Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
TUESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2006
MS CARRON
MCDIARMID,
MS CAROL
GREER AND
MS PHILOMENA
DE LIMA
Q60 Mr Davidson:
That is not specifically targeted at the poor because everybody
in the local village will use the bus. That is not specifically
targeted at poor people, is it? They will benefit from it but
I am seeking to identify what it is you target at poor people
at the moment?
Ms McDiarmid: Targeting at individuals,
there are a handful of things. I think the first thing to talk
about is the council's approach to welfare advice and money advice.
In Highland I think we are quite peculiar as an authority in that
we procure most of that service through the advice network. We
have a very small in-house team of money advisers and a small
team of people promoting benefits. We provide funding to an advice
network of nine providers and an umbrella organisation of over
one million pounds per annum to provide that service. We do it
that way in Highland because the service is good but also because
it can bring in volunteers.
Q61 Mr Davidson:
Do they have an open door?
Ms McDiarmid: Yes.
Q62 Mr Davidson:
So they are not targeted specifically at poor people? That would
be a money advice service which anybody could come to and access?
Ms McDiarmid: Yes.
Q63 Mr Davidson:
Again, what I am asking you is what do you have which is targeted
specifically at poor people?
Ms McDiarmid: We have a targeted
approach to benefit take-up.
Mr Davidson: That is not universal then,
that is specifically at poor people?
Danny Alexander: It would only be the
poor who are entitled to benefit.
Q64 Mr Davidson:
The issue I am trying to pursue with you is this question of in
my own area I have got poor areas where the council clearly puts
resources in and it focuses them on these particular areas. You
are arguing that your poverty is dispersed and, therefore, you
ought to have equivalent resources of some sort. In fact, as far
as I can see, you do not identify any of your spending specifically
on poor people in order that that can be enhanced because most
of your services are universal services. I recognise that you
have got problems of rurality and sparsity and so on, but that
is a slightly different set of issues from poverty issues.
Ms McDiarmid: I will give you
another example, and I have got a leaflet I can give you. The
council has a high-life card which provides access to all of our
leisure facilities, swimming pools and leisure centres, so for
households in receipt of certain benefits they can access all
of these facilities for 50 pence. People who are under 18, are
in full-time education or are over 60 get half price. We do have
ways that we can make sure people can access services and not
be deprived of that because they are poor.
Q65 Mr Davidson:
If you are getting 50 pence access to swimming pools, for example,
it might cost you a large amount of money to get there, so that
would only benefit those who were in relatively close proximity
to the pool, say, in Inverness.
Ms McDiarmid: Or they can use
the subsidised public transport which the council invests in.
Q66 Mr Walker:
Going back to the income issue. What percentage of your households
are workless, where there is no-one in work of working age across
the Highlands?[37]
Ms McDiarmid: The employment deprived
population is 13,500.
Q67 Mr Walker:
A household where no-one is in work?
Ms McDiarmid: No, that is the
total number of people who are not working and could be in employment.
Q68 Mr Walker:
You do not have any figures of households where neither the woman
nor husband or two partners are not working?
Ms McDiarmid: I do not have that,
I can see if I can provide that as written evidence.
Q69 Mr Walker:
Secondly, we know what the gross annual pay is for the Highlands,
but what is the average household income in the Highlands which
is completely different from average wage? What is the average
household income?
Ms McDiarmid: In Highland as of
last year from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings it was
£18,800.
Q70 Mr Walker:
No, that is not the average household income, that is gross annual
pay which is completely different from average household income.
Ms McDiarmid: We do not have that
information.
Q71 Mr Walker:
This is what amazes me. I think every other council has these
figures or knows what the average household income is in the area
they represent. I cannot understand how you do not know what the
average household income is in this part of the world.
Ms McDiarmid: This is the best
information we have.
Ms de Lima: There is an issue
around an information gap and there are two aspects to it. One
issue is around the way in which national surveys are undertaken
and the under-representation of samples, for example in the Highlands
and Islands. I know there have been discussions on the part of
the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and so on, so there is a
boost on samples and we can have some of this information at root
level. I would also like to go back on the issue around individual
households and how do you find out about the individual household
poverty. There was a study done in 2003 which was commissioned
by the Scottish Executive which looked at the issue around the
Index of Multiple Deprivation and what should be adopted. One
of the recommendations which was consistently made throughout
that report was that the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation
was a pragmatic solution to looking at spatial deprivation and
that should be adopted. They also made a recommendation with the
Scottish Executive, which others have chosen not to take up, which
was that there was an issue around trying to understand dispersed
deprivation. One way of doing that would have been by complementing
it with surveys which targeted individual households and developed
a picture of household poverty over a period of time. That recommendation
has fallen by the wayside and has not been picked up. I am aware
of this from the unit I work in about the issue around the Index
of Multiple Deprivation being a blunt instrument. It recognises
there is a need for it but it is a blunt instrument. Therefore
they need to adopt some alternative measure which is really in
the form of surveys being undertaken to get a sense of individual
household poverty. Unfortunately, I do not know who is in a position
to take that forward, where are the resources for this and at
what level this should happen, but there certainly has been that
kind of recommendation on that sort of issue. Again, I know this
was an issue which came up in the last discussion around what
is the impact of the recent fiscal or welfare measures that the
Government has implemented around Pension Credit and so on. I
have to say, we are not in a position to say the extent of that
impact on communities because we do not have the data or the research
which has been undertaken. There is an issue around "Whose
role is it to commission that research to give an understanding
of it?", therefore, what we find, certainly as a researcher,
is that we are going round and round in circles. We have lots
of discussions around the Index of Multiple Deprivation and why
it is poor without looking at how we might address that issue
in the longer term.
Ms Greer: I take your point about
the need for targeted resources on areas of particular deprivation.
When we are looking at our service delivery we would look at those
and make sure we had adequate services there, good marketing and
that kind of thing. The advantage though of the council funding
us to do open door services is that it enables us to identify
those people who do not think they are poor, who do not think,
"I am a poor person". I do think there is a balance
to be struck. At the moment in terms of resource allocation nationally
that balance seems to me to be overly focused on the identified
areas.[38]
Q72 Mr Davidson:
Like the Highlands, I have got pockets of severe deprivation in
my constituency and I have also got deprived people who are not
in those areas. We have a mix of universal services, such as the
CAB which does all the things you are saying, but we also have
a clear focus on areas of deprivation. What I am not clear about
in terms of the discussion that we are having in Highlands is
(a) whether or not the council does actually do anything which
is specifically targeted at poor people who are dispersed and
(b) if they do not, what justification is there for saying that
you ought to get more money because you have got poor people who
are dispersed. If you are arguing that you want to be able to
help these poor people who are dispersed but you are not doing
anything for them at the moment, then it is difficult to see why
you should get more money. It is the point about transport, I
accept that transport is a difficulty for poor people but it is
a difficulty for everybody and, therefore, subsidies for the bus
services or subsidies for petrol or whatever benefit Mohamed Al
Fayed just as much as they benefit the poor person in the community.
That is where I have got some difficulty in terms of what you
are saying to us.
Ms McDiarmid: I think what you
said crystallises the real dilemma that we have. We know there
are more people living in rural communities who are income and
employment deprived, Government statistics tell us that, but they
are not conspicuous, they are hidden because they do not all live
next door to each other. The difficulty we have in reaching those
people is that when the Government makes decisions around allocating
funds, for example the new financial inclusion strategy for the
country was launched, the funding for that was targeted based
on SIMD and we got nothing at all from that fund because we did
not score high enough in that Index, yet we do have a high number
of employment and income deprived people in the Highlands.
Q73 Danny Alexander:
Can I ask the opposite question to Ian's question, in a sense.
Are there things you would like to do to target those individuals
who are dispersed to a much greater extent than elsewhere in the
Highlands if the resources were available?
Ms McDiarmid: We would certainly
want to do more benefits promotion work in taking information
out to communities and to particular venues. We do that at the
moment but it is restricted by the amount of funding and staff
resource we have for it. We have also just conducted a major best-value
review of advice provision within the Highland which we have done
jointly with the advice sector and the recommendations from that
came out last year. We have been working through those to see
how we could implement that model. That is probably going to be
more expensive to implement in order to have consistent services
across all of the Highlands so that if you are in need of financial
advice or welfare benefits advice in North West Sutherland, you
can get the same service as you can get in Inverness, which currently
you cannot because the service coverage is not the same everywhere.
If we had more of a resource we could improve the service we provide
around benefits information and benefits take-up.
Ms Greer: We could also provide
a range of ways of accessing that because at the moment it is
a combination of face-to-face, if people can attend a Citizens
Advice Bureau or another advice agency, and some telephone advice.
In an ideal world we would want to expand telephony in particular
to cover out-of-hours services and weekends and do a lot more
home visiting than we can do at the moment. We are not resourced
to do enough of that at the moment. For very deprived people in
remote rural communities who cannot travel, for whatever reason,
we would like to do more of that. There are also huge opportunities
for us to do more outreach in GP surgeries and the kinds of settings
where people are comfortable going and are less stigmatised than
going into other agencies that have got "CAB" or "I
have got a problem" written on them. There is huge potential
for us to make our services very much more accessible, even using
things like the internet, email advice services and text message
services for younger people, all resource dependent obviously.
We could do very significantly more than we are doing in partnership
with the council and separately, but there is always the problem
with resourcing that.
Ms McDiarmid: I am not sure if
you are interested in the extent of debt, whether you are taking
that into account in your inquiry or not, but I have got some
information from a very small money advice team the council has
which has four advisers and a manager. In the last financial year
they dealt with over 400 clients with multiple and complex debt
and the debt totalled almost five million pounds at that time.
That is just our money advice service, there are also money advisers
who operate through the advice network.
Q74 Mr McGovern:
It is possible that my question has been answered in bits and
pieces. If my colleagues had not launched in without the permission
of the Chairman, I might have got in earlier! I think you were
here earlier in the first evidence session and you may have heard
me asking the question possibly of the wrong person. I asked Mr
Brady of the Highlands and Islands about the money advice project,
and someone said to me yesterday at the Merkinch Centre that they
felt the money advice project was quite proactive rather than
reactive in as much as it went out to communities. I would like
to know a bit more about that. It is in line with what Ian was
asking and possibly was answered earlier. Is there a campaign
bus that goes around or do you advertise that the money advice
people will be in the parish hall on the first Friday of every
month or how is it done?
Ms McDiarmid: Yes, we have a benefits
promotion team and they run road shows across the area and promote
benefits advice. We also target particular places with information,
residential homes, pensioner groups, lunch groups and lunch clubs,
that sort of thing, but the team is very small and we have to
fund that from core council resources. There is no additional
funding to deliver those services which other local authorities
benefit from.
Q75 Mr McGovern:
I must have heard at least a dozen times in the past couple of
days that this area is geographically bigger than Belgium and
there are only four people to provide that advice throughout that
whole region?
Ms McDiarmid: That is the money
advice team, they are accredited money advisers and are slightly
separate from benefits promotion teams, a smaller team of about
a half a dozen people. That is in addition to the funding we provide
for the advice network for all of their benefits advice they provide.
Q76 Mr McGovern:
Are these people expected to not only man an office somewhere
but also go out into the community campaigning on a bus?
Ms McDiarmid: Yes, they do home
visits.
Q77 Mr McGovern:
I must say I am not really surprised that apparently there is
a low take-up.
Ms McDiarmid: The money advice
team last year visited 233 clients at home and that was a small
team of four. That is because they need to visit people to give
advice because they are not always accessible.
Q78 Mr McGovern:
Are there some sorts of regular surgeries in regular areas once
a month?
Ms McDiarmid: The council has
got 37 service points throughout the area and staff there are
also able to give introductory advice around benefits. They can
arrange for more advice to be provided by those who work in that
full-time.[39]
Ms Greer: There are also six Citizens
Advice Bureaux and three independent advice agencies and, again,
they operate very similarly. There is a kind of open door for
people to come and discuss debt or they can phone up or they run
outreach clinics and do home visits and things as well, so that
supplements what the council is doing. We do work very strongly
in partnership with the council obviously to try and join up the
services. We are talking about doing more of that in the future.
As you say, there is always room for significantly more; we can
never meet the demand, particularly for money advice, everybody
is really busy.
Ms McDiarmid: The council had
some independent work done to quantify the cost of delivering
services in super sparse areas and that was quantified at over
£12 million per annum. This is an extra cost for keeping
our services local and accessible and that includes the cost of
having to do home visits for certain services. That is not recognised
in our grant settlement.
Q79 Mr Davidson:
Can I pick up some points that we raised earlier on about what
the Government has done already. We heard glowing reports earlier
from the people we previously met about the impact of the national
minimum wage which we see as being something which is specifically
targeted at people who are being badly paid. Our impression is
that this has been an unalloyed benefit to the area. Is that your
idea as well?
Ms Greer: I have to say, if you
look at the number of employment enquiries that we get, very many
of those are to do with seasonal employment. Arguably, yes, for
a short time it may raise some incomes higher than they might
otherwise have been but it does not deal with the seasonality
issue. We also have large numbers of enquiries from people who
are not being paid the national minimum wage for a number of different
reasons. I think it is a partial solution but it will only ever
be a partial solution because the minimum wage is still very low.
It is still a low wage.
37 See Ev 38 Back
38
See Ev 38 Back
39
See Ev 38 Back
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