Examination of Witnesses (Questions 351
- 359)
TUESDAY 6 MARCH 2007
MS SUE
MIDDLETON AND
MR GUY
PALMER
Q351 Chairman:
Good afternoon. First of all, may I welcome the witnesses to our
inquiry into Poverty in Scotland. Perhaps you would introduce
yourselves, for the record, please?
Ms Middleton: Thank you very much,
and thank you for the invitation. I am Sue Middleton. I am Research
Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough
University, and I am Adviser to the Poverty and Disadvantage Committee
of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Mr Palmer: My name is Guy Palmer.
I am Director of the New Policy Institute, and we work with the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation on a regular basis, producing poverty
reports in Scotland.
Q352 Chairman:
Before we start on the detailed questions, would you like to make
an opening statement?
Ms Middleton: I found the preparation
of the document quite interesting, in that the poverty situation
in Scotland reflects so much the situation in England and in the
UK as a whole. I have read some of the evidence that you have
been taking, and some of the discussions that you have been having,
with great interest and I would make just a couple of points to
add to what is in the document that I prepared for you. The first
is that I think there needs to be an understanding of the dynamic
nature of poverty, that it is wrong and misleading, in policy
terms, to view people who are experiencing poverty as a static
population; they change, they move. I think I saw evidence, for
example, that you were informed that the average length of lone
parenthood in Scotland is six years, something like that. I think
that also has lessons for us, in terms of what we know about,
for example, severe child poverty, which is that the children
who experience the worst forms of poverty are not those whose
parents sit on benefits year in year out, they are the children
who are in families whose parents seek to get out of work but
move between work and no work. That seems to propel those families
into a much more severe sort of poverty; so we need to be looking
at a flexible benefit system. Whilst there has been lots of progress
made on shooting people into work from benefits, there has not
been as much attention given to, shall we say, the parachutes
to protect people as they fall out of work, bearing in mind that
most people actually do get back into work. There needs to be
more attention given to the situation of those who are inevitably
dependent upon "out of work" benefits.
Mr Palmer: 50% of those who are
not working are disabled.
Ms Middleton: If you add to that
the proportion of lone parents who have a disabled child, the
proportion of lone parents with young children, there really is
not very much evidence that there are large numbers of people
on long-term benefits who are simply sitting there. We know that,
even with the tax credits, the amount allowed for adults in "out
of work" benefits has fallen way behind. I think attention
needs to be given to that.
Mr Palmer: Like Sue, I was struck
by the fact that in most of your discussions to date the direction
of conversation has been more about poverty generally in Great
Britain than poverty specifically in Scotland. That coincides
with my experience, that many of the issues in Scotland are similar
to the issues in Great Britain as a whole. Indeed, if you compare
Scotland with the English regions, for example, Scotland typically,
on most subjects, falls bang in the middle. The one exception
to that is health, and therefore health might be a subject for
you to take a particular interest in. As well as Scotland having
similar issues to Great Britain, the big policy levers are the
non-devolved levers to do with tax and benefits and New Deal,
and so on and so forth. One of the issues we grapple with perpetually
is what leeway the Scotland Executive has to take different angles
from the UK Government; and, secondly, to what extent, Scotland
should be trying to influence the UK agenda. My impression is
that, largely, the UK agenda is set and Scotland accepts it, rather
than that Scotland lobbies. Therefore, it seems to me that the
challenges are to think about policy in terms of both what the
Scottish Executive can and should be doing and how it should be
lobbying on behalf of Scotland to get a Scottish angle to UK-wide
policy.
Q353 Mr Davidson:
I wonder if I could follow up one point in relation to that. I
thought you were saying that Scottish poverty was pretty much
the same as poverty in the UK as a whole. Therefore, is there
a specifically Scottish aspect for which they ought to be lobbying?
Mr Palmer: The politics in Scotland
are different from the politics in the UK as a whole. When I go
and have discussions about poverty in Scotland, the whole ambience
of those discussions, both amongst the politicians and amongst
the third sector, is rather different from equivalent discussions
in London.
Q354 Mr Walker:
Can you explain what you mean, "the ambience"; that
there is more smoke in the room, or whatever?
Mr Palmer: There is more concern
about the subject of poverty and there is more entertainment about
doing more on the subject. Perhaps potentially doing something
about inequality more generally is much more on the political
agenda up there than it is down here.
Q355 Mr Davidson:
Apart from the health issue, which we understand, you are not
suggesting that there are actually solutions which would be identifiably
flowing from the Scottish situation, as distinct from the North
East of England, or anywhere else?
Mr Palmer: No. I am suggesting
precisely the opposite; that actually Scotland has got very similar
problems to the rest of Great Britain.
Q356 Mr Walker:
You say the ambience is different; do you think the outcomes are
different? Obviously, what we have discovered is that people who
are in straightened times do not need nice mood music, they need
actions to be taken to alleviate the circumstances in which they
find themselves. Whereas in Scotland there may be more sympathy,
do you think the outcomes are better than in England, where perhaps
there is less sympathy?
Mr Palmer: In general, I would
say, no. A specific example would be banking, where there is a
lot more concern historically, in Scotland, about people who do
not have bank accounts and therefore the financial exclusion which
results. The banks in Scotland have undertaken a number of initiatives
to try to address that problem, but the net result is similar
in Scotland to that in England; the trends over time and the number
of people who are unbanked are similar in the two countries.
Q357 Chairman:
We understand that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation spends about
£10 million a year on research and development programmes,
seeking to understand the causes of social difficulty and exploring
ways of overcoming them. Could you explain exactly how the Foundation
goes about this?
Ms Middleton: That is interesting.
Remember, I do not actually work for the Foundation. I am a consultant
to the Foundation, so I can explain to you what I know about the
way in which the Foundation works. The Foundation is separate
from the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, which is something different.
As you say, the Foundation disperses research funding, usually
through a number of committees, one of which is the Poverty and
Disadvantage Committee; there are committees on other aspects
of social problems, such as disability, and so on, but the Poverty
and Disadvantage Committee is the one I know best. It disperses
its funds in a number of ways. It has programmes of work and then
it will put out a call for projects within those programmes of
work, for example, there is one at the moment on Needs and Resources
in Later Life. There is a developing programme on Poverty Dynamics,
and there will be, as I said, a call for projects within that
competitive core of projects. Occasionally, it has specific ideas
about an area where it believes further research is required,
so it will put out an invitation to tender. At the moment there
is a call out for a project to look at the dynamics of debt and
poverty, in other words, looking at how debt can facilitate people
into poverty, keep them in poverty and what sorts of initiatives
would be needed to remedy that situation; also it allows open
calls, so at any time. From my perspective as Director of a self-funding
research centre, the joy of it is that they give you the opportunity
to put in bids to do some blue-skies thinking, which in the past
was absolutely wonderful. At a time when Government was not funding
research on poverty, they were one of the few organisations where
you could get some money to do some really innovative thinking
about issues around poverty. That is roughly the way they work.
Q358 Chairman:
Since they spend £10 million in the United Kingdom, can you
tell us how much, or what percentage, of that money is spent in
Scotland?
Ms Middleton: I think really you
would have to ask someone from the Foundation itself that question;
it would be completely wrong of me to answer on their behalf.
As I said, I do not work for them, I act as a consultant to them,
and honestly I do not know the answer to that question. I can
ask it for you afterwards and find someone. I know a man who can.
Q359 Chairman:
You have mentioned twice, and probably we know as well, that you
do not work for the Foundation. Are you familiar enough with the
Foundation's work to answer our question?
Ms Middleton: I am familiar with
much of the Foundation's work, but I do not know about the Foundation's
internal workings or the proportions of the funds which it allocates
in different regions of the UK.
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