Examination of Witnesses (Questions 618
- 619)
TUESDAY 12 JUNE 2007
REVEREND GRAHAM
K BLOUNT AND
MRS EILEEN
BAXENDALE
Q618 Chairman:
Good afternoon. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our inquiry
into poverty in Scotland. Would you please introduce yourselves
for the record?
Mrs Baxendale: I am Eileen Baxendale.
Reverend Blount: I am Graham Blount
from the Scottish Churches Social Inclusion Network.
Q619 Chairman:
Before we start on the detailed questions, would you like to make
an opening statement?
Mrs Baxendale: I should have said
that I am here in my role as the Chairperson of the Baptist Union
of Scotland Public Issues Advisory Group. We welcome the opportunity
to be at this Committee hearing. We are glad that you want to
hear from Scottish churches. I do hope that you will find the
slightly different perspective we have on poverty useful. I think
we have two dimensions to our perspective to bring from the churches.
One is in our commitment and obligation to justice and righteousness,
which I am sure is shared by everybody in the room, and the second
is that as churches we are involved day-to-day with people who
live in poverty and not so much as service users like some of
your other witnesses, but the fact is that they are us, part of
the Church, part of what we do. I hope it is useful that their
voice can get heard through us.
Reverend Blount: Perhaps I could
just also say something quite personal. I was born 56 years ago
in Glasgow, somewhere between Castlemilk and Shettleston. If you
look at the figures, if I had been born in either Castlemilk or
Shettleston the odds are against me still being alive today, but
I was born in a leafier suburb in between them. Poverty kills
people and that is why this inquiry really matters. That is why
we have welcomed the Committee taking up this issue again. That
is why we have welcomed the fact that in recent years a number
of the statistics for poverty and inequality have been turned
round from going in the wrong direction to several of them going
in the right direction now. It may well be that actually keeping
them going in that direction is getting harder. It is the people
who are harder to give opportunities to and to lift out of poverty
that we are having to deal with increasingly and keeping the focus
there is going to be increasingly difficult. Joining up the thinking
between Westminster and Holyrood may have become a little bit
more politically tricky, but we need to focus on keeping it joined
up.
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