Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 40)
TUESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2006
MR CAMERON
STARK, MR
FRASER PARR
AND MR
SANDY BRADY
Q20 Mr Davidson:
I wonder if I can particularly pick up that point. I have raised
this question of take-up particularly in some of the organisations
we have been at, things like pension credit, and it does seem
to me that the council here and other organisations have not been
as vigorous as they have in perhaps some other areas. I know that
in my own constituency, for example, they have had leaflets through
every single door, into mother and toddler groups saying, "Would
one of your grandparents be eligible for this?" to try and
get children to apply for their parents or grandparents. Am I
right in thinking that there has not been the push on getting
pensioners to pick up pension credit here that there has been
in a number of other areas? Why is the council falling down on
this?
Mr Stark: I do not know if there
have been specific council campaigns. Certainly when we speak
to the NHS centre or Aberdeen University we find that community
nurses, for example, are often asked to help with forms and often
suggest it to people as part of the assessment.
Q21 Mr Davidson:
They respond if they are asked.
Mr Stark: Yes, although they also
pick it up, they also do ask. Under the single shared assessment
process they do also ask a bit about it and what people are claiming
sometimes, so they do sometimes suggest it, but I entirely take
the point that it is not systematic.
Q22 Mr Davidson:
Are home helps briefed to specifically ask people about pension
credit in order to push rather than waiting on people to ask them?
Mr Stark: I do not know the answer
to the home help question.
Mr Parr: Twenty years ago in the
Fire Service up here we did that, we got the home helps and district
nurses to ask if they would like somebody to come out and visit
them and give them fire safety information or a talk or just check
around the house to make sure the house was safe. We got quite
a good response from that. Now we have been modernised and we
are all going out and giving community fire safety advice around
the houses, knocking on everybody's doors like insurance people.
We do still give talks to groups, and I would have thought that
the council should have been doing that a long time ago, especially
with pensioners' groups. We have got the Mackensie Centre up there
where people go on a daily basis. It should not just be for them,
they should be targeting youngsters and wherever they are congregating
so they can give the information to them regarding what they are
entitled to. I found it surprising that when my daughter was entitled
to go on to benefit with this jobseeker or whatever it was she
was on before she got employed, it entitled the whole family to
free college courses. I could have gone and got a course in a
college if my time off would have fitted in around it. I do not
think many people know that.
Q23 Mr Davidson:
Chairman, maybe we could get the Fire Service to do fire safety
and pension credits!
Mr Brady: Whilst we are out selling
insurance!
Q24 Danny Alexander:
Quite a broad question, what do you think are the most important
steps the government—and I guess we mean government at any
level—could take to alleviate poverty?
Mr Parr: Give everybody more money.
Q25 Mr Davidson:
That is the minimum wage, is it?
Mr Parr: Yes.
Q26 Chairman:
What do you think the level of minimum wage should be then which
would satisfy you?
Mr Parr: As I mentioned at the
beginning, £290 a week is what the Employment Tribunal calculated
a week's wages to be and what are the multiples of that. If you
are sacked for whatever reason and you go for a claim that is
what they calculate on and apparently that works out at £7
an hour. I would imagine there would be a certain amount of Government
input on that Employment Tribunal agency for setting these figures.
If they are setting that figures for that, why not set the minimum
wage to reflect something along that line. If that is what they
see as a reasonable wage to be calculated on then let us start
looking towards that.
Q27 Mr McGovern:
I think that is also the statutory minimum used for the calculation
of redundancy pay, is it not?
Mr Parr: I am not sure about that,
I have never had to go through that.
Mr Brady: I am not sure what the
right level would be. I think there is merit, however, in trying
not to have any major dislocation within labour markets. If there
is a feeling that the level needs to be raised then a way of doing
that is to raise it steadily year-on-year with some degree of
targets set so that in five years' time that is the level we want
to be at because that allows the economy to respond to that. That
would be good but it is a question of trying to decide the rate
at which you want that increase to go.
Mr Stark: Again, I do not have
any blinding insight into what the level should be, but going
back to some of the theory underlying poverty and health, apart
from the specific health related initiatives, Michael Marmot is
one of the big theoretical workers in this area and he would argue
that you could think about three areas: one is about the overall
level of wages, and that would relate to your minimum wage point;
the second is about access and support for education, because
we know there is a big association between education and poverty
and that poverty in turn affects whether you are likely to access
education; and the third would be a safety net type issue for
older people who are particularly likely to be income deprived.
I suppose I would try and hit all three.
Q28 Mr Davidson:
I think we are trying to hit all three, are we not, in terms of
what the Government's strategy is, in terms of wages. We have
got the national minimum wage and the Working Families' Tax Credit
and so on. The routes out of poverty for children, there is a
big focus on educational spend and then there is the safety net
element. Chairman, while you are on that, can I ask about the
routes out of poverty issue because this is one of the things
the council has raised with us. Because poverty in the Highlands
is perhaps more dispersed I would tend towards the view that in
schools, for example, in a constituency like mine where maybe
you will have 90% of the kids on free school meals, there is then
a concentration which requires special effort because there is
a whole community that is getting no stimulation at home. Whereas
here, if you have a couple of children who are on free school
meals, not necessarily but maybe with less stimulation at home,
if they are then in a class where the others are being adequately
stimulated, they in turn will be brought up and therefore the
focus need not quite be in exactly the same way and additional
resources, because you have got poverty but it is dispersed, are
not necessarily as justifiable as additional resources on poverty
because it is focused and concentrated.
Mr Stark: Perhaps it is more a
question of how you spend the additional resource rather than
whether it is worthwhile. It is in the Council's submission that
one of the problems, as you say, is poverty is relatively dispersed.
A couple of facts on that: in Glasgow in the SIMD 2003, 31% of
employment deprived people were in the most deprived 20% of wards.
In the Highlands in the 2003 SIMD the comparable figure was about
9%. If you target you miss most of the folk, but that does not
mean the folk have any lower level of needs, it just means it
is harder to get at. I am not saying there are not some areas
in the Highlands where it is well worth targeting but, equally,
you are not going to get all your return for that, you have got
to go for some of these measures which Sandy and Fraser have talked
about.
Mr Brady: I think another effect
which we have not talked about is population. Our concern is that
the cost of delivering public and private services to rural areas
is rising faster than inflation for a whole range of reasons.
We see one of the long-term important planks here for rural communities
is to grow the populations of these communities. We have seen
places like the City of Inverness grow remarkably in the last
20 years but in a sense that looks after itself now. It is much
more about not only the smaller towns like Thurso, Portree and
Fort William but also about the rural areas and it is also ensuring
that we try to get the populations to grow in the rural areas.
That increases the demand for services, it makes the cost of delivery
per unit much lower and it helps to provide the kind of support
networks to help low income pensioner-type households where there
are simply more younger and active people living in the community.
We have seen examples; I guess the Island of Skye would be a good
one in the last 25 years where the population has grown significantly,
something like 50% over the last 25 to 30 years. All the benefits
of that flow: the primary schools are busier, they have got bigger
roles and the range of public and private services are much better
than they were a generation ago. The alternative to that, if population
is declining, is a loss of services, the closure of shops and
the inability of the local authority to provide small rural schools
and so on.
Q29 Mr Walker:
That brings me on to my question. I am going to play the devil's
advocate here, but are rural communities in large parts of Scotland
viable in the long-term? Are you just like the little boy in Holland
putting his finger in the dyke? You have talked about education
and actually you will be educating people to leave these communities.
They have very poor transport links and they are a long way away
from international, global or even regional markets. Skye is perhaps
an exception that might prove the rule bearing in mind that Madonna
has moved up there and it is becoming the playground for the rich
and famous. I am concerned about this because you are here to
talk about poverty and obviously there is a diet of misery in
a number of these places, but really you and we are delaying the
inevitable, which we should do, are these communities actually
in 30, 40 or 50 years going to be viable?
Mr Brady: We have set a target
in our strategy for the next 20 years for the Highlands and Islands
of a growing population in every part of the area. That might
not be exactly every last small crofting community or every last
small island but we would regard ourselves as having failed if
the population continued to grow in the Moray Firth area, which
is doing relatively well, but declined in other parts of the area.
Skye is not the only example we have; places like Arran, the Firth
of Clyde, Wester Ross and parts of Argyll have seen their populations
grow in the last 20-25 years. The challenge is to try and learn
the lessons of what has happened in those areas and apply them
into some of the more difficult places. In recent times the Western
Isles, for example, had a population of around 30,000 and that
is now down to 26,500. I guess our ambition would be to see that
number rise back towards the 30,000 mark.
Q30 Mr Walker:
Why are people going to move to these communities? We have just
heard there are low rates of employment, low wages, what on earth
is going to convince people to move to a number of these communities
unless they are retiring and want to buy their rural idol which
may result in some of the population growth you have talked about,
but young vibrant communities, how are you going to create those?
Mr Brady: I think retirement will
play a part in it, there is no doubt, and the differential in
housing prices has helped in some of those areas. Again, the examples
of those areas which have done well is that while there has been
in-migration of retired people, there has been in-migration of
people in economically active age groups, particularly I guess
in the 40 to 55 age group. Many of these people have come in and
started their own businesses or found paid employment and have
made a contribution to the economy. We think that can be replicated
elsewhere. Yes, people cannot make jobs out of thin air and we
have to try and work in generating employment in new sectors of
activity which will come along. The use of broadband technology
has brought jobs to parts of the Highlands that we would not have
dreamed of before. We have people who are earning very good incomes
living in remote parts of the area because they are able to do
their business from their computer: graphic designers, international
collaborators and so on. There is a growing trend in that and
that is something we want to see more of. Again, there is no easy
answer to that, it involves a lot of people making lifestyle choices.
Some of those are about trading-off material benefits from a high
paid job in a city environment to a lesser level of income but,
nevertheless, a good level of income within a rural community.
Q31 Danny Alexander:
Mr Stark, I am going to ask a question specifically of you. There
is obviously a very close link between poverty and poor health,
and mental health is something I am very interested in and I know
it is one of your specialisms. I wonder if you could describe
for us how particularly poverty and mental health interact in
a rural environment?
Mr Stark: The core association
is probably the same. If you are relatively poor then you are
more likely to develop many mental illnesses from anxiety and
depression to sometimes more serious illnesses. What is probably
different is help-seeking, access to services and stigma and these
probably confound some of the problems. We know from research
from the University of Dundee and the University of Glasgow that
as many people who find it supportive to have a mental illness
in a rural place find it unhelpful to be in a relatively rural
environment. The reasons they cite are people knowing your problems,
people knowing your history, going back years in some cases, and
the fact that if you seek out help and contact a service it is
very likely that other people are going to know about that. There
are issues about help-seeking and accessing services. There are
probably issues about infrastructure to support you if you have
a particularly serious illness, you have been off work and you
have to return to work, then a lot of the services and some of
the jobs you might return to are not necessarily local, so it
probably compounds it.
Q32 Mr McGovern:
Again, this is a question for Mr Stark. I realise that you said
in part of your answer to one of the very early questions that
poverty was poverty unless I misunderstood you, but you seemed
to be saying that it is much the same wherever it occurs.
Mr Parr: Yes.
Q33 Mr McGovern:
I think possibly in an urban setting the knock-on effects of poverty
are more visible, crime et cetera. I believe you worked in Argyll,
Clyde, Ayrshire and Arran before you came to the Highland region.
Would you say the mental health aspects of poverty are more pronounced
in an urban setting or more so in a rural setting?
Mr Stark: There are higher rates
of mental illness in urban settings. There are a few quite good
national cross-sectional studies, particularly one done by the
OPCS in England and Wales which gets a clear gradient that you
get higher rates of mental illness in urban areas. There seems
to be something particularly toxic about the combination of urban
settings and great poverty which seems to be very bad for you.
I would not suggest that you do not get very substantial burdens
of mental illness particularly in some of these deprived settings.
What I was arguing was the services are often there as well, they
are often more local and you are often relatively anonymous. All
I was suggesting was that the impact might not be precisely the
same in the two areas, but I would not pretend for a second that
there are not higher rates of mental illness in some urban inner
city areas.
Q34 Mr Walker:
Although Lincolnshire has very high rates of suicide in England,
does it not, some of the highest rates in the UK and that is a
very rural setting?
Mr Stark: Suicide might in some
ways be a slightly different phenomenon. A lot of people who kill
themselves have a mental illness but not everyone does. There
are probably issues about method choice that might be quite important
in rural areas too and it may be back to some of these issues
about help-seeking.
Q35 Danny Alexander:
Mr Brady, could you explain a bit to the Committee about how Highlands
and Islands Enterprise works with other organisations such as
the Highland Council, for example, to combat poverty and perhaps
particularly to what extent the Highlands and Islands Enterprise,
in working with other organisations, targets its effort at those
areas where poverty is most prevalent and the need is greatest?
Mr Brady: We work very closely
with all of the local authorities and other public sector partners
across the Highlands and Islands. Community planning has brought
that to the fore within Scotland in the last few years. In the
Highland area we have a thing called the "Wellbeing Alliance"
which is a grouping of the council, ourselves, a northern constabulary
and NHS Highland who look together at some of the problems faced
within the Highland area. I guess that has been in existence now
for five to eight years. That is the way we try to bring that
together both at a regional level but also in terms of things
that are done at a local level. In terms of our own targeting
of resources, we have a thing that we call the "formula share"
within our budget whereby we positively discriminate in favour
of those parts of the Highlands and Islands which we see as having
the greatest need. For example, we give a disproportionately high
part of our budget to the Western Isles, to Caithness and Sutherland,
for example, where we see the problems being the greatest. Correspondingly,
we are able to put less funding into places like the wider Inverness
area because the level of economic progress there is that bit
greater. That is something we feel very strongly about. We have
tried to take that not only from our own budget but also into
the use of European structural funds in the area over the last
12 years to try and ensure that they reach out to the furthest
flung parts of the area where the infrastructural needs are greatest.
Q36 Mr Walker:
Talking about investing in the area, every year I am one of those
English people who come up and holiday up here at Lochinver, and
there is that huge fish unloading dock which cost millions and
millions of pounds to build and it employs two people part-time
in this huge modern infrastructure. What was the point of that?
What benefit has that brought to Scotland? It is not manned by
local workers, the boats coming in there are Spanish and Portuguese,
they unload their catch on to Portuguese, Spanish and Greek lorries,
funnily enough, and I am absolutely staggered that that level
of investment has generated probably less than one full-time job
in probably one of the most deprived economic parts of Scotland.
Surely the money could have been better spent on something else,
could it not?
Mr Brady: I think the fishing
sector is a challenging one whichever way you look at it. There
are other parts of the Highland, notably Shetland, where the industry
is very much still a local industry and where the benefits both
of the fish catching and the fish processing are captured there.
Lochinver has played an important part in West Coast fisheries
over a long generation, and while the current pattern is not the
one we would desire to see, nevertheless there is more to it than
simply the jobs on the end of the pier. That fishery is an important
one and it is part of a Common Fisheries Policy, so to that extent
we recognise that we are part of a European catching sector and
a European processing sector.
Mr Walker: I do not want to get into
a debate about the merits of the EU, but if I was living in Lochinver
and I saw that I would be absolutely staggered, I would be appalled,
because there is not one deep-sea fishing vessel that uses that
base in Lochinver, the only boats left are shrimp and scallop
boats. To me it is just outrageous that that level of investment
has generated less than one full-time job. I know that is not
your problem but I am standing united with my friends in Lochinver
on that, and I could not let this opportunity pass.
Q37 Mr Davidson:
I am afraid I do not think I have got a friend in Lochinver but
anyway, we will not discuss the Common Fisheries Policy and how
appalling it is! Could I ask in terms of getting people in the
area "job-ready" how much work you are doing? You have
indicated already that there are substantial degrees of under-employment
and part-time work and so on and what I am not clear about is
whether or not the people who are there as a reserve pool can
be considered to be "job-ready" so that if you brought
people in they would be ready to fill these sorts of posts?
Mr Brady: I think one of the most
important things to say is unemployment, as conventionally measured
in the Highlands and Islands, is at a very, very low level. We
are talking about under 2½% across the area. That does disguise
a degree of under-employment and part-time employment and so on,
but in conventional terms it is quite low. In the NEET group we
do not have as huge a proportion as there is in other parts of
Scotland, but they are significant, Once again, they are widely
dispersed. It is a challenge for us to try and get some of these
young people especially ready for work. One of the ways we have
gone differently in the Highlands and Islands from the rest of
Scotland is we have embraced Career Scotland into the HIE network
where the Scottish Enterprise are currently hoping to see a parting
of the ways there. We believe that careers' advice for young people
especially is something that should be part and parcel of our
effort. That starts at school and goes right through trying to
ensure that we identify the youngsters who are potentially going
to go into the NEET group and try and find ways of getting them
ready for work, raising basic life skills and so on, so that the
size of that problem in the Highlands and Islands, relatively
small though it is, is reduced to something very, very small.
I guess that is one of the targets we have for the next three
to five years. We believe we can make a really significant impact
on the size of the NEET group because it is a wasted resource.
In small communities, again, these young people are people who
are visible, it is well known who they are, and I think with the
right mix of careers' advice and apprenticeships and training
we can make some kind of impact there.
Mr Parr: Just on that, I do not
know how much it costs HIE to put in for each job they generate
but to go back on what you were saying about the fishing—I
am not going to go into it in any great depth and they never used
to land the fish, it was just transferred from ship to ship. The
number of people who are employed in Lochinver is symptomatic
of what was done when they built the yard over at Kishorn. The
people who came from around there, or the people who managed to
travel in to get jobs there, were not given skilled jobs, they
were not given training, they were given a brush and told to get
on with it. I think that was an opportunity missed where we could
have developed apprenticeships. How we generate industries or
jobs in the rural areas, I do not know, I will leave it to cleverer
people than me. To pick up on a wee point that I missed earlier
on the school meals, we are attempting to put a motion to STUC
to say that everybody should get free school meals anyway, primary
schools and secondary schools. It would remove the stigma as well
as the burden on poorer families who take it. On the Skye thing
which I think was touched on, I do not know about the growing
population on Skye, I go back and forth to Skye pretty regularly,
it is older people and the crofts there are de-crofting house
sites, the people who are able to afford to buy the house sites
to come over and live there are retired people. I do not know
what their contribution will be to the workforce once they arrive
on Skye, are they then just going to retire totally and put their
feet up or are they going to be taking part in the activities?
There are only so many craft shops or candle shops you can have
in these places for tourists to buy things.
Q38 Mr Davidson:
Following this point about developments and the extent to which
local people get jobs in them, in my own area we have the development
of a really big shopping centre and part of the deal with the
developers was that they and their contractors had to take local
people, they had to give out apprenticeships and they had to give
the first go of all the jobs coming up to people from the local
area. From what you are saying the Highlands and Islands Enterprise
does not seem to do that. Is that a fair assessment and if not,
why do you not do it?
Mr Brady: We do do it. I guess
one of the obvious ones would be the tourism sector. Whatever
financial assistance we give to tourism businesses is based on
the fact that they will have a business plan, and part of that
business plan will be they will put significant resource and effort
into staff training. One of the bugbears of the tourism industry
is the rapid turnaround of labour and the lack of local people
working in hotels and being in the frontline with people who expect
Highland folk to be working in Highland hotels and Highland centres.
That is one of the things we are exceedingly keen on. At the end
of the day, in some rural areas we get the feedback which is,
"We would like to do that but it is not always possible.
We have recruited all the local people that we can and we have
to top-up sometimes with migrant workers". That happens in
the tourism sector increasingly worldwide as well as in places
like the Highlands.
Q39 Mr Davidson:
Can I clarify that because I wanted to ask about the impact of
migrant workers. One of the issues we have been hearing about
is under-employment, yet the fact that so many migrant workers
have come in and managed to get jobs indicated obviously that
there were posts there. It would be helpful if you could clarify
that for us. As I understand it, a lot of them have gone into
tourism where people are low paid, trained badly and generally
the staff are treated fairly badly. Is it because local people
do not want to work in those sorts of occupations and that is
why the only people they can get are migrant workers, or are there
some other forces at play that we have not picked up?
Mr Brady: It is difficult to generalise.
The first thing to say is a number of migrant workers in the tourism
industry have been here now for two, three or four years and have
worked their way up in the business and are now beginning to appear
in first-line supervisory and managerial type jobs and they are
making a contribution to those businesses. Some of the best tourism
businesses in the Highlands and Islands have got some very able
people, notably Eastern Europeans with very good English and very
good customer skills working for them and that is an asset. I
think it is fair to say that in some places, yes, local businesses
would like to recruit locally if they could do so but have drained
that labour pool, particularly in small rural areas, so that they
are dependent on using migrant workers where they can. There are
challenges there with housing, particularly in the tourism sector.
If you have got people working in tourism businesses in remote
areas housing or even accommodation availability may be quite
tight. Again, some of the better employers will do something,
they will either provide it in and around the hotel or they will
have local arrangements which will enable people in their workforce
to stay locally. It is a challenge because there are other areas
where people working in bars have to drive 10, 15, 20 miles to
do an evening shift which is unique to rural areas.
Mr Parr: They are usually split
shifts as well, so they have got to go and come back again. On
the point about migrant workers coming up and filling jobs, they
are. One of the big employers here, apart from the tourist and
the hotel industry, is the fish processing factory. Again it is
minimum wages which comes back to the balance that you were talking
about earlier, "If I am here on the dole, how much better
off am I going to be working in this cold, smelly place for £5
a week less or £5 a week more?" I do not think the incentive
was there for possibly getting people in there. I know for a fact
the way they were recruiting was if you had a criminal record
you were ideal because nobody else was going to take you, "We
will have you, and if you work more than one week we will give
you a bonus of a tenner a week. If you work two weeks you will
get £20" because they were that desperate to hang on
to people. Now we have got a lot of Polish people in particular
working there doing a grand job, where they stay is another thing.
The accommodation they have got to try and find for themselves
is generally in these houses of multiple occupancies which are
far from desirable but they put up with them. Once they get themselves
up the ladder, as somebody mentioned a minute ago, then they will
be able to afford something which is slightly better but certainly
they will not be able to afford a house.
Q40 Chairman:
Can I thank the witnesses for their attendance this morning. Your
evidence will be very useful to us when we compile our report.
Before I close the meeting, if there are any final remarks anyone
wants to make perhaps on an area which we have not covered in
the questioning they may do so?
Mr Brady: No, I do not think so.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
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