Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2006
MR CAMERON
STARK, MR
FRASER PARR
AND MR
SANDY BRADY
Q1 Chairman:
Good morning. We are delighted to be here in Inverness for the
first meeting of the Scottish Affairs Committee on our inquiry
into Poverty in Scotland. I would like to thank the staff of the
Highland Council for making these arrangements and I would like
to welcome you as our first witnesses on our inquiry. Perhaps
you would like to introduce yourselves.
Mr Stark: I am Cameron Stark.
I am an honorary clinical senior lecturer at the Centre for Rural
Health at the University of Aberdeen. The Centre for Rural Health
is based here in Inverness. I am also a consultant in public health
with NHS Highland.
Mr Brady: I am Sandy Brady. I
am the Director of Strategy with Highlands and Islands Enterprise.
We are the sister agency of Scottish Enterprise.
Mr Parr: I am Fraser Parr. I am
an Operational Firefighter here in Inverness. I chair the Trades
Council here in Inverness. I got hooked into this at short notice.
Q2 Chairman:
Thank you very much for coming here. Before we start with the
detailed questions, would you like to make any opening remarks?
Mr Stark: We would be happy to
pick things up as you wish.
Q3 Chairman:
In your view, what is the single biggest cause of poverty in the
Highland region?
Mr Stark: From the health end,
poverty in the Highlands is not that much different from poverty
everywhere else and causes must be linked to low wages, job opportunities
and access to education. All these things have exactly the same
impact in the Highlands as they have elsewhere. One of the things
I am sure we will come on to later is how difficult it can be
to record some of these things in the rural areas.
Mr Brady: I think low incomes
are a major part of that. The economy has over-representation
of sectors which are traditionally low paying and correspondingly
an under-representation of higher paying sectors that we see elsewhere
in the economy. There is also an age profile effect in there.
We have a disproportionate number of pensioner households which
tend to be low income and correspondingly we have a gap in our
younger age groups, largely in the age range of 18 to 34. That
is caused by young people leaving the area principally for higher
education. Those two are definite effects.
Mr Parr: I would just say low
wages. I cannot say any more than what has already been said but
low wages would be my take on the main impact on it.
Q4 Danny Alexander:
Following up on that point, we are interested in the issue about
low wages, and I am sure we will come on to that, but I think
we are also interested in people who are not in paid employment
as well. Obviously there are a number of things in the benefit
system and the tax credit system that are there to help either
people who are in work or people who are out of work, for example
pension credits, winter fuel payments and tax credits, many of
which were increased in-line with inflation by the Chancellor
in his Pre-Budget Report last week. To what extent do you think
those measures help to alleviate poverty? As a supplementary,
can I ask to what extent those measures can be reformed in some
way to help more to alleviate the sort of problems you have been
describing with your experience in the Highlands?
Mr Parr: Talking about what you
were saying there about the benefits, it is not directly back
to your question I suppose, but I know that if anyone in your
household is on benefits then you get opportunities to get training
through the college and that sort of thing and that is open to
the rest of the family. Perhaps an impact on that is to do with
their social standing within the community. I know it is there,
but a lot of them do not take the opportunity to go on any of
these courses. It is very difficult to try and encourage people
out of that environment which they find themselves in to go and
take the first step.
Q5 Danny Alexander:
Because there is a stigma attached to it and people do not want
to have that highlighted.
Mr Parr: Yes, I think it has a
stigma, but more than that I cannot say.
Mr Brady: I think benefits are
very important for low income households, and things like fuel
benefit are clearly a big factor in places like the Highland and
Islands where we are, certainly some people say, colder, darker
and wetter, particularly in the six winter months. It is very
important that the cost of living for low income households is
a little bit different in the Highlands and Islands than it is
perhaps in more central parts. It is very important that such
benefits as there are are trying to pick that up. Fuel is an obvious
one and that is done at the moment, transport is another. Households
in small communities are very dependent on transport. In many
cases that can be public transport or it can be that the household
has to have a car simply because it is more of a necessity in
a rural area than it is in an urban area where public transport
can be very thin. These are some of the costs that low income
households have to pick up which horizontal benefits help with
but they are not specifically addressed to.
Mr Stark: There were two points
I wanted to pick up from that. One was about the nature of intervention
in poverty. Most of the things that will obviously be done to
target ill health and poverty have got the paradoxical effect
of widening overall inequalities in that they improve the health
of people who live in poverty but they have an even larger effect
on the health of relatively affluent people, so the net effect
is you widen the inequalities. One of the advantages of the fiscal
measures that are targeted specifically at people who are relatively
poor is that they do not have that automatic disadvantage. If
one of the main aims is to reduce inequalities, then these targeted
financial measures certainly make a lot of theoretical public
health sense. The other point was to pick up Sandy's point about
transport. The point about what a drain cars are on some households
probably cannot be overemphasised. There was some good work by
The Robert Gordon University of Aberdeen looking at car ownership
and the fuel price escalator. One of the things they found in
the rural areas examined was that 80% of households who did not
own a car had an income of less than £10,000 a year, but
paradoxically two-thirds of households who were earning less than
£10,000 a year had a car. Pretty clearly it is hard to run
a car on that kind of income, so something that is normally a
sign of affluence in an urban area can be a major financial drain
in some rural areas.
Q6 Danny Alexander:
On that transport point, because it is clearly a very important
one, if we are looking at how to tackle poverty in our report,
and you are quite rightly saying in my own experience that transport
costs are a greater contributory factor to household costs in
remote and rural areas in the Highlands than perhaps in the rest
of Scotland, are there particular fiscal measures or measures
in the benefit system for example which could help to deal with
that differential cost in communities like this one?
Mr Brady: I think there are. We
need to be quite subtle because I think we need to address the
heart of what the problem is rather than simply arguing for higher
transport subsidies. Another thing to say is it varies greatly
from community to community. In Island communities, for example,
there is absolute dependence on ferry transport, and the ferry
services in the Highlands and Islands are supported by subsidy
and that keeps charges down. In remote areas sometimes they are
dependent on bus services which can be very, very thin with two
or three services a day, so that imposes another kind of cost
which is that you can get into the local town but you may have
to spend four hours there for something like a single doctor's
appointment or something like that. That is another hidden cost
which rural communities face. There is a need to think about what
happens in rural areas and to think about tools that can be used
to address that. A very small-scale one would be mail order, for
example, which is a means by which people, particularly older
households in rural areas, buy goods. We look askance at some
of the conditions which apply to that which they allow free delivery,
for example, to anywhere with a UK mainland address but not to
Island communities. That is a form of subtle discrimination which
hits low income households in Island communities, that they do
buy things through mail order but they have to pay a surcharge
to get those brought to them. I do not think there is a single
bullet that answers that particular problem, it is a question
of reflecting on the kind of challenges they face and trying to
find ways of dealing with that.
Q7 Mr Walker:
The cost of shopping is much higher in rural communities, is it
not? If you live in Inverness you go to Tesco's, if you live in
rural communities you go to the local shop and, of course, the
cost of supplying that shop is much higher, they have much greater
transport costs to fund, then you might also have to drive to
that shop. I would imagine that is a fairly significant impact
on a family or even an individual, the cost of feeding and supporting
oneself.
Mr Brady: We did a number of surveys
on this on a regular quarterly basis for about 20 years, but we
have ceased to do them now because in a sense we worked out what
the effects were. We took a baseline as being somewhere like Aberdeen
or Inverness and we had local volunteers collect the price of
a typical basket of groceries and consultants put together the
numbers, but the pattern was quite an interesting one. In the
main towns around the Highlands the price differential above the
likes of Inverness or Aberdeen was only 2 or 3%. In places like
Kirkwall, Stornoway, Oban and Thurso there was a price differential
but it was relatively modest. Where the big price differential
came in was in much more scattered communities where typically
price levels were 10, 15, even as high as 20% above the baseline
and it is the people in those communities who suffer most. Yet
when we spoke to the people who have retail outlets in those areas,
as you can probably imagine, they were not making vast profits,
they were barely making a living. All the problems of economies
of scale, of the high cost of purchasing goods and then having
to put some kind of mark-up on them before selling them on, that
is what resulted in the higher prices. That pattern of higher
prices has been pretty consistent as far as we can see over the
last 20 years or so.
Mr Stark: The point about transport,
I want to pick up a couple of things on that before we move on.
There is probably not a one-size-fits-all answer because rural
areas themselves are not one type. The Western Isles, for example,
have been relatively successful in organising bus services but
that is because of the way the communities are arranged. It is
relatively easy to have a bus service in Lewis. The Robert Gordon
work, for example, found that something like 97% of the people
they spoke to in Lewis were on a timetabled bus route; by contrast,
less than half the people they talked to in Sutherland were on
a timetabled bus route and that is because of the different characteristics
of the community, they are much more spread out and much more
sparsely populated. What I am arguing is that there is unlikely
to be one single answer for all the different types of area.
Mr Parr: I would agree with that,
it is very difficult to standardise everything here. Picking up
what you were saying, if you lived in the West Coast somewhere,
never mind the Islands, Scourie, Lochinver, Achiltibuie, to get
to a bus you are going to need a car because it is maybe four,
five or 20 miles to get to somewhere where a bus is going to pass
and you are lucky if it is going to be once a day, never mind
four times a day. If there is a bus, because there is no real
transport network in the more rural areas, and if you have to
shop at the local shop, which is the local post office as well,
and if that shuts, which looks like it is getting planned anyway,
where are you going to shop? You are going to be far more dependent
on having your own car. How could you afford that on a minimum
wage, I do not think you could.
Q8 Mr McGovern:
Charles makes an important point about the difference in the prices
of shopping, but I am intrigued, I cannot see a solution to that.
Have you got any idea how that should be addressed?
Mr Brady: I do not think there
is an easy solution to that. It is one of these things, it is
raw economics working. People who live in rural areas reluctantly
accept that that is part of their lot. There are other compensations
in terms of the cost of living which are to their benefit, there
are not many but there are some there. Despite changes in house
prices over the last little while, house pricing in some communities
remains relatively modest and that is good. There are other rural
communities where a lack of housing is putting pressure on prices,
they are beginning to rise and that makes it very difficult for
local people. Housing is one area. Another one which is often
put to us is car insurance, that while the cost of running a car
is expensive, at least one compensation is that car insurance
in remote parts of the Highlands is relatively low compared with
others, but that is only one small example against a large number
of goods and services where you do have to pay more.
Mr Stark: There is a kind of linked
problem of sustainability of local shops. The Aberdeen work found
that one of the things that sometimes happened if you improved
transport markedly was people did not use it to get to the local
shop, they used it to go to a Tesco and you ended up with a big
drain of cash outwards. One of the things they have tried in Norway
is looking at targeting money on local infrastructure and making
local shops more accessible, perhaps encouraging them to do some
of the home delivery type things that you get on a larger scale
online. It might be that while I do not suppose you can tangle
with economics there might be some things you can potentially
do to help it work better at a local scale.
Q9 Danny Alexander:
Partly we are looking at this from a Westminster perspective and
the fiscal measures that could be taken. One which has been put
forward is if you look especially at rural areas—and this
was put to us in one of the communities we visited yesterday—there
is a huge variation in the price that you pay at the pump for
petrol. If you are running a car and you are filling up at a small
station on the West Coast you might be paying five or 10 pence
more per litre than if you are filling up in Inverness, let alone
in Perth, Edinburgh or Glasgow. One idea which has been put forward
there is to have a lower level of fuel duty in the rural areas
to try and compensate for that difference. I wonder whether you
think that is something which would make a difference to folk
in these parts?
Mr Brady: It would certainly make
a difference because, as Cameron has said, when you are on a very
low income and you still have to run a car then these costs absolutely
come right out of your pocket. I think a mechanism like that which
has a differential in fuel duty would have an enormous impact,
both financially and psychologically as well, in terms of sending
a signal that there is an attempt here to try and create a level
playing field. One of the things I know is being widely talked
about in the Highlands at the moment is the potential of moving
towards some form of road pricing, how would that work at a UK
level? Clearly, if it were to completely replace things like vehicle
excise duty and fuel tax then potentially that could have a beneficial
effect on remote rural areas. We are a long way from going down
that particular road but it is an interesting one because it would
rebalance the thing in favour of places like Sutherland and Caithness.
Mr Parr: It might be 10 miles
to the nearest shop, it might be 50 miles to the nearest petrol
station, so you have got to get there first and get back again.
I think that way of addressing it would possibly be a benefit.
To grasp the distances people have to travel to do that—you
are not going to see it in Westminster or the Central Belt—it
is a stark reality and it costs a lot of money. Perhaps you should
be looking at the benefits the people receive in that area, they
should be higher.
Q10 Mr Davidson:
I want to pick up that angle if I can because I think some of
the issues which have been raised with us relate to problems of
rural areas generally. Presumably the subsidy for petrol in rural
areas would allow Mohamed Al Fayed to fill up cheaply as well,
it would not necessarily be targeted at those in greatest need.
I want to pick up, if I can, the sort of things the Government
has been doing to try and help poor people and try and clarify
the extent to which they have been successful. For those who are
in work, the national minimum wage and Working Families' Tax Credits
and other things, it is my impression—I would be grateful
if you could clarify whether or not I have got this wrong—that
wage rates up here tend to be much less than they would be in
the Central Belt. I am originally from the Borders and I remember
what it was like there with almost feudal employers who would
be paying as little as they could get away with. In that area
the national minimum wage was undoubtedly giving a considerable
boost to people who either were not in trade unions or did not
have any bargaining power at all. Similarly, the tax credit mechanism
has also been clearly targeted at those who are in greatest need.
I am presuming that in areas like this where wages again, even
if they are on the minimum wage, are lower than elsewhere, they
would be disproportionately effective in tackling poverty for
poor people. Is that a fair assessment?
Mr Brady: I think that is right.
The minimum wage has been a boom for rural parts of Scotland and
for the Highlands and Islands in particular. It has had an impact
on the economy which has been an important one. As I said in some
of my introductory remarks, the thing we still suffer from is
we have an economy which is based on the rural staples of tourism,
agriculture, fish farming and so on, where traditionally wage
levels have always been low. Part of the long-term improvement
comes from trying to diversify the economy into higher paying
sectors wherever you can. For example, the financial services
sector is very poorly represented in the Highlands and Islands,
we do not have many jobs there. We are working very hard to bring
a university to the Highlands and Islands. That is one of our
gaps at the moment because the higher earning people who would
work in a university and the spinouts from that are something
we do not have in the area. Those types of things over time will
help to reposition the economy. Yes, you are absolutely right,
those horizontal Government policy measures have had a beneficial
effect as far as we can judge.
Mr Stark: Perhaps we are saying
that there are still issues about the seasonal nature of some
jobs in that there are folk who can get jobs in the summer who
cannot necessarily get jobs in winter. Often one of the measures
which is sometimes used is the proportion of people who are unemployed,
but of course it is relatively common in rural areas to have people
with two or three relatively low paying jobs, some of them at
different times of the year.
Mr Parr: I think the minimum wage
was a real boost and should have been implemented years ago. I
personally think it should be a lot higher. I was reading about
what happens in employment tribunals, if they are awarding someone
a week's wages in a calculation that works out at something like
£290 for that week and they make multiples of that, that
is approximately £7 an hour. I think you should be looking
at increasing wages to something like that, although what has
happened has been excellent, and it was long overdue to get away
from employers just setting any wage. In the rural areas where
there may have only been one employer, they could have been paying
anything they wanted and people would have had no option but to
either take that on or take it on as a part-timer. Tourism and
farming are definitely no higher paid and people up here would
rely on most of that. I think tourism would also benefit from
having some kind of structure for their employees so that if somebody
goes for a job in a hotel or restaurant or whatever, at least
they are given some kind of career out of that, training through
colleges or universities or whatever, so they can develop themselves
and perhaps improve their chances of getting employed maybe in
the Central Belt or wherever. All of these things should be considered.
Q11 Mr Davidson:
I wonder if I can follow that up. It is my impression that in
areas like this the minimum wage has become the maximum wage in
a whole number of areas and also that there is a whole string
of employers who are hostile to any sort of trade unionism, which
generally in the Central Belt and elsewhere has had the effect
of allowing wages to be negotiated up. Is that a fair impression?
Mr Parr: I would agree with that.
The biggest employer in the Highlands is LifeScan and they are
determined that you are not going to get a trade union in there.
I believe the GMB or someone tried to get in there and they have
had no impact there at all. I can understand people's fears of
forcing that issue because it is a fickle employment market and
I am sure that perhaps LifeScan would say, "Okay, we will
just go and move somewhere else or go into Europe or South America",
I think they are already there. It is how do you achieve that
without chasing these employers away. I do not think they pay
the minimum wage in LifeScan but, again, why not be unionised
so you can have some kind of collective bargaining or representation.
What has happened also throughout the Highlands is it is very
difficult to have a union. I do not think there are many unions
in Tesco's, Safeway's and Morrisons. We are certainly not seeing
people coming to the Trades Council here from the unions who would
be representing the shop workers, but I think that is possibly
needed. We would like to see people encouraged to join unions
for the sole fact that it gives them a better collective bargaining
power.
Q12 Mr Davidson:
I was told also before I came here that the fish farms were pretty
anti- union employers and at all costs resisted allowing unions
in and were paying just the minimum wage. I wonder why the Highlands
and Islands Enterprise seem to be encouraging either anti-union
or low wage employers so much and why you seem to have a relationship
with these employers who tolerate that sort of behaviour? Certainly
we would not have it in the Central Belt to the same extent, we
would expect a more co-operative attitude both from employers
and from Glasgow Enterprise or what have you. Are things different
up here?
Mr Brady: No, I do not think so.
We are very, very happy to see union arrangements with employers
across the Highlands and Islands, and if Fraser says there are
not as many as there should be then I think we would certainly
like to see more. There are sectors like fish farming where it
stems from the difficulty that big companies face in trading in
what is now an international and very competitive market, costs
are difficult and obviously the Norwegians and the Chileans are
major competitors there, but in the long run we would like to
see the level of wages in these sectors rise. It has been down
at the bottom for some time now but there are signs that with
prices beginning to rise in the fish farming sector, and salmon
farming especially, there is the prospect of doing a bit more
there. Another thing that is a low wage sector which is perhaps
unseen in the Highlands and Islands is the self-employed sector.
We have something like 30,000 people in the self-employed sector
and that is very good because these are people who have their
own businesses. There is a significant proportion of those who
are not making substantial amounts of money. They are providing
very valuable local services but sometimes some of these businesses—we
spoke about the retail ones a little bit earlier—are just
making a living and no more. It is a challenge to try and find
ways of driving those things up, but we want to see the level
of earnings in the Highlands and Islands rise in real terms over
the future. It is all very well having low earnings and being
able to argue for European funds to come to the area but there
is no pleasure or pride to be taken from that. We would like to
see earning levels rise across the economy in all sectors, from
things like tourism and fish farming where they are lower into
the higher technology sectors like LifeScan and call centres and
so on; we would like to see the wage levels rise.
Q13 Mr McGovern:
It has been suggested that work should not be the only route out
of poverty, for example there should be greater money advice for
parents, encouragement to improve the take-up rates of benefits
and perhaps to equalise the national minimum wage for young people.
Could I ask how you view suggestions such as these?
Mr Stark: There has been some
very good qualitative work on poverty from Shetland that you might
have seen, if you have not I would be happy to copy it to the
Committee[1].
One of the things they found, which I think fits with anecdote,
is that people were relatively reluctant to take up benefits in
some rural areas, partly because of the complexity of the system,
but also because of a feeling of stigma, of being marked out or
being different or having to be self-sufficient. Anything that
can encourage past that or make it easier certainly seems well
worthwhile.
Mr Brady: I think the delivery
of that advice is very important. As Cameron says, there is a
subtlety there of trying to ensure that people understand the
full range of benefits available and yet within sparsely populated
areas there is a limit as to how you can do that overtly. It is
very important that existing networks within rural communities
are the ones through these kinds of messages get passed. Family
and friends, particularly around elderly households, are very
important in trying to ensure that elderly people who are perhaps
not aware of the benefits or do not wish to claim them are made
aware of the fact of what is available and that it is their right
to have those benefits. That is one thing. I think also where
it is possible technology and the use of websites and so on to
make this information available are very important. You may not
reach the elderly by that means but at least you will reach some
of the active people within small communities that way.
Mr Parr: On the youth side of
things, I do not know what else you can do to encourage young
people to go on and train, but I certainly think the way it is
set up now with apprenticeship schemes, although I would like
to see the big profit makers being forced to take on far more
apprentices and put some of their profits back into developing
young people, if you are on an apprenticeship scheme you do not
even have to pay the minimum wage, which I think makes it even
more difficult for youngsters. Maybe they could get paid more
for doing a labourer's job somewhere where it gives them better
cash-in-hand than attempting to get on to an apprenticeship scheme.
Nipping back to the point about fish farms, I think also it is
an escape out of hours of work. They can vary hours of work to
suit themselves which perhaps does not suit the employees and
yet that is why they want to pay the minimum wage as a maximum
and that is what sets it across the board for most of the employers
up here.
Q14 Mr McGovern:
As a supplementary, someone said yesterday, I think it was at
the Merkinch Centre, that a council department for welfare benefits
goes out to the communities to make them aware of what benefits
they are entitled to rather than the constituents or people coming
to the benefit centre or the job centre, is that correct?
Mr Brady: As far as I know, yes,
but I would have to seek the details of that from the council
themselves.
Q15 Mr Walker:
Going back to Mr Parr, who are the big profit makers up here who
you feel are not pulling their weight as far as apprenticeships
are concerned? You said you would like to see the profit makers
investing more in apprenticeships and I am wondering who the big
profit makers are in this part of the world?
Mr Parr: We have lost all the
engineering that was located at Inverness which was an apprenticeship
scheme here. The building companies that are putting up houses
all over Inverness and the rest of the Highlands, I do not know
what the score is there or how many apprenticeships they take
on, but we just talked about self-employed people, I think most
of the people in the building trade are self-employed and if you
are self-employed you are not going to take an apprentice on because
it is someone that you have got to look after. That is what I
am talking about. Safeway's, Morrisons, Tesco's, I do not know
if they do apprenticeships, butchers, that sort of thing.
Q16 Chairman:
It is obvious that the national minimum wage has made a difference
and has helped people to tackle poverty. Government initiatives,
minimum guaranteed income for pensioners, tax credits, child tax
credits, pensioner's tax credits, have these made a difference
to alleviate poverty?
Mr Brady: I think it has been
a major contributor. These horizontal measures have helped in
the Highlands and Islands across communities. I still think there
is a need to try and recognise that some of the facets of poverty
in rural areas cannot be got at easily by horizontal measures
and there is a need to think about what some of the local solutions
for some of the problems are. Heating, fuel, quality of insulation
in elderly households are ones where there would be returns for
some very sharply focused investment but that is very specific
sometimes to individual households within small communities. Fuel
poverty in the Highlands and Islands, as some of the submissions
to you today have said, is a significant issue but it is a very
dispersed issue spread across sparsely populated communities.
Q17 Chairman:
One other issue is that because of the complex nature of these
application forms for these tax credits and minimum guaranteed
income a lot of people are not taking up these benefits. What
do you think the situation is in the Highlands and Islands and
what more can you do to make sure that the people take up these
benefits?
Mr Brady: I think it comes back
to the old struggle between horizontal measures, which can be
very effective if they are spread across the community, and means-tested
types of measures. Means-tested measures have their place but
they are difficult to operate generally within society and are
particularly difficult to operate in traditional Highlands and
Islands' households, many of whom would not apply for means-tested
benefits. Things like winter fuel support, which are horizontal,
are very effective. Pensioners see these as being a fair return
for being an elderly person living in a difficult to heat house.
I think the challenge is to try and devise measures which are
so far as possible horizontal but do recognise that there are
particular challenges that are different in rural areas from urban
areas and might involve something which is available in rural
communities but not in urban communities and is not means-tested
in the way it is applied in rural communities.
Q18 Chairman:
Let us say the Government had a certain amount of money and somebody
is enjoying a pension of half a million pounds and you want to
increase the pensions, why should that not be targeted at the
people who really deserve it and who are in the most need rather
than giving it to the rich people?
Mr Brady: I think that exemplifies
the difficulty of horizontal versus means-tested. There are communities
in the Highlands where the income of individual households within
a crofting community can vary literally as you go from croft to
croft between single person, elderly pensioner households to much
younger households with three, four or five wage earners and that
is part of the difficulty.
Q19 Danny Alexander:
I want to go back in the conversation slightly because part of
this conversation is about the difficulty of getting people to
take up benefits and some of the barriers which exist. I know
that across the country, but particularly in the Highlands, there
have been closures of Jobcentre Pluses, a reduction in that service,
which often makes it harder for people in rural communities to
access that sort of support. I would be grateful for your comments
on that. Also, one of the things that is important in relation
to the point which has been made about the extra costs, for example
in terms of heating and transport, is the back-to-work calculation
which is made for people when they are looking to get off benefit
and into work, working out will you be better off if you get a
job or not? This is something we were talking about in a couple
of communities we were in yesterday, that if you are in a rural
part of the country and perhaps the nearest place you can get
a job is 20 miles away you have got to factor into that the cost
of travel and that makes the back-to-work calculation, which in
any case given that some people can face benefit withdrawal rates
of 70-80%, even harder to then say to that person definitively,
"You would financially be better off in work" but of
course I am sure, Dr Stark, there are lots of other benefits to
work which are non-financial and also have a knock-on effect.
Mr Parr: I think the back-to-work
differential is a big thing and that is what people do work out;
it is definitely a big deciding factor. Means-testing, I think
if you had somebody on a pension getting half a million pounds
they would know how to fill in any forms regarding means-testing,
but if a pensioner or somebody in the back of beyond gets a means-testing
form dropping through their letterbox, I bet you a pound to a
penny they will not know how to fill it in and they would probably
be frightened of it anyway. The information that is circulated
and put out regarding how you collect your benefits or what you
are entitled to, if you can read it and understand it then you
are a better man than me because I cannot. One of my daughters
was on the jobseekers thing and she came to me with the forms
and I said, "You need to go and speak to somebody in the
job centre because I cannot make head nor tail of this".
Perhaps when you are talking about crofts, each one being different,
each income being different, that is still a particular way of
life up here and crofting has always been a supplementary income
to people who work in that type of environment. The only way to
get around that would be to visit them personally, sit down but
not with a Government uniform saying, "This is what we are
here to do and help you", you need some method of conveying
the information to people in a user-friendly fashion that they
would find acceptable.
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