Examination of Witnesses (Questions 769
- 779)
MONDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2007
COUNCILLOR HARRY
MCGUIGAN,
MR JON
HARRIS, MR
RICHARD CAIRNS,
MR BRIAN
BARKER, MR
JIM MCCROSSAN
AND MR
MATTHEW CRIGHTON
Q769 Chairman:
Good afternoon and welcome to our session on poverty in Scotland.
Could you please introduce yourselves for the record?
Councillor McGuigan: Thank you
for that welcome. If I could introduce myself, I am Harry McGuigan.
I will be acting as chair for the team of people who are with
me here today. What I would like to say before we start as part
of my introduction to you is that it is a great opportunity and
pleasure for us to come along here and be able to assist you in
the important work that you are undertaking in your review of
poverty. It is a persistent, pervasive problem in the UK and Scotland
here, so we appreciate that. We are anxious to stress that we
see the role of ourselves as being part of a tripartite initiative
between Westminster, the UK Government, the Scottish Government
and local government and we are anxious to stress, as we did in
our submission to you, Chairman, the importance of flexibility
and the importance of recognising that the strategies which are
most effective in dealing with poverty, the problems that accompany
poverty in our communities and the way it impacts our communities
are best solved in the local areas where there is that flexibility
to tackle the real issues. I have said enough there and I will
leave my colleagues, moving from the left, to introduce yourselves.
Mr Barker: I am Brian Barker,
Policy and Strategy Manager at Argyll and Bute Council and I head
up the Council's corporate policy department.
Mr McCrossan: I am Jim McCrossan,
Community Learning and Regeneration Manager for Argyll and Bute
Council.
Mr Crighton: My name is Matthew
Crighton, the Job Strategy Manager at the Capital City Partnership,
which is a social inclusion partnership for Edinburgh where I
am responsible for the Edinburgh City Jobs Strategy, one of the
Department for Work and Pensions Pathfinders.
Mr Harris: Jon Harris, Strategic
Director at COSLA.
Mr Cairns: Richard Cairns, Head
of Economic and Social Initiatives at Glasgow City Council.
Q770 Chairman:
Obviously there has been over the years some reduction in the
number of people living in poverty in Scotland, but still it is
very high when we have almost one million people and a quarter
of a million children still living in poverty. Obviously we need
a strategy where—you are absolutely right—we need
to make sure local government, the Scottish Executive and the
British Government all work together. Could you please tell us
what is the role of local government in tackling poverty and disadvantage?
Councillor McGuigan: I think the
absolutely crucial role of local government in tackling problems
is, first of all, to listen to the people in its community, understanding
what the issues are that prevent them from being able to escape
from the poverty traps which are there. Many of those poverty
traps are not things that occur because of the particular location,
many of them are, but it is not necessarily because of the particular
location. In many circumstances the poverty trap, the thing that
keeps people trapped in poverty, is the inflexibility of some
of the arrangements that are there as far as benefits, tax credit
systems, employment and routes out of poverty are concerned. I
think the role of the local authority is to identify not in isolation
but along with the community planning partners, the other key
public agencies and the private sector too the best ways of ensuring
that programmes, initiatives, opportunities, training, social
facilities and housing for our people are all put in place to
ensure that our communities are able to be better equipped to
solve some of their own problems, but they cannot solve these
problems on their own. Local authorities are quite naturally the
agency for enabling that kind of diverse approach to dealing with
poverty and poverty-related matters.
Q771 Chairman:
You see there are different services within local government,
as you mentioned, health and education. How best can local government
co-ordinate between these services to form an anti-poverty strategy,
because that seems to be the big issue? I was a councillor before
becoming an MP and this is one of the issues, that social work,
education and all these departments are not working in coherence
or have a strategy together to tackle these issues.
Councillor McGuigan: I think there
is growing evidence and, as you said, in the last ten years it
is a 25% decrease in child poverty, for pensioners it is one third
of a decrease, so we are having some impact. It is important to
understand that much of that is due to sensible strategic leadership
at a UK level, but a lot of it has been very, very much as a result
of the structure approach which has been established between partners
in the local areas where they are able to identify the opportunities
that are there, the needs which have to be met and the resources
to tackle that. I think there is considerable evidence that is
working and working very well.
Q772 Chairman:
Do you think there is anything more that the Scottish Executive
and the British Parliament could be doing to support local government
to tackle poverty?
Councillor McGuigan: I think some
of the things—and I will bring in Richard in a minute on
this one—that do have to happen there is we do have to look
at greater flexibility in terms of the benefits and tax credit
situation. There has to be, I think, an appreciation that sometimes
you will not help people out of poverty by having some national
blueprint that applies across the whole of the UK or the whole
of Scotland, it has to be tailored to meet the needs of the area
and, indeed, to meet the needs of individuals. I get frustrated
very often, Chairman, when I see situations where people are required
to fit into the system that we think is best for them as opposed
to tailoring the support arrangements around the individual and
that is crucial as far as the poverty agenda is concerned.
Mr Cairns: I think the points
that we would make would be as follows. First, poverty manifests
itself at a local level and local authorities are in the frontline
of addressing the consequences of that poverty by and large, not
in every case, but in many of the instances where poverty demonstrates
itself, the problem first presents itself to local authorities
and then has to be addressed by them with the support of others.
Poverty is not inevitable and we should never accept that it ought
to be, but the key to eradicating poverty is to link opportunity
and need. One of the other areas for local authorities to play
a pivotal role is in creating the connections between economic
growth and the opportunity that has presented and enabling those
in poverty to take advantage of that growth, either by accessing
work directly themselves, someone in their family accessing work
or by some other mechanism, sharing the economic benefits that
accrue. In respect of what you would ask national government to
do to help us to deal with that, I think there are probably—I
will not list them because that is always a hazardous thing to
do, let us just imagine—first, to continue to ensure that
economic growth and stability happen is clearly paramount because
unless you have that you cannot address poverty, you can address
relative poverty but you will not address absolute poverty without
that. That is the first thing. The second is a recognition that
because local authorities are in the frontline for these things,
they have to be adequately resourced to address the problems of
poverty because until you address the problems, you cannot then
help people to progress beyond that. Finally, what they have to
do is to give local authorities the power to create those connections
or, where that is not the appropriate thing to do, to have other
national organisations behave in a locally responsive fashion.
In relation to poverty, particularly in relation to poverty of
work, the most significant of those is the DWP and Jobcentre Plus,
and to give that organisation the ability to act in a more locally
responsive fashion because the last point I would make is remember
that poverty gets addressed locally as well because opportunity
and need both occur at a local level. People who are local and
in poverty find local jobs by and large. People who have got health
poverty address the services.
Q773 Mr Devine:
I totally agree with what you are saying, Richard. In my previous
existence I was a full-time officer with UNISON and we were part
of the Joint Future agenda. I certainly agree about local authorities,
but I am sure you also agree that health boards, for example,
have a big role as well. On the job creation front we are picking
up poverty and one of the things that we still have today, as
an MP, when I was in UNISON—and I actually worked in a GP
practice—you had scenarios where a health visitor would
be in at nine o'clock, a district nurse would be in at ten o'clock,
a social worker would be in at 11 o'clock and a home help would
be in at two o'clock looking at the family. It never seemed to
me that everybody met up and in a Joint Future agenda I was obviously
looking, as a trade union official, quite rightly about protected
terms and conditions for my members. One of the things that struck
me was if you were dealing with a blank sheet of paper, the logic
would be that you would have coterminous local authorities and
health boards and you would also look at a job, recognising all
the issues about pensions and such like, but you would have a
flexible job that could move between health boards and local authorities
to provide the type of service I think we are both talking about.
I wonder what your views are? Harry, you are nodding there.
Councillor McGuigan: I was going
to bring Jon in, but could I say one thing. Once again there has
been a lot of evidence as far as health service is concerned and
local authorities working together and the Joint Future agenda,
there has been great success there, the single shared assessment
is an absolute excellent manifestation, but the single shared
assessment should not stop at two partners necessarily. You are
quite right, you get a whole tribe of people visiting a particular
client to assess. We need to be looking at the kind of financial
advice, the financial information that is being given to people,
the financial assessment, the social inclusion assessment needs
to be carried out alongside those other assessments which are
taking place.
Q774 Mr Devine:
Who do you see doing that? I do not disagree with you.
Councillor McGuigan: I think there
would need to be a willingness on the part of the DWP in regard
to some of these matters and that is where we do have to shake
things up a little bit. We talk about silos and everything else,
the most obvious silos can be the highly centralised mentalities
that sometimes exist in places like the DWP.
Mr Harris: I think the whole focus
in terms of public service reform over that past few years in
Scotland has been to make services much more citizen, client orientated
and to get the public sector to work across organisational and
professional boundaries. I think there has been some success,
we have got Joint Future, that is extending across adult, older
people services, you have got integrated children services, community
safety partnerships and so forth. One of the things we are doing
now is linking that to a much more outcome focus and we are developing
jointly with the Scottish Government what we call "a single
outcome agreement" which will be between each council and
the community planning partnership and the Scottish Government.
That will bring all the players together in terms of delivering
those outcomes. You will probably find from the Minister this
afternoon that we are looking again at the poverty strategy and
seeing how that fits in with that approach. We are looking again
at how we measure poverty and see if we can be a bit more ambitious
in terms of what we are going to achieve but that particular initiative,
the single outcome agreement, will be developed towards the end
of this financial year but will be put into place from April next
year. We think it will take at least two years to put into place,
to have robust outcome agreements, but we feel that is a journey
worth having.
Councillor McGuigan: Could I ask
Matthew to come in on tax credits.
Mr Crighton: The original question
is, how do you get the organisations that are necessary for delivering
these services to work together. I would applaud the initiative
of the Department for Work and Pensions in setting up the City
Strategy Pathfinders because effectively what we are tasked to
do in relation to helping people into work and helping people
recovering from sickness into work is to sit around the table,
the health board as well as the council, Jobcentre Plus and Scottish
Enterprise to work out solutions to that. The only significant
point I would add to what has been said here is that does require
every partner around the table has equal capacity to operate flexibly
locally. It means the health board representative, the council
representative and, dare I say, the Jobcentre Plus representative
can all say, "Yes, I will deploy my resources in a joint
plan". That is the issue that I am suggesting the DWP needs
to think through because, as part of what some people have said,
the way they contract for services is run very nationally, the
contracts are held and managed somewhere far, far away from the
locality. It is something which I think in terms of what they
call "devolution" they need to think through how they
empower their local staff to be part of this joint collective
activity which we have all been talking about.
Q775 Chairman:
Does anybody else want to add on the role of local government?
Mr Barker: I think there is a
particular point from the Argyll and Bute experience of changing
the health service that maybe helps illustrate some of the points
there about the local responsiveness but also the point you made
about coterminosity. Previously when we linked to NHS Argyll and
Clyde, Argyll and Bute was on the edge of a very urban-focused
health board but the changes, now being part of NHS Highland,
having the relationships there and the understanding about local
circumstances have helped in terms of relationships. A significant
improvement has also been around the creation of community health
partnerships because the relationships there are now focused on
the common geographic area. You can see a change coming from that
common area, you have got common issues to tackle but also the
bodies that are more distant, because NHS Highland is more distant
from Argyll and Bute, but they have some of the common understanding
as well. That influences the way the relationship is developing.
I think things are moving closer together in that respect.
Q776 Chairman:
The Committee is taking evidence from the DWP, in fact, tomorrow
morning and the financial secretary, Rt Hon Jane Kennedy, and
Caroline Flint from the DWP. If you have any suggestions or there
is anything you think we should be raising with the Minister of
State, please email the clerk and we will be happy to raise those
concerns and those issues with the Minister of State.
Councillor McGuigan: Thank you
for that.
Q777 David Mundell:
What do you think needs to be different in Scotland, if anything,
from the policies that are being pursued across the rest of the
UK?
Councillor McGuigan: It is a hard
question, I suppose, to answer in that I do not know the full
picture across the UK, but I would imagine that the aspirations
of local government across the UK would be shared with what we
have here in Scotland. We very often talk about different agencies
working together than the necessity of that. I think for a long
time some people have said that there needs to be closer working
together between the political agencies, the centres of government,
Westminster, the Scottish Parliament and local government. I think
that is important, that a dialogue is established and an agenda
is understood and we work towards that common agenda. There are
some things that are specific to the Scottish scene here in regard
to poverty, and disabled people and poverty is a matter that causes
us very serious concern. Fuel poverty in Scotland is a specific
issue, transportation issues, the cost of food, all of these things
in rural areas, health, as you have said, are absolutely crucial.
We do not think that we can deal with poverty in isolation from
each other. Premature death in Scotland is three times higher
than it is in other parts of the UK. These are very worrying things
as far as health is concerned, but it is not just health personnel
and people that should be involved in that.
Mr Cairns: If I could, I think
the question was what needs to be different in Scotland from the
rest of the UK. My view on this would be that poverty needs to
be understood at a level below the UK, it is not necessarily a
Scottish level and an English, Welsh, Irish level. It is about
the fact that poverty manifests itself in lots of ways, but it
is fundamentally economic and you will know that the economy of
the UK is not what one would describe as a flat, featureless plain.
The economic conditions that pertain in the South East of England
are radically different from the North East of England and radically
different again from Scotland. The manner in which one addresses
these things has to be considered at a more appropriate spatial
geography than necessarily the UK or, indeed, Scotland. I would
go back to a point made earlier which is that—and this has
been recently recognised by the Scottish Government—local
authorities have a fundamentally important role to play in that
in terms of ensuring the local services are configured to address
these problems, so the education services are configured in a
certain way and social work and health services are configured
in certain ways. I appreciate local authorities do not run health,
but that is a proxy for understanding how that is done. The important
thing is that there is a recognition that one manages this and
seeks to capitalise on whatever the opportunities are and address
the depths of the problems which are different in different parts
of the country. It is not Scotland or the UK, if you will forgive
me.
Q778 David Mundell:
What level do you see it at? We visited the Highlands and Dundee
where, if you take the Highland or rural example, you have often
got really a mix of poverty and affluence very closely together,
whereas perhaps in the city you have got more focused areas of
poverty. Where do you see then the spatial level that you are
talking about being?
Mr Cairns: I think in the Scottish
context—and others might take issue with this—it probably
is managed at the local authority area and slightly above, but
there are certain aspects of policy and certain aspects of government
spending that are devolved and certain others that are not, so
we have to be able to manage a relationship with the Scottish
Government in respect of this too. It is probably local authority
and a bit above in my opinion.
Mr Barker: I think there is an
element in terms of where the local knowledge comes in so you
can get some of that fine-grained detail because there is a challenge
from Scotland in terms of poverty in that you have the most diversity
in terms of the circumstances of individuals and the measures
that we have for identifying deprivation tend to work best in
urban areas. In a rural context it becomes very difficult because,
as you say, you have the affluent and people in poorer circumstances
very close together, quite often you are measuring across areas
that are not physically connected and so there is an element there
of needing that local knowledge. In terms of complementing quantitative
information with some of the qualitative local knowledge, you
can start to identify solutions that are best targeted for those
areas. It is a very different mix, but I think the local authority
area is probably as good as any as a starting point and then there
will be some things if you have got larger urban areas where you
have to work larger than that, but certainly within some areas
you might have to take a more local focus.
Q779 David Mundell:
I think from what you are saying in answer to those questions
and previous questions there is an acceptance that local authorities
have a very important part to play along with the devolved administration
in Scotland and the UK Government. As Scottish local government,
you do not really have a mechanism for a direct relationship with
the UK Government, or do you, compared to, say, your equivalents
in England? It would appear that your relationship is with the
Scottish Government, if I am allowed to call it that.
Councillor McGuigan: Certainly
not as far as poverty is concerned, that is an absolute necessity
that a relationship is established with the Scottish Parliament
and with Westminster in regard to matters like that. We have mentioned—and
I hate to keep on emphasising this—that the DWP is one example
of that. If you look locally at a situation, I think you have
to be careful about assuming even over a kind of large local authority
zone like my own in North Lanarkshire that you do not try and
impose a template that says, "That will fit in every part
of North Lanarkshire", because it does not. Sometimes when
you aggregate issues across a whole area like that, you miss the
important areas of focus that really do need to be addressed.
An example of that is in housing. There are many examples, but
I can give you one in my own local authority in North Lanarkshire.
The issue is not about social housing shortage right across the
whole of North Lanarkshire but it is an acute and very, very serious
problem in the Cumbernauld area. When you aggregate that up it
would suggest to you that North Lanarkshire is pretty comfortable
as far as social housing is concerned. There is that type of thing.
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