Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620
- 639)
TUESDAY 12 JUNE 2007
REVEREND GRAHAM
K BLOUNT AND
MRS EILEEN
BAXENDALE
Q620 Chairman:
What is the single biggest cause of poverty in Scotland in your
view and what are the consequences of poverty for the poorest
in our society?
Reverend Blount: I think it is
quite difficult to differentiate cause and effect here. I would
not want to get too far away from saying that poverty is about
low incomes. Obviously as Christians we would not adopt an entirely
materialist view of poverty or anything else, but sometimes other
definitions seem to be an excuse to get away from the reality
about income and financial resources. There are several ways in
which that becomes embedded and a kind of spiral, ie the interaction
of that with poor health, as I have mentioned already, with levels
of indebtedness, with difficult decisions about the use of fuel
and with fuel poverty. All of these take a situation of low income
and exacerbate it over a period of time and lead to more and more
people getting stuck in poverty.
Q621 Chairman:
Is poverty getting worse or is the situation improving in Scotland?
Reverend Blount: I think there
have been some very positive developments. The figures tell us
that we just about met the target in terms of child poverty in
2005 and therefore we might stand a better chance of hitting the
2010 target in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. I am not entirely
sure why we are doing slightly better in Scotland, but so it would
seem. However, the piece of research that I referred to in our
submission which has now been published by Joseph Rowntree, which
is the voices of people experiencing poverty in Scotland, would
suggest that although a lot of the figures show an improvement
in the situation, the perception of people living with this is
not one of significant change. We asked them to think about the
period since devolution and there was not a resounding "yes,
things are getting a lot better". There were some specific
examples of ways things were getting better which were a bit patchy
across the country, but by and large people did not think there
had been a significant change.
Q622 Chairman:
Do you think the situation has improved but the message to the
people is not there because of propaganda or because of some people
thinking things are not getting better?
Reverend Blount: As you already
hinted with your first question, the experience of living with
poverty is a wide mixture of things. Statistics tend to isolate
one factor at a time. While a number of the statistics are getting
better, the people that we spoke to were not experiencing a big
change in their lives subjectively.
Q623 Chairman:
Which groups do you think are most affected by poverty in our
communities?
Mrs Baxendale: One of the things
I mentioned in my submission was poverty issues for the ethnic
minority population. It clearly is the case that unemployment
and poverty are higher among members of ethnic minority groups.
An ethnic minority graduate is three times more likely to be unemployed
than another equivalent graduate. Ethnic minority women are particularly
disadvantaged in the labour market. Difficulties in accessing
employment obviously contribute to poverty. There has been a big
piece of work done by the Scottish Executive about the strategic
group on ethnic minorities and the labour market which is going
to be part of the race equality plan, but that is not yet published.
That investigation was done some months ago now and it certainly
highlighted a lot of these issues, but I do not know to what extent
it is going to deal with them because I have not seen the outcome
of that. That is one group where there are particular issues connected
with employment and therefore poverty.
Q624 Chairman:
Do you think the newly elected Scottish Executive knows about
these issues? Have they taken any initiatives over the last two
months to deal with these matters?
Mrs Baxendale: I have certainly
spent some time on websites this week and it was significant that
putting in things like ethnic minority poverty, looking at statistical
reports that are published, did not generate much information.
It took me a long time to find anything.
Q625 Mr Davidson:
I want to follow up this point about ethnic minorities. In your
experience to what extent is a lack of English something that
is holding people back? I have been struck in my constituency,
particularly the section that I have recently taken over in Govan,
about the extent to which women from ethnic minorities, in many
cases who have been here for ten, 15, 20 years, cannot speak English
and seem to be making little effort to do so. Clearly in those
circumstances it is highly unlikely that they are going to be
attractive in the labour market where obviously the English language
is overwhelmingly used.
Mrs Baxendale: I have a great
deal of experience, like yourself, of working with asylum seekers
and refugees, which is almost a different subset of the problem,
and it is true that many of the women are not learning good English.
What is also true, and this becomes anecdotal in my experience,
is that many refugee men and women—
Q626 Mr Davidson:
I am specifically not asking about refugees and asylum seekers
because they are in exceptional circumstances but about ethnic
minority populations who have been here for ten, 15 or 20 years
and where the women have not learned English because of cultural
differences. Clearly in those circumstances they are almost unemployable
except within their own community where quite frequently they
are exploited by being given low wages. To what extent does that
ring true with your own experience?
Mrs Baxendale: I really could
not say because my experience is a lot to do with asylum seekers
and refugees. Certainly the information about women graduates
and ethnic minority graduates struggling in the labour market
would not be to do with English because obviously people would
have good English in order to get their qualifications.
Q627 Mr Davidson:
You were going to come on to asylum seekers and refugees. Maybe
you could just clarify the point for us that you wished to make.
Mrs Baxendale: I wished to make
two points. One is that, in terms of me being here today, every
asylum seeker person I have spoken to in the last however many
years would say to the Committee that they should be allowed to
work, they do not need to be in poverty and they could be paying
taxes. They are getting money from the Government they do not
want. People want to work.
Q628 Mr Davidson:
I understand why asylum seekers, many of whom are economic migrants,
would want to say to us that they should be allowed to work. Have
you taken into account the extent to which that would then be
a substantial pull factor in attracting further people to come
here on the basis that if you come here, say you are an asylum
seeker and then immediately you are able to work there is obviously
an attraction?
Mrs Baxendale: I am certainly
aware of the pull factor. My personal opinion would be that there
might be two ways in which we would allow asylum seekers to work
that I would commend. One would be if they come with particular
skills—and we have a skills gap in Scotland—and the
other one would be that after a period of time, perhaps after
thee years because then I think you diminish the pull factor quite
considerably—
Q629 Mr Davidson:
As I understand it the whole concept of managed migration is about
identifying skills that we need, in which case people will be
able to apply to come here, rather than self-selecting. If you
have dealt with asylum seekers you will be aware of how any time
that is given as a particular target can quite easily be manipulated
by lawyers in order to spin the whole process out and that would
then provide a perverse incentive for people to make their claims
ever more complex simply in order to reach a target date. How
do we deal with these two points?
Mrs Baxendale: I am familiar with
the arguments you are putting forward. I think there is a part
of the argument that is not included there, which is that many
asylum seekers do not come because they are economic migrants,
they come because they are in genuine fear of the lives of themselves
and their children. The pull arguments and the economic migrant
arguments do not really apply to that group of people. For them
it might be considered only reasonable to allow them to work.
Q630 Mr Davidson:
Perhaps if we could distinguish between the genuine asylum seekers
and the economic migrants we would not have half the difficulties
we have at the moment. The problem is distinguishing between them.
Mrs Baxendale: I do not know if
this goes outside of the remit of the Committee.
Q631 Mr Davidson:
I think you have made some quite interesting points in the submissions
that we have received about the position of asylum seekers. Glasgow
MPs in particular have large numbers of asylum seekers under the
NAS dispersal programme and so on. In my case it is the biggest
single category of surgery cases that I have. I am well aware
of the extent to which many of them are spurious cases and they
are clearly economic migrants and it is therefore a major difficulty
how we identify which cases are justifiable and ought to be allowed
to work right away, but the problem is that 99 per cent of the
others would claim the same right.
Mrs Baxendale: Certainly the new
asylum model I would commend because it would deal with things
much more quickly. The issue of having been here four years and
not being able to work and all these difficulties hopefully will
not be such a big problem for many people.
Q632 Mr MacNeil:
The Scottish Churches Social Inclusion Network made a profound
statement when they said, "we are convinced that the problem
of poverty has to be understood in relationship to the problem
of wealth. What, for the wealthy, is often perceived as a problem
of poverty, is for many living in poverty a problem of wealth.
For the creation of wealth to add value to society it requires
to be more adequately distributed." What needs to be done
to ensure that the poorest in society are gaining the benefits
of increased influence?
Reverend Blount: I think for some
time we have proceeded on the basis that if the country as a whole
got wealthier then everybody got wealthier and that would sort
itself out. That produced some fairly alarming figures of growing
gaps and people being dramatically left behind. I think increasingly
now it is realised that not only are these health inequalities
I mentioned not only morally unacceptable but they are actually
a break on the economy because effectively large numbers of people
are being cut off from full participation in the economy. We seem
to believe sometimes that extra money in the hands of rich people
automatically produces benefits for the economy whereas extra
money in the hands of poor people does not. I do not think there
is any solid evidence for that. I think there is a strength in
the more people we have actively participating in the economy
being included, if you want to pick up the language of social
inclusion, and therefore playing a full part and that means a
redistribution of resources.
Q633 Mr MacNeil:
I read last night in the Evening Standard in London of
the perhaps folly, as the columnist put it, of building more houses
because they will always be snapped up by property speculators.
He was advocating mechanisms to prevent speculation in the housing
market to enable house prices to fall and become more affordable.
What are the key mechanisms you see that would enable people to
participate properly in society and eliminate the relative poverty
or actual poverty that we have?
Reverend Blount: One of the things
I wanted to say something about was the importance of affordable
housing in this discussion. The Scottish Churches Housing Action
is part of the social inclusion network and along with Shelter
and others they have been campaigning around the last Scottish
election and since it about the need for 30,000 affordable homes
in Scotland. We have a legal framework and system of rights now
set up legislatively in Scotland which is apparently the envy
of Europe in terms of homelessness legislation, but it does not
mean a great deal if there are not the houses for people. We need
to be finding ways to ensure that an appropriate level of affordable
housing is created. I think the possibility of local authorities
suspending in areas of high pressure the right to buy may be a
part of that because the possibility that affordable houses built
now will be into the speculative market in the relatively short
term is a disincentive to building them. So we need to ensure
that there is an adequate supply of affordable housing available.
Q634 Chairman:
Do you think that policy makers have the right definition of poverty,
that the language used around social inclusion and exclusion properly
reflects the lack of opportunity faced by some people, and that
the measures being used to assess and gauge poverty are the right
ones?
Reverend Blount: I think the language
of inclusion and exclusion has alerted us to important aspects
of what it means to live in poverty. We have looked at the various
statistical ways of analysing poverty. We believe that the Scottish
index of multiple deprivation is as helpful as any single tool,
but any single tool does not capture a many layered reality. In
particular, it does capture concentrations of poverty, particularly
of urban poverty and tends to miss small pockets of poverty and
even individual households of poverty, which is much more the
rural dimension of the scene. Statistically no one figure is going
to capture the whole reality. Part of the definition has to be
listening to the people for whom this is a daily experience. Schumacher
has a story about a student job on a farm where he was sent out
to count the cows every day in a particular field which he thought
was beneath him and rather silly. Slowly as he did this every
day he realised that he was paying attention to the cows and he
began to see them as individuals and see when there was something
wrong with one of them and that was really the purpose of the
exercise. People experiencing poverty are not dumb animals. They
are able to tell us if we are prepared to listen. I think that
has to guide policy for the future along with the statistical
analysis. When we are talking about regeneration within a community,
there has to be a very strong local voice saying what that community
needs rather than what somebody on the basis of policy analysis
thinks they need.
Q635 Mr Davidson:
I want to ask about routes out of poverty and, in particular,
about the Government's view which I think could be fairly summarised
as saying that work is the best route out of poverty. I think
we are aware of issues relating to low wages and we will maybe
come on to those later on. Do you accept the general thrust that
for the vast majority of people work is actually the best way
out of poverty?
Reverend Blount: I think for a
very large number of people in recent years work has been the
way out of poverty or at least a step towards that. As you mentioned
yourself, for some of them it has been a transition from benefit
dependency to low wages that has not entirely lifted them out
of poverty, but for many people it has lifted them and lifted
them beyond a lot of the thresholds that we are measuring.
Q636 Mr Davidson:
The Government's strategy has been to get people into work. Do
you think that that is essentially the right strategy, notwithstanding
caveats about progression and the minimum wage? Is the general
strategy right?
Reverend Blount: Yes, certainly
in terms of the past. I think increasingly we are talking about
smaller numbers of people who are unemployed and seeking work
and therefore we are dealing with people who are harder to get
back into work and so it becomes harder to make that difference
as time goes on. I think it would be a mistake to see work as
the only way out of poverty because I think we have to reckon
with the fact that there are people who are not going to be working
for a wide range of circumstances.
Q637 Mr Davidson:
There are pensioners and disabled people who are effectively unemployable,
I understand that and it is then a question of benefits. If you
take that group out of it, in terms of the strategic direction,
I just wanted to be clear that you did not see anything else,
such as the provision of more benefits willy-nilly, as being the
best route out.
Mrs Baxendale: There is also a
generational element to people not working in terms of children's
aspirations as they grow up in areas where there is high unemployment.
A lot of young people I have known do not expect to work, but
if their parents move into work—and I have seen this happen
with local families—the children's aspirations change and
lo and behold you have a family who ten or 15 years ago were a
serious family with a lot of problems. The parents picking up
basic employment means we now have a group of young adults who
are all working. Getting the parents into employment has had that
effect. It works the other way round as well in that if that had
not happened for the parents I am sure those young people would
not be working.
Q638 Mr Davidson:
I am conscious that in my area there are enormous numbers of people
in poverty without ambition because they have been reconciled
to their lot. Are we in danger of having a whole raft of families
who are just above the poverty level, who are getting into employment
but who cannot progress beyond that? Is that your experience or
is your experience that people, once they are moving into employment,
are then moving onwards and upwards?
Reverend Blount: If one was optimistic
about it one could that with those who have been brought over
that threshold time will tell. There are certainly some signs
that there is not the fluidity in the economy that leads to a
natural moving up from low paid work on to something better paid.
Certainly the experience is, going back to listening to the voices
of people with poverty, that people felt almost as trapped in
the low paid work that they had found as they had in the benefits
culture that they had now moved on from.
Q639 Mr MacNeil:
You mentioned fluidity in the economy. I would like to mention
a more upstream issue. The fish are swimming in a certain pool.
I am thinking back to an earlier evidence session we had when
two lecturers from Bradford University were here who mentioned
a European report. They said that the Republic of Ireland led
Europe in the amount of people that moved from low quality jobs
to high quality jobs but that the UK led Europe in the number
of people who moved from low quality jobs to low quality jobs
to low quality jobs. Is it not almost incumbent upon us to look
at some of those fluidity in the economy problems that are surrounding
people and contributing to the problem of hopelessness and being
reconciled to their lot?
Reverend Blount: I certainly think
that is an area where the subjective and the objective that you
have had from Bradford University are of the same mind, ie that
there does not seem to be as much perceived opportunity to move
on easily from poorly paid jobs. People work in whole sectors
where there are poorly paid jobs and where there does not seem
to be much opportunity to move on from them either within that
sector or to build on the experience they have gained with one
sector to move into a better paid sector. It does not seem to
be working that way for people.
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