living inflationary environment that is a kind of cup, essentially. Not one that MD would want to, but in an inflationary environment it can result in real terms, just cuts it, and nobody would want that. I am sure that the Scottish Government would do the same in that. In terms of the impacts on that, then it does have an impact on third sector and communities because the third sector is there partly because, as charities, we are there to be much more accessible, to be less rule bound by legislation, et cetera, to be there for the people who are there, but we can only do that if we have enough resources ourselves to do that. That is where it is really important that there is partnership or at least effective liaison between local authorities and third sector organisations on the provision of the key things that need to happen. No recourse to public funds is a good example of that. There has been a lot of work done in Scotland over the past few years around Fairway Scotland, as in a national initiative for housing rights organisations, refugee rights organisations. It is essentially working to try and apply housing first principles to people who are no recourse to public funds. That is what it is trying to do. It is bloody difficult because no recourse to public funds wipes away entitlement to the key social security and housing homelessness provisions for people who are subject to no recourse to public funds. However, if we have partnerships that we have tried to do in Glasgow, particularly where between RSLs and third sector bodies, really great organisations that are safe in Scotland, for example, who are a charity but have strategic relationships with RSLs and others, for the provision of accommodation to people who are, in this case, refused asylum seekers, who are seeking to re-access the asylum procedure. The savings that that makes to me are incalculable not only in mental health deterioration but also in terms of trying to prevent people, prevent unplanned costs on local authorities and others. We really need to come together across Scotland with local authorities and charities because the facts are that we've got a highly unstable macroeconomic environment. There is very little from what we can see visibility of vulnerable groups within the room in decisions that are currently being made at the UK level. There are casualties, as has been the main theme of this evidence, particularly as Danny has articulated it. In less local authorities and third sector bodies work really closely together, there will be more risks of people not only suffering significant mental health deterioration and then all the costs that come from that, but a higher risk of exploitation from organised crime groups as well, because there are society crucial people to the margins, then they are potentially met by organised crime groups, and that can make community safety much more of a challenge, because organised crime, of course, gets involved in multiple criminal activities. The key point is that, if we don't come together locally, what is actually going to happen is much greater costs when individuals are affected and have a higher number of people, and then on the services that are trying to meet them. That is why it is so important that the next budget and the Scottish budget has no recourse to public funds and has clear visibility of people in the asylum process and wider minority ethnic communities visible in it, because we didn't really see that within the budget when we looked at the documents. Obviously, that is why we said in our recommendations 1-2 and 3, I think that it was, and that Scottish actions were all about trying to give visibility to people in the policy making process, because that in itself, if it is done reasonably well, can prevent people falling into the predicaments that local authorities and third sector bodies have to come together on. I hope that that is helpful in terms of an answer. That is a very limited time. My second question before I have been hearing Danny was with regards to what engagement you have had with Government about discussing these priorities. I think that we, as a committee, have heard loud and clear your ask around people with no recourse to public funds, but what sort of engagement have you had with Government on that as well? We have had some engagement around issues around child poverty and social security. We think that there needs to be, as we said in our suggested 10 actions, a kind of ramping up of awareness and education around entitlement for those provisions, because they are really important. I think that the other area that we have not had engagement in, and it will be touched on, I am sure in the following session, is what I emphasise is housing. Housing needs to be much more prominently thinking in the next budget, because we see wider the most vulnerable communities, socioeconomic and legal communities, who are frankly put into, across the UK, not only in Scotland, into what is not suitable accommodation. Often it is privately owned accommodation by big landlords, who are taking public monies to provide what is actually not good accommodation that anybody would sign up to. There is a strategic issue around the availability of social housing that we would really emphasise. In many ways, what we have seen in relation to the Afghan populations and the Ukrainian populations is that, across the UK, it is not only in Scotland to show the fragility of the lack of availability of appropriate social housing. We think that that is something, if I do not get a chance to say any more, it is something that needs to be prioritised and given prevalence in the next future budget measures. I will hand over to Pam, and if she wants to come in and wrap that up into the answers to Pam, that would be helpful. My questions are around the effect of the flat cash allocation to local authorities. I am keen to know what the impact, in addition to what you have already covered, will be the impact in areas such as the employability cuts. I appreciate the point about employability in the intersections with the people that you represent, but I am keen to know whether there are any implications of that. Further, my last question for this session is about what you would like to see the Government do to engage your organisation. Not specifically about the actions that it takes, but how would you like them to work with you going forward in the budget and processes? Thanks very much. Just to cover my old question and Pam's question as distinctly as possible, I also want to provide the committee and listeners, general public, more broadly, with key information about the infrastructure and what we are talking about. In 2016, we launched, along with the Scottish Government and partners, the race equality framework. For Scotland, from 2016 to 2030, over each parliamentary cycle, the framework and its overaction ambitions are distilled into what are called the race equality action plans, so the last one was 17 to 21. We were interrupted by the pandemic and everyone focused on that, naturally, and now we are moving into this parliamentary cycle again. I hope that the race equality action plan has over 80 action points across six key policy themes. Some of them are the responsibility of the Scottish Government, but the vast, vast, vast majority are the responsibility of other duty bearers and a significant amount are the responsibility of local authorities. We have reiterated this continuously at other committees and in other meetings, but the current budgetary allocations at both national and local level, local government level, are not compatible with the Scottish Government's race equality framework or the action plan. The stark truth is that this will be exacerbated by the current cost of living crisis, and we know that budgets are finite. If we continue on this path and trajectory, we will observe small, non-impactful symbolic gains, while austerity and recession enhanced and exacerbated by Covid and the cost of living crisis will weld a generation of ethnic minority youth community further systemic inequalities. That is the truth. There is no other way to put it out there, despite all of us working as best we possibly can, despite the best intentions of Government and ministers. That is the reality. That is where we are at the moment. Thank you for that, Danny. That was really bleak but clear. Graham, do you have anything to add on the process point or, Danny, if you want to finish, then we can bring it back in after that. The process of budgeting should follow up at what is called a human rights-based approach, a panel process. It should be about participation, accountability and discrimination, equality and legality. The panel process in terms of budgeting priorities should be hardwired into everything that we do, and it should be on-going. It should have a degree of flexibility to respond to the crises that we are facing at the moment. The truth is that, like the pandemic or systems, the way that we conduct our business is not capable of responding in real time appropriately to the circumstances that we face, and we should all—Government, local government, first sector and everybody—take account of that and think about how we learn from that. Thank you. Graham, do you have anything further to add to those points? Yes, I promise a good brief. I think that lived experience is the current term for people who are at the front end of the bad stuff. My main recommendation is that, alongside the panel approach that has been applied all year round, we really put lived experience at the heart of it. We do that not because we think that it is the right thing to do, because it is, of course, the right thing to do, but also because, objectively, it gives you excellent insights into what it is like and what it can be done to overcome it. In other words, it is not a charitable thing to do either. It is a deeply important ingredient, but under a neglected part of effective policymaking, which should be about what is described here, what is actually happening in terms of how people are managing the issues, and then how we can overcome it. It needs to be at the heart of the process. Of course, we have said that the first three points of our 10 actions are all about process, inclusion and involvement of refugees in policymaking. All that we are doing there is what people within the gender equality movement, the disabilities equality movement and the race equality movement have done for decades and decades, which is trying to get visibility and awareness of the experiences of groups into the mainstream of the lifeblood of life, social economic life and political life. That is what we are trying to do. The budget process should be set in that as its target. That is especially given that the truth is that, as the Deputy First Minister said, options are being restricted through wider macroeconomic pressures, so it is all the more important that people come together. We need to put a lived experience at the heart of that. It is not just the right thing to do in principle. It will deliver a lot of benefits for the accuracy and precision of effective policy. The lived experience, rather than people who are much more at these types of sessions in the budget process, is because people will tell much more useful things often than people who have got job titles around policy manager or whatever within third sector bodies, because they are experiencing it and actually have got unique insights that, once they have probably no other, they would rather not have because often it is bad stuff, but they have got it and that should be at the front in a style. That is what I would say for the budget process as much more gently. Thank you very much to both of you for joining us this morning and giving your evidence and also for your written submissions. Just to let you know that the committee did undertake human rights training over the summer and that the panel principles are forefront in our mind and we think that that is a key way that we can ensure that we do our scrutiny work to the best that we can do. I will suspend briefly for a changeover of witnesses. If we can come back in approximately five minutes, that would be helpful. Thank you. Welcome back everyone and I welcome to the meeting our third panel of this morning. We have Gordon Macrae, who is the Assistant Director of Shelter Scotland who is joining us in the room. We also have Frank McKillop, who is the Head of Policy and Research at Enable Scotland, who is joining us remotely. I have just reminded members before we started that we cannot direct all the questions to Gordon because he is in the hot seat in the room, we have to remember that we have Frank online. As always, I will ask members to direct their questions to one of the witnesses to start us off and then if the other witness wants to come in. Frank, if you just give me a wave, I will make sure that I am keeping my eye on you there. If you give our colleagues in broadcasting a second to turn your microphone on before you start, that would be helpful. Thank you for your written submissions and thank you both for making time to come in today. Deputy convener Natalie Dawn is going to start us off with some questions around about the impact of the rising cost of living. Thank you convener and good morning to the panel. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. I just want to start off with a fairly general question to open up the discussion this morning. If you could tell us how the rising cost of living is impacting your organisations and the individuals that you support. I will go to Gordon first and I will turn to Frank after. Thank you. It is safe to say that we have never seen a time like this, that the cost of living crisis is accelerating the depth of homelessness. It spends a bad housing in Scotland and the most recent annual homelessness statistics show just how that is impacting in the communities that we are here to serve. It was not lightly that we described the last homelessness statistics as demonstrating that Scotland's housing and homelessness system is on the brink of failure. There is a very real bubble of people trapped in temporary accommodation. Homelessness in Scotland is largely indoors, not outdoors, but that shouldn't hide it from our gaze and our understanding. The cost of living crisis is not necessarily a new phenomenon for a lot of the communities that we are talking about. The ability to access vital services, people with multiple and complex needs, is getting harder. It is harder even still for people without the support and capacity to access those services at a point of crisis. It is also beginning to impact on people who just quite simply need a home. The homelessness problem is relatively simple. We need more houses. That is why Shelter Scotland published our proposal of a Scottish housing emergency action plan a couple of weeks ago, because we think there is more that can be done here in Scotland. We can't be immune from the trends coming from elsewhere, but there are different choices that we can make that can improve the lives of people here. Thanks to the committee for inviting and able to make a submission. For us, the impact is twofold. It is on our members and the people that we work for, disabled people in the communities around Scotland and the organisational impact, I think, is primarily felt through our workforce. Turning to the people that we work for firstly, it is well documented that disabled people are among the most at risk of poverty in any circumstances. Some of the most comprehensive research that has been done on that was by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation back in 2016 to some of the headline findings from that, that 31 per cent of people in a family with a disabled person live in poverty, 44 per cent of disabled young adults live in poverty, 66 per cent of disabled people who live alone live in poverty and perhaps the most worrying at the moment, 38 per cent of households with a disabled person experience full poverty. That was back in 2016. We know that Covid exacerbated that yet further, and we know that the current energy crisis and cost of living crisis once again will be falling disproportionately on disabled people. As something that we have serious concerns about the impact on disabled people, organisationally, I think that the biggest impact that we are feeling is through our workforce, enabled as one of Scotland's largest social care charities. We employ roughly 2,500 people, 2,200 of them are front-line social care workers in communities all over Scotland. As we know, the social care workforce has often not been one of the better paid professions in Scotland. We have got to a better position, where pay, certainly everyone at Enable, is paid substantially above the current real living wage. The Scottish Government had agreed last year to come in with an increased funded pay rate of £10.50 an hour, £60 an hour above what was then the real living wage, but we nevertheless know that cost of living impacts are hitting our workforce quite hard. The Living Wage Foundation has just this month announced the new real living wage of £10.90 an hour at a 10.1 per cent uplift, obviously reflective of the rate of inflation at the present time. There is still me a significant challenge there in the living wage foundation that has recognised that pay in social care across the sector has to be higher than it is. We really need the Scottish Government to react to that, because otherwise the impact, as we know, of excellent social care is delivered by the workforce. Unless we have a workforce that feels secure in their employment, who feels secure in their home life that they can afford all their bills and can bring their whole selves to work when they are supporting the people in our communities, then our whole social care system would be at risk. It is vitally important that front-line pay in social care is addressed, and that is certainly something from Enable. We are very proud that we are an award-winning living wage accredited employer, but it is certainly something that we need to see a swift reaction from the Scottish Government to implement an uplift in social care-funded pay to reflect the new real living wage and, indeed, significantly beyond the real living wage. Not only because of the cost of living pressures but also because of the recruitment and retention pressures, that remains a significant factor in the social care sector. Thank you very much both for your responses to that. I suppose to follow on from that then, Frank. The Scottish Government has set out certain steps that are taken to support people through this crisis, but we have been speaking this morning about the extreme pressures facing the Scottish Government because they are working on a fixed budget with limited fiscal powers, and any change to one budget has to be found from another. Given those constraints, are you supportive of the steps that the Scottish Government has taken so far and what would be your priorities going forward through that? I think that what we welcome and, again, I think that even looking at the resource spending review, as other witnesses have said today, a lot of that has been torn up by recent events, as the economy has moved quite significantly over the past few weeks. What we have welcomed is the maintenance of funding in health and social care, but that has been held up. The increased funding is not being impacted by the immediate cuts that have been brought about. We do have concerns. We note that the Scottish Fiscal Commission, even at the time of the resource spending review, noted that inflationary pressures meant that the 10 per cent uplift to health and social care by 26, 27 was essentially a 1 per cent uplift in real terms. That predated some of the spiralling inflation that we have seen, so I am worried to see what the impact there is going to be. By welcoming upholding health and social care investment, we recognise that a big part of that has to be the NHS's Covid recovery, but social care has to have enhanced funding. I have mentioned just on the basic level front line pay, but I think that the ambition that the Scottish Government has is that we very much welcome to implement a national care service. We know that that is going to require significant funding. The independent review of adult social care in Scotland, led by Derek Feeley, estimated the cost of a national care service under his proposed model, would be an additional £660 million a year. That was based on front line pay at 9.50 million, so if we project front line pay, hopefully somewhere 11.50 or higher, we are looking at £860 million a year and by the time we get to 2026, it is not unreasonable to say that that would be over a billion a year that would have to be found in addition for social care. I think that, while we, again, listen to the Deputy First Minister this morning, entirely appreciate the frustrations that he has about the limits that he has to work within, we certainly welcome that health and social care remains prioritised, but there is greater investment that is required there. The second strand of that in terms of employability, we did have some concerns about, needless to say, about some of the cuts that are proposed to employability and the impact that could potentially have on disabled people, but we specifically focused on what we welcome in it. It was recognising health and social care as a high priority for the coming years. We very much agree with the Scottish Government's stated objectives when it comes to housing and homelessness. It is a rights-based system that is about ensuring that I assist to more social housing. There is cash being made available through discretionary housing payments in the resource spending review. I recently announced some Surround Tenants grant fund. We very much welcomed the reversal of the decision to make that a loan fund originally and turn it into grants. We also recognise that it is not touching the sides of the scale of the problem. The budget pots are quite anatomised. We are trying to understand where the money is going into prevention and through local government cuts. How is that investment? How do we know what is having an impact on the welcome initiatives that are housing first, which require a significant cultural shift within local authority and homelessness services? It is really difficult to understand how much money is going where, what is the benefit of it, what should we do more of and what should we do less of. What we come back to is when the Scottish Government and COSLA jointly created the ending homelessness together plan, there was an estimate of what the transition funding was required to do that. The available cash fell a long way short of that. I made out policy makers would say that there is a negotiation to be had, there is work to be done with local authorities about what is co-funding and what is transitionary, but what we see are the results. The results are a record number of children in temporary accommodation with a reducing prospect of permanent housing. We see more and more people being placed in hotel accommodation and in suitable accommodation based on the standards that are coming forward. We recognise that local authorities have been asked to do more with less, and that is not a sustainable position. We have to have an honest conversation about what is the priority for us at Shelter Scotland. We think that the priority should be ensuring that we drive forward with the increasing access to social affordable secure housing. We think that that can be done by reprofiling some of the funds to encourage more buying in the open market. We think that that should be done at a national level, not just making a bid pot available to local authorities, but setting an objective. Something odd that Scotland criticised the last affordable house building programme for was not having any objective beyond just the numerical target. We think that the objective should be what the research that we commissioned with Chartered Institute of Housing and Scottish Federation of Housing Associations to reduce affordable housing need in Scotland. That is a measurable impact of the levels of housing poverty. That is not a stated goal. The only stated goal is 110,000 by 10 years. Housing to 2040 did stay a midpoint target of 50,000. That is no longer a target. We need to know what the plan is. We need to know how it is going to be delivered, and we need to know how that will lift people out of poverty, out of temporary accommodation and give our youngsters a real chance for a future. Thank you very much, Gordon. I will hand over to Pam Duncan-Glancy now for our first night of questions, Pam. Thank you, convener, and good morning to you both. Thank you again for the submissions that you have sent in advance, but also for the questions that you have answered so far. In a similar vein to my colleague Natalie Donne, I wondered if you could set out—if it is okay, I will start with Frank on that particular question, and I will come back to you, Gordon. I wonder if you could set out some of the realities of what disabled people are having to do in the crisis that is the cost-of-living crisis and, in particular, around fuel poverty and how it is affecting what they do on a daily basis. What we are seeing from among our members who interact with us in a lot of the community groups that we run around Scotland, is probably the most heartbreaking that we hear. It is often people having to restrict the amount of care and support hours that they are contracting, and that is where, as we know, there are charges that are applied to a lot of social care that people access beyond the budget that they have been allocated through social work. We are hearing people having to cut back on care and support hours that they would pay for in addition to that budget allowance. That has a direct impact on how active and engaged they can be in their community, which is the antithesis of what charities enable us to believe in supporting disabled people to be fully involved and included in their community. I think that our fears are certainly heading into the Scottish winter. We are certainly welcomed that the UK Government has acted to, I think, stem the worst of the projected spiralling of fuel costs. I think that the freezing at least helps with that, but we should never lose sight of, from October 1, the price of fuel for pretty much every household in Britain will still go up, and will still go up reasonably substantially. That will impact people in particular, and as we know, poorer people are living in poverty. As we know, that disproportionately impacts disabled households. They are more likely to have prepaid metres. They are more likely to be on the more expensive methods of paying for energy, and that reflects the amount that you use at that time. There might perhaps be a bit of shielding from the worst of the impacts when payment is based on usage than those individual bills that people are facing over the winter months. It could be quite horrific, even with the capping that the UK Government has introduced. That is certainly our concern. The biggest, and we may get to that horrific situation in the winter where people are choosing not to keep their homes or are cutting back on the amount of food that they eat and stuff like that. That is certainly something that we fear, but the immediate impact that we are already seeing from the cost of living crisis is people, unfortunately, cutting back on their hours of support and being less active in the community as a result of that. Thank you very much, Frank. As someone who uses social care, I cannot imagine what that must be like for people, or I cannot not to have it and not to be able to rely on it. It is tragic. The Scottish Government has said that it is doing everything that it can for disabled people and to help them through the cost of living crisis. Do you agree, and do you think that there is anything more that they could be doing? It is always that frustration that we always want more to be done. Again, I hear the Deputy First Minister's frustration at the limitations that he is working on and the challenge to others to come up with alternatives. We would certainly like to see some more action around care charging. We know that there is the ambition, as part of a national care service, that care charging would be abolished. We would certainly like to see that happen. We would like to see that come through in the bill in its final form, but we cannot wait four years. That is a real impact on people now. If there were measures possible to remove care charging for disabled people, that would certainly make an immediate impact. I wish that there was limitless money to make that happen. I appreciate those pressures, but as a priority, if we believe in the human right for people to be included, we think of the UN Charter on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in article 19 about the right to be included in your community. If we really believe in that, if that is important to us as a country, we have to find a way of making that a reality, and ensuring that people have all the support that they require to be fully engaged and active in their community is an important step that can be taken. As others have said, politics is about decisions and priorities. Our view is that that should be a priority for any Government. Gordon, I was hoping to hear from you a little bit about the impacts of the cost-loving crisis on your members in particular, but also your thoughts on the impacts of the rent freeze and what difference will that make to people in Scotland? In terms of the impact on the people that we work with, first of all, the impact falls disproportionately on people with protected characteristics. We know that one of the big choke points in the Scottish housing system is a lack of larger properties. We know that there is a correlation. I would not want to put any stronger than that because the research does not really exist, but there is definitely a correlation with households from a first to a second generation—immigrant background, refugee status and people with both physical and mental impairments. The need to provide adaptive accommodation is a real struggle in which there is a live legal challenge right now around what the expectations we have on public bodies to meet the housing support needs when they are assessed, and that is not happening consistently. We know that the overall availability of properties, the availability of cash and the ability of public bodies to go and secure accommodation in the open market is very limited, and that falls disproportionately. We have also never truly done the gendered analysis of the ending homelessness together framework that has been long-promised and is now well overdue. In terms of the second half of your question, are the Scottish Government doing everything that it can? No, we would not have published an action plan setting out what else we think it could be doing. There is a range of options available. The rent freeze for us is good news in terms of stopping more people becoming homeless, but it has a relatively marginal impact because of the effect of housing benefit on people at the lowest end. We also know that many social landlords had relatively modest plans for the coming year, not universally, but we want to see rents as low as practically possible. We also need to understand the unintended consequences of that. At a time when the revenue books of social landlords seek funding from borrowing to meet their net zero carbon targets and to build the new social homes, any compound impact of a reduction that is unfunded could risk choking off the new supply of social housing. For us, the question around the rent freeze is whether it has additional resource attached to mitigate that impact. We understand that it may be for the initial six months, but there is an interest in having the powers for two subsequent six-month periods. Is that forecast available, the financial forecast, in terms of housing benefit and revenue? As a housing home society, it seems almost chudlish to be asking questions about something that is reducing the housing costs of people. What we know in housing is that you pull the thread in one bit and it starts to unfurl somewhere else. We very much welcome anything that keeps people in the home that they have, but there are many unanswered questions. There was not really much engagement before the announcement. We are now the best part of three weeks in. We are getting a lot of phone calls from very worried tenants who do not know whether they are supposed to pay the rent increase that has come through since the 6th of September. What are the rights, and we cannot answer that just now. It is a bit of a godot, but the intention is one that we share, but we just need to know the detail. Thank you for that. I agree that I would like to know more on the details well. I hope that that will become a bit clearer next week, but thank you for that. I have no other questions at this point. I am just wondering, Pam, if you have questions for the next theme in spending priorities, if you want to start us off there and then we will bring Jeremy in after that. Thank you, convener. Moving on to the spending priorities. In particular, we have already mentioned employability. I think that Frank, you raised that as well. Are you aware, Frank, of any impact that the employability services or the employability cuts will have on the employability services that you deliver? I think that immediately we are feeling that some of the contracts that we have in place do not have immediate fears about. I think that renewal of those contracts further into the future is where we would have a potential concern. Certainly, it is something that we are actively engaged in. It is to say to the Scottish Government about what the nature of the cuts where those cuts are going to fall is going to be. Some of the early assurances that we have had is that employability for disabled people will be less impacted than some of the other programmes that were planned. That is something that we want to see. It is a concern that we have that Scotlanders seem to be lagging a little bit on addressing the disability employment gap. The disability employment gap in Scotland sits at roughly 32.8 per cent, which is higher than the UK-wide average of 28.4 per cent. We also note that the disability pay gap in Scotland at 18.5 per cent is the highest of the four UK nations, so we certainly feel that that is a priority area for action. We would certainly have concerns if, as we have seen in the £53 million cut to employability, we have concerns that that is misdirected and that that is perhaps an error. We have no doubt that that will impact us as an organisation going forward, certainly to future years, but we would certainly feel that that is the wrong priority. I noted the Deputy First Minister's comments at the time of the statement that it was related to a more buoyant jobs market. The barriers to employment for disabled people are not the number of vacancies that are in the economy. Those barriers are far more complex and specialist employability support is extremely important to support a lot of disabled people into the jobs market. We just felt that that was perhaps a misconnection between the two issues that we would certainly like to see rectified. That is helpful and really clear. My question in the similar area around some of the spending priorities for you, Gordon, was that you highlighted in your submission to us that there has been a 17 per cent rise in children's homelessness, which is tragic. You have also noted that the flat cash settlement is setting councils up to fail. Do you have concerns about any of the priorities in the recent DFM cuts or the flat cash settlements in terms of the delivery of the child poverty delivery plan, particularly in relation to housing? Yes, and I think that it is mainly around the local government settlement that is the concern. In our action plan, we called for an audit of the money that is spent on housing and homelessness services. That is because it is quite atomised. Some local authorities are in partnership with local health bodies and how that is delivered is not always obvious. Therefore, we have been able to track how that goes up and down over the years, which can be very challenging, especially for a third sector body like us. What we can see is that a flat cash settlement is, in effect, a cut just at a time when demand is growing. The Scottish Government, to its credit, has repeatedly brought in injected pots of cash at various steps. We recognise that it is not a recent history and that it has not been a one-moment-only event. However, that does not allow for the type of planning and the type of quality services that we think could have the long-term impact. What we have called for is some different choices. On the capital side, we can choose to make sure that all the money is already allocated, so not even if we do not increase the capital programme. However, let us make sure that all that goes into social housing rather than the mid-market rent and low-cost home ownership. We think that that is a proportionate response to the nature of the crisis right now. On the revenue side, because the pressures do not fall equally across all 32 local authorities, there is a role for an emergency fund of the sort that the Scottish Government has brought in in the past to really target that money at where homelessness is most acute and where the pressure to access accommodation is most acute. That is largely in the east. The challenges in the west tend to be more around access to properties and the work done with local authority and RSLs, whereas in the east it is literally just the number of homes that are available. However, the service delivery side of that is where we see, as we saw recently, people have been asked to go to Newcastle to access seven days' emergency accommodation, and that was deemed a reasonable offer. Those families had children about to go to school in Edinburgh, and another person had a job in Edinburgh. That is not reasonable. We know why local authorities are needing to make an offer and do what they can. They cannot do more without access to more resource and more capability. We think that there are different choices without necessarily unpicking the whole of the spending priorities of the Scottish Government. Thank you. I have no other questions in that area. Many thanks for that. I will turn now to questions from Jeremy Balfour. Thank you, convener. I want to go back to previous questions asked by Pam around the legislation that is going to be introduced next week. I appreciate we don't know the legislation, we are going to see it, I think, an hour before committee 6. However, I have had a number of constituents, and obviously this is in Edinburgh, and there may be more issues, but a number of people who have got rent to buy properties, so their mortgage has been paid by the rent, with the mortgage possibly now going up because of inflation and interest rates. Are you concerned that these people will have to withdraw their flat properties from the market? One of the other unforeseen circumstances could be less housing available for rent, because people can't meet their mortgage payments. One of the things that we would say is that it shouldn't be a given that an extreme example of a lender repossession of the property that a sitting tenant should be evicted. There are ways of looking at the grounds for possession that would ensure that the tenant who has paid their rent throughout the time that they have met their contractual obligations should, given the relatively high number of open market purchases that are by-to-let landlords, be attractive to having a sitting tenant. We would certainly look to in the emergency legislation whether there should be a suspension of the grounds for lender possession during that period just to protect tenants. In the broader point of the trend of private landlords leaving the market, it is certainly happening. It is difficult to identify the difference between the number of landlords leaving and the number of properties leaving the sector—the two are not necessarily the same. That is why I come back to our proposal about the Scottish Government having its own buying properties. Again, if there are landlords' property owners in financial crisis, it is reasonable to seek to support them. One of the ways that they can do that is to market rent or a suitable rate and to seek to purchase that and to keep the tenant in the property. Otherwise, we find more people being made homeless and more people coming into the state system at a time when we do not have the properties to meet their needs. A prigmatic proportionate response is to think creatively about how landlords and financial peril have an exit route, if that is the right thing for them, but that the tenant retains their tenancy. Last week, in the evidence that we took, many of the groups said that there wasn't open transparency in regard to how the budget was set last year. There wasn't particular engagement, they didn't get the information required. Do you agree that additional information would be helpful when engaging in the budget process as we look forward to next year? I'm happy to start with my own comment. Go to Gordon Shaw. It would certainly be helpful to us as an organisation and as a charity if we did have an earlier site of the considerations that we're going into the budget process. I think that our submissions in that process will generally be around our priority areas, around good funding for health and social care, funding for the front-line workforce, support for employability, support for people remaining active and engaged in their community, and the opportunities that there are people with disabilities and other disabled people to participate. We would certainly feel more able to make the most constructive possible submissions if we had the best possible information on which to base that. I reflect on the Deputy First Minister's challenge. We would be better equipped to perhaps offer some alternatives and some suggestions if we were partied to some more of the information. I think that there is always the risk that engaging the third sector with limited scope and a fairly wide and broad agenda there. We will always default to our main priority issues and I think that we can engage more constructively if there is more information available to us about the parameters that the Government is working within. We would probably be able to offer some more innovative solutions because, needless to say, we all want to get the best that we possibly can, not only for the people that we represent as an organisation but for Scotland more widely. We certainly want to be able to engage in finding solutions and not always just be lobbying, sort of lying in a space that we don't really have the full information around the parameters that we're working within. That would certainly be helpful to us as an organisation. From a Shelter Scotland perspective, I can make no complaint about the level of access and engagement that we have with the Scottish Government. I think that they're probably both to tears hearing from us. I think that the issue more is around how third sector bodies engage beyond our sector issues. I've got no qualms that housing and homelessness policy makers reach out to us to understand what that would look like on the ground when time allows, when there's a process. I think that the bigger challenge falls off from what Frank is saying but also from panellists earlier on is to have a genuinely human rights based approach to budgeting, to look at the panel approach so that we can see what is the role of the health budget when it comes to meeting people with multiple complex needs in the homelessness system, who require access to mental health services. That is a bill that gets picked up in the housing sector. If we're going to look at an open and transparent approach to budgeting, we need that kind of conversations that are required to be had and I'm sure there's parallels with other policy areas. We have, again, very good intentions from Scottish ministers but not yet the delivery for putting that approach to inclusive budgeting in place. We'll turn to questions from Emma Roddick to be followed by Miles Briggs. I have a few questions about two very big policy matters on how they affect homelessness, so if we could do a little bit of quickfire then I would appreciate that. The Parliament expects next week to deliver on the emergency legislation around freeze and I'm sure you'll be painfully familiar with the arguments that this could increase homelessness because landlords take their properties out of the rental market. Is that a legitimate concern? It's up to Parliament to put protections in place to make sure that's not the consequence. I think that there are areas around the grounds for possession and I also recognise that Scotland now has quite a suite of tools from licensing around short-term lets, empty homes levy, and there are actually a number of policy levers that can be pulled to get a maximum benefit of every property. I think that it's having that joined-up approach that would make the difference. Should ensuring that people can afford to keep a roof over their head be a greater priority than allowing landlords to increase their rents? We would certainly say that the role of government is to ensure that citizens have the access to their human right to a home and if for any reason that's in conflict with the interests of business groups then I think that if there is a choice to be made it wouldn't come as a surprise that we would say back the choice that protects people. Thank you. Do you think that the rent freeze will have a positive impact on tenants and could it help prevent homelessness? I think that it will have a positive impact on tenants as a whole. I think that it will have a relatively marginal impact on people at the lower end of the market. Do you think that it could prevent people who would have otherwise become homeless due to not being able to afford a rent increase from becoming so? Yes, and obviously with the events of the last few days that issue has become more acute. When this was first proposed, I think that people are expecting a couple of percentage points, potentially up to 6 per cent next year. That's now been blown out of the water. The rent freeze proposal and again we don't know the detail of it, we don't know how it's going to be enforced, we don't know what policy lever mechanism is going to be used and we're talking here in the private rented sector, is very welcome in the context of the cost of living. I think that what I would all about to reinforce is that universal versus targeted responses are always a difficult choice and we recognise the desire to make a universal approach here but let's not lose sight of the additional need to have quite targeted support for people at the lower end. Finally, thinking about the eviction ban during the pandemic, from your perspective, did that have a positive impact on tackling homelessness? Unquestionably. We did not see the spike in homelessness that would have occurred otherwise and the Scottish Government, through their PRS resilience group and the social housing resilience group, brought stakeholders together, made it work. We understand that there will be a very similar approach to how the evictions moratorium will be brought in and that's to be welcomed. However, there does need to be planning for making sure that the court system is robust enough, that advice organisations and legal representation is available for people once the moratorium is lifted because otherwise we'll end up with another bottleneck and we're already beginning to see the system catching up on itself on some of those delayed evictions from the pandemic. Thank you very much for that, Emma. I remember vividly those days of all the meetings that we were having in terms of bringing all the sectors together to try and implement that at the time. Miles, all the time. Thank you, convener. Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Earlier, we heard the Deputy First Minister instilling the virtues of Ireland and their policy agendas. I just wondered in terms of the impact of the rent control policy that we've seen in Ireland, for example, at 30 per cent increase in homelessness, 38 per cent increase in Dublin alone. Whether or not you think that the Government hasn't looked at the unintended consequences of this rent-freeze policy? The Irish example is more about rent controls, as my understanding is, than rent freezes as proposed in the emergency legislation. Historically at Shelter Scotland, we've taken the view that first-generation rent controls can have the unintended consequences of setting a floor rather than a ceiling for rents. However, I'm not aware of anyone truly proposing that kind of first-generational rent control in the upcoming housing legislation. We want to see the detail. We don't take an ideological view on what's good policy and what's bad policy. We want to see what it says. The rent freeze itself, as I said, is welcome in so far as we know how it will be delivered. In the Ireland example, I would need to know more about the direct cause and effect between the rent controls and the lack of general supply, because there was also a massive crash in supply in Ireland due to the financial crisis that is still working its way through. Disaggregating that from the rent control policy would require an academic, and I'm sure that you had Kinga up here a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure Kinga could tell you more. That's helpful. We're also waiting to see the bill and probably won't until now, before the committee has to look at it. I wonder specifically with regard to rural homelessness, and it's something that we maybe don't talk enough about. Supply and demand in those cases is often hugely limited. Has there been any work done that you know of about potential consequences for rural homelessness? Not to my knowledge, as a specific piece of work, but there is certainly a focus that's come from the cabinet secretary around using 10 per cent of the supply programme to increase accessibility and availability in rural Scotland. Through the housing options hubs that local government convene, there is a lot of best practice sharing among those more rural local authorities around how do you make temporary accommodation provisions in small towns when you're trying to keep people connected to the school and their employment and all those things. It's incredibly challenging. The Perth and Ross, who are not entirely rural local authority but certainly have large rural areas, have some really advanced approaches to providing temporary accommodation by bringing in private rented sector and doing a lot of Tennessee support work at a very early stage. Both are being referenced as the high water map, but there are certainly lessons that other rural local authorities can learn from there. It is ultimately about partnership. It is about the availability of homes, but it is also about the quality of the services and sustaining the investment in those services. Just finally, I wanted to ask it someone I've raised consistently. We are seeing a really depressing picture, a worrying picture with regard to the number of children in temporary accommodation here in the capital. That is at a crisis point, I would say. Where do you think that the Scottish Government is going wrong in terms of that policy direction? There is not to get too existential, but there is a bigger Scottish politics issue that we focus on the thing that is happening right in front of us. There has been an incredible amount of focus on housing options, on ending homes together, on the far too long overlooked needs of people with multiple and complex needs. At the exact same time, we saw the growth in children's temporary accommodation because we were not building enough homes of the right size. By its very nature, families require larger properties. We had a supply programme that was not solely but predominantly focused on smaller units. What we have now found ourselves is that we do not have the larger units, and that is the main issue. Apologetically, we keep coming back to supply. All roads and housing lead back to supply of social housing. If we can drive up by buying and by building more larger properties, we will be able to deal with that. The temporary accommodation task force task and finish group that the Scottish Government convened as part of the homelessness prevention strategy group co-chaired by Shelter Scotland's director Alison Watson has already made interim recommendations calling for a national acquisition plan for that very reason. Jeremy, you have a follow-up question. A quick question, Gordon. It was interesting that I was meeting with one of the fairly large homelessness charities in Edinburgh on Monday. They were talking about with the people coming from Ukraine how their impacts on the demand that is already there. Obviously, we all welcome having the Ukrainians coming in to Edinburgh and to other parts of Scotland, but how do we then deal with those who are still on the list? Practically, do you see the way forward in regard to keeping people within the central belt, whether it is perhaps or do you see more of a policy? We discussed this previously in another report from the Women's Committee. Is it better to say, let's destroy people around the whole of Scotland? I just wondered if you had a view around that, because obviously it's going to go on for a number of months, if not years now, and what's the longer term issue around this? It's incredibly important to say that we mustn't allow a situation where there's even a perception of our ability to welcome people fleeing conflict to be played off against the needs of homeless people here in Scotland. A very struck by the Scottish Refugee Council's own submission to the committee references our call for new supply for that very reason. We noted the announcement last week of £50 million bid fund for local authorities to try and bring existing void social properties back into use. It's very welcome what capacity there is to do that, but it also shows that whether there is a will to make better use of existing properties we can do it. What we need is an integrated approach that says that the more people we can get out of temporary accommodation and inter-permanent accommodation, the more capacity there is within the temporary accommodation sector so that we can meet the needs of Ukrainian refugees and other communities fleeing conflict. We think that that chain, if you like, of addressing the needs of people in the homeless as temporary accommodation system to free up capacity for people coming from Ukraine who maybe are not being well, whose hosting situation falls through or who are currently being accommodated in unsatisfactory accommodations such as the floating refugee centres in the ships. That integrated approach is key. What we also hear from local authority partners is that there is a risk of some opportunity cost. There's only so many people, there's only so many heads of housing, there's only so many senior managers able to deliver those services and they're spending an awful lot of time on Ukraine and we worry that there's not the capacity to also do the homelessness work at the same time. So, very much share the concerns but think we can and we should be able to do both. Can I just piece you a wee bit more on that because I mean I think what you suggest is all very sensible but it's a best medium term and I suppose the question I have round this is you know I don't think a floating boat is the solution beyond a very short period of time. So what's the short term answer to this? I'm sorry I didn't come back to you on the dispersal element of your question but I mean I think the longer term answer is that the housing needs of a community like the Ukrainian refugees but someone needs to be one that's dispersed across the country that we make the best use of the accommodation that we have but that has to be reasonable for the household. We say about we need houses but sustaining a house is about connection to the communities, it's about access to jobs but access to family and support networks so there's no point pushing someone on a property up in Elgin if all their support network is in Edinburgh. So we have to be sensible but we also have to be pragmatic and as I say I think this is not the paradox that I think some in government have sought to make it. Thank you very much. I'm wondering Frank from your perspective and the people that enable supports do you have anything that you want to mention at this point when we're discussing homelessness? I think it's not been a huge issue that's come through among our membership if I'm perfectly honest. I think for a lot of our members we'll either be living with family members who may be homeowners themselves. Some of our members will have owned their own homes and a lot of our members who are renting it is generally social rents that they will have so I think it will bow to Gordon's knowledge on homelessness and housing and his expertise there but from an able's perspective it's not been an issue that's come through strongly from our membership to date. I'll bring Paul MacLennan in a wee minute but I just want to Gordon take you back to to discuss the proposals that shelter has round about changing the approach to affordable housing specifically round about whether looking at it in a national perspective you'll be well aware previously as the cause of spokesperson that's a very tense moment if you think about 32 local authorities looking at where that grant money's money's going and where they're sharing that's going to be what do you think the benefit of that national approach could be and if we think as well about you know the empty homes partnership where could we improve upon you know the speed and the pace at which we can work collectively to buy back those properties and force that kind of movement from properties that are set in empty and is a well round about you know the type of properties that councils and register social analogy building in terms of them being able to be convertible so maybe built for our two or three bedroom but could maybe be going to a four if they're built with capacity within the loft etc so a few thoughts in there but just if you can expand on that a wee bit. Many many many thoughts there I think the immediate part obviously is we all share the desire to have a long term affordable housing programme that the sustained that builds good quality accommodation that those individual houses meet people's adaptive needs over the over the lifetime but we can't get away from the fact we have a bubble in temporary accommodation right now and we think the benefit of a nationally led it has to be delivered in partnership with with local authorities local ourselves but by taking it out of the normal local government funding mechanism and saying this is this is going to be targeted where we think it can have the greatest impact to reduce affordable housing needs allows us to put an interim programme in place that can have that can turn the dial on the levels of children and families in temporary accommodation and that's the that's what we're we're seeking to do here so we're not necessarily suggesting that the Scottish Government becomes a landlord we're suggesting the Scottish Government direct a purchasing programme that looks at you know what are the former right to buy pro properties that are coming back on to the market you know within the current constraints of individual local authorities many of whom including in this city are already buying properties but are they able to do it at scale and at speed to meet the levels of demand we don't think they are we think from our conversations with local authorities that that they would welcome that certainly those local authorities under under greatest pressure and I think it's it's probably a question of capacity and and skills within Scottish Government to be able to to direct that but if the principle is agreed let's target additional resource where it you know where it can where will reduce affordable housing need then that requires direction it can't just be a bid in system based on who's got who's got a land site that's ready to go who's shovel ready you know that's a it's not so much passive but it's reactive we need to be proactive and identifying where we can put a resource for the greatest benefit thank you I think males have you got a supplementary question quick thank you can be there just just briefly on that point and to go back to the rent controls policy and the unintended consequence now the Scottish Government have set themselves a target of 110,000 affordable homes now part of what we are now hearing from housing associations is them not being able to deliver that so I just wondered in terms of what you said in terms of that the need for more supply actually what impact you think that's going to have or have you spoken to housing associations around this policy as well because they are adamant that they are really concerned of the very negative consequences we'll have on on their ability to take forward or have to scrap these projects on the rent freeze in the weeks as I said earlier we share the concern that if the rent freeze is unfunded then it will have a will have a negative impact but again there are choices the Scottish Government can make they could you know roughly just now that's a 50-50 split between grant funding and leverage you know the landlord borrowing money so if we want to sustain rent freezes then that balance could could shift more towards grant I'm not a housing finance expert I would pretend I'm not housing a columnist so there's people better verse than I but what we recognise is that the aspiration to ensure that tenants don't have to pay any more money in rent during a period of extreme cost of living crisis is one that we share the consequences of it they'll have to be understood they have to be financed and that's why we're saying buy and build because those local those local authorities and RSLs are actually pretty good at purchasing property when it when it suits their portfolio all we are saying is we can accelerate that target it that takes it beyond the limitations that those individual RSLs and local authorities have to ensure that the national aspiration of reducing affordable housing needs can be met by by by by you know through national leadership many thanks that just before I turn to Paul for the last question I think there are a lot of authorities and RSLs that do have you know even within councils you know delegated authority to heads of housing to do that buy back as soon as they see that you know ex-local authority properties are on the market so I think it's about perhaps how we you know make that quicker bring pace to that so or take it beyond sorry come here or go beyond just buying former RSLs yeah especially when it comes to bigger properties done that in the past as well when you're looking for a four bedroom and property paul to finish the stuff thank you convener Gordon against question first I might be just touching on what you said obviously and about changing approach to affordable housing and obviously building more social housing what level of discussions have you had with cosland that one because obviously there are the key partners as well as individual local authorities about their their view on that in terms of that because obviously there may be capacity issues around about how they develop that scheme the second question was really just more specific was asking about programme for government announced an increase to discreting housing payments and extending eligibility for a tenant grant fund I'm just wondering what impact you think that have on tenants and is there any other further measures that could be taken to address the cost of living for tenants so in terms of conversations with cosla and local government we haven't had detailed conversations about our action plan in of itself but as I mentioned there's already an interim recommendation from the the temporary accommodation task and finish group that proposes a national acquisition plan to to mitigate the lack of temporary accommodation that is co-chaired by Alachow so the association of local chief housing officers and includes a representative from cosla on it so as the collective view of that task and finish group that includes local government chief housing officers I can't speak for them but that implicit endorsement we very much welcome the additional funds and discussion housing payments and tenant grant funds the change in the eligibility to I think our reflection on the tenants grant fund would be that it probably hasn't gone far enough into the private rented sector so far I think the reliance on local authorities as the promoters of it I think has bumped up against the the challenge that private tenants don't really have a relationship with with their local authority there was a good example during the pandemic where local authorities made use of the landlord registration scheme to write to out to all tenants to make them aware of their their rights during the eviction auditorium and other things and we would we would suggest that's probably something till we can't know for for making sure that private tenants know that they could access this this tenant grant fund because it's incredibly hard a group of people to to reach as a as a sort of audience segment into marketing terms miles and I both actually sitting now local government housing committee as well so that's obviously something we can take back to that one as well thank you it's very much and thank you both for coming along this morning and if there's anything you think that you need to follow up in writing with us please feel free to do so and I'm now going to close the public part of this meeting we'll move into private sessions thank you very much