Examination of Witnesses (Questions 780
- 799)
MONDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2007
COUNCILLOR HARRY
MCGUIGAN,
MR JON
HARRIS, MR
RICHARD CAIRNS,
MR BRIAN
BARKER, MR
JIM MCCROSSAN
AND MR
MATTHEW CRIGHTON
Q780 David Mundell:
What I was getting at is how can COSLA and local government in
Scotland influence the UK Government, because there is a suggestion
that what is needed is a tripartite relationship, it is the coming
together of local government, the devolved government and the
UK Government, but I do not see the mechanisms to do that.
Councillor McGuigan: I will ask
Jon to come in but more regular meetings of this type, a more
regular review of issues like this I think help us to be able
to communicate that via yourself to the UK Parliament.
Q781 Mr Devine:
Would you like a formal structure, Harry?
Councillor McGuigan: Yes, I would
certainly like to see something more formal than the kind of random
thing that happens.
Q782 David Mundell:
It seems to me, without diverging off the point, that it is essential
there is some form of conduit from Scottish local government to
the UK Government that is not just about going through the Scottish
Parliament system.
Mr Harris: I think one of the
issues we would have liked to extend is the idea of a memorandum
of understanding to cover joint work between the local government
and the Scottish Government, particularly in relation to community
planning partnerships. We have some very, very good relationships
with parts of the DWP and one-stop shops in Scotland, but our
engagement with the Whitehall department is less effective. We
did have a Scottish committee which was hosted by the DWP some
time ago which was local government, the voluntary sector and
so forth but that was abolished. They did a survey of people who
said, "Was it a good idea or not?" All the people in
Scotland said it was a good idea, but all the people from the
DWP felt it was not.
Q783 Mr Devine:
We will ask that question tomorrow.
Mr Harris: We have had a recent
meeting with the DWP. They are going to launch a consultation
paper on supported employment in December and they made that effort
to come up to Edinburgh and meet us. To me, that is how it should
be, but it has been rather hit and miss. Whilst there are some
very good local relationships, we would like to still see some
link in with the DWP nationally. There is still a group that exists
which liaises with local government, but the local government
representation on that tends to be the local government association
in London and it is a bit inaccessible if you have to go to London.
It is expensive for us, but it is even more expensive if you are
a voluntary sector body.
Mr Crighton: If I could add on
that point, I have been going to quite a few meetings in England
with DWP officials and it is apparent to me that, on the whole,
people in England do not understand how distinctive the arrangements
for Scottish local government in the Scottish Government are.
I think there is a danger that they will think about how they
roll out their programmes across the UK without taking into account
the distinctiveness of the Scottish arrangements, for example
the arrangements under which targets are set for local government.
For some years now in England there have been the local area agreements
under which local authorities have had a direct negotiating arrangement
with central government departments, including the DWP, which
is not obviously something that has been rolled out here. I am
certainly very conscious that dialogue with DWP officials was
quite common to folk in England, but at a local level in Scotland
we were not ever encountering that. From my point of view and
from Richard's point of view, with being part of the Pathfinder
for DWP that has changed, but for most local authorities in Scotland
it is a very remote relationship that exists at all, or access
through Jon at COSLA.
Mr Cairns: Could I make two very
small points in relation to that. The first is that a lot of the
tools and levers that are available to address poverty are reserved
matters and the clue is in the word "reserved". As a
consequence of that, there is not the same sense of a role to
be played by local authorities and particularly Scottish local
authorities in some of these things. I suspect that is more of
an unconscious thing, I do not think it is an overt thing. Also,
if I pick up Matthew's point, if the DWP looks at the areas where
benefits claimants are highest and finds that is cities, as it
did, and it therefore concludes that there should be particular
strategies to address this in cities and then concludes because
of that, the larger cities in Scotland should be part of this,
if you follow the same thought process through logically, then
it follows that if you wish to combat poverty, the involvement
of the organisations seeking to address poverty should be sought
regardless of the scale and the concentration. The principle of
City Strategies, whilst it is valid in one sense for dealing with
particularly high levels of concentration, the principle of involvement
of those we are trying to deal with should hold true regardless
of the concentration. The thinking has been right, I would argue
it has not gone as far as it might.
Mr McCrossan: Just really implicitly
on what Richard was saying, there are issues about diversity again
in Scotland. We have got probably the worst urban deprivation,
but we are also the most rural part of the United Kingdom. Certainly
in rural areas where I am working we do have issues about identification
and measurement of poverty and deprivation, where the main instrument
is the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation which is really
designed to pick up concentrations, so we work on the basis of
the worst 15%. We have that kind of deprivation within Argyll
and Bute as well, but it is on a very small scale in the towns,
it is really peripheral housing schemes; it is urban deprivation
in miniature. But we also have remote fragile communities that
are not getting picked up in these measures at all. We also have
quite a lot of poverty outside these areas. Income deprived in
Argyll and Bute, there are 20% in these recognised areas of deprivation
and 80% outwith there. We need to take an approach that does look
at the small area deprivation because it is still there, looks
at the fragile communities but also looks at a more thematic approach
that is going to pick up individual groups with difficulties,
whether it is mental health, health difficulties or homeless young
people. It is not a one size fits all and I think that is a characteristic
of Scotland. We are really saying the issues are more diverse.
Q784 Chairman:
Since many issues relating to poverty are linked with the British
Parliament, do you think after the establishment of the Scottish
Parliament the link between Scottish local government and the
British Government has weakened? How can we strengthen it?
Councillor McGuigan: I do not
know if it is weakened. In my own experience there has been a
fairly strong contact between the politicians at Westminster and
the politicians in my own area. I think it can always be improved
and it is important that kind of dialogue takes place in the local
areas, constituencies, local authority areas and so on, but in
terms of dealing with some of the big national agencies it is
extremely difficult, I think, for local authorities here in Scotland
to feel confident that they are being treated as mature partners
to any kind of protocols. That is certainly my reading of it.
Mr Harris: I used to look after
all the parliamentary business before devolution so I was quite
often down in London two, three days a week. I now go down to
London maybe once a year. As soon as devolution came there was
an element where you got invited to a meeting, but you could only
attend a pre-meeting and then you flew back home.
Q785 Chairman:
There has been a gap.
Mr Harris: There has been a gap
and I think we need to work at how we can meet that and, in part,
it is structures and that comes to the idea of extending the memorandum
of understanding. You are key partners to help us deliver on poverty,
just as it would be in terms of your relationship with Wales or
the North of England.
Q786 David Mundell:
That is right. To me, Scottish local government is a separate
entity, it is not a subgroup of the Scottish Parliament, if I
can put it that way. You cannot have a tripartite relationship
with only two legs on the stool and to expect everything from
Scottish local government to be channelled to the UK Government
through the Scottish Government is not the way forward, I do not
think.
Mr Barker: I am not sure whether
there is a factor in here in terms of the number of local authorities
in Scotland dealing with these issues and the number of local
authorities in England, in that you have a much smaller proportion
of local authorities which deal with some benefits-type arrangements
when you are looking at the proportion of the population. I am
not sure whether there is a disproportionate view from the DWP
that it is 32 local authorities out of several hundred, but actually
it is 10% of the UK population, and whether there is a factor
there that is influencing the way that relationship works.
Councillor McGuigan: Could I say
to you, I think you are absolutely right there does have to be
realisation among the collectives of local authorities that they
are not simply involved in a business of dealing with one particular
other unit of that tripartite, there has to be a realisation that
their relationship with Westminster, the UK Government, has got
to continue to grow and to strengthen the opportunities for local
government working with the Scottish Parliament to effectively
tackle it. I think you will have an interest in making sure and
overseeing just how well we are impacting upon areas like poverty,
are we achieving the outcomes that we agreed.
Q787 David Mundell:
Could I turn now to some of the evidence COSLA provided to the
Committee in which it was suggested that a more localised approach
to tax credits and benefits would be desirable. I wonder if anyone
is able to give us an example of how that might reduce poverty.
Mr Crighton: The aspiration with
which we set off within Edinburgh when we set up our strategy,
Joined Up for Jobs, was that in looking at the resources needed
to help the harder to help people into work, if we could demonstrate
a reduction in the benefits claim in our city, we would be able
to draw on some of the resources saved by reducing the benefits
bill in order to re-invest back into the systems which train people
and upskill them. That was an aspiration we put to the DWP quite
a few years ago, I think it was in 2004, and that was also the
aspiration we took into the City Strategy Pathfinder. It is seen
in the employment zones, which is an experimental process, whereby
what you call the "programme money" which goes to people
is bundled up and available to help them into work. That is what
we have put forward in our bid to be a Pathfinder as what they
call "an enabling measure". It has not actually come
to fruition yet, but essentially, as part of that request, which
is that the locality sorts out its plans and draws to it the resources
available to help people into work, we were saying, "Include
the savings we can make on the benefits bill so that we can invest
at least a share of that into helping more people into work".
That was the aspiration and the Department for Work and Pensions,
shall we say, are still considering part of that request because
I think it is one of the ones they find hardest to deal with,
primarily because it is not entirely within their gift. It would
have to be within the gift of the Treasury as well as the DWP
to say that you can mix those funding streams.
Q788 David Mundell:
You are confident that could genuinely be done more efficiently
and would not end up costing more?
Mr Crighton: I think it is a very
good challenge. A locality would not obviously be able to claim
any increased use of those resources if it was not generating
the benefit which would come from more people being in work, but
I do think we were modelling that on the Government's own experiment
within the employment zones which had this idea of a personal
job account for the individual that did demonstrate you can get
higher returns of people into work by a more flexible approach.
The aspiration is that could be routinely rolled out to increase
the amount of resources which can be managed locally and helping
primarily the hardest to help groups of people back into work.
Q789 David Mundell:
Obviously there is a group of people, primarily often asylum seekers
or refugees, who are not entitled to benefits. How are local authorities
managing that issue?
Mr Cairns: I think there are two
elements to this. There are something between 5,000 and 6,000
asylum seekers in Glasgow at any given time. The first point I
would make categorically is that the issue around whether or not
somebody is given refugee status is a matter for the Home Office,
it is not a matter for local authorities and it is important that
is quite clear in everyone's mind. The challenge for the local
authorities, though, as with so many other things, is that this
problem then manifests itself locally. The problem of asylum seekers
manifests itself very locally, in Glasgow it manifests itself
in a very small part of the city. Even when people have got leave
to remain and have refugee status, then the problem manifests
itself in very particular pockets in the city. There are certain
challenges for local authorities around responding to that and,
in effect, responding to a problem—"problem" is
possibly unfair—responding to a situation where they do
not control the mechanisms and the decisions of the Home Office.
Once you get beyond that, you then have to recognise, as local
authorities do, that the circumstances of asylum seekers are difficult
for a whole range of reasons, typically because they cannot access
the same range of benefits and they are harder to provide services
to in the first instance. From that to people who have refugee
status who have a different but equally challenging set of problems
around their access to housing, access to the labour market, the
accreditation of which skills and experience or qualifications
they might have accrued in their country of origin, all of which
we somehow have to take into account if these people are going
to be assimilated into the labour market and into their communities.
The best way to explain this is the numerical scale of this problem
compared with the overall poverty issue is relatively small; the
complexity and the intractability of it is far in excess of that
number and, therefore, we have to find better ways of dealing
with it. I suppose the last point I would make also is that you
will know that it brings with it a whole range of emotive and
not terribly well thought through reactions that also have to
be addressed and, again, they manifest themselves locally.
Q790 Mr Devine:
On that point, the point was made earlier on about the need for
a direct link with the DWP and such like. Do you think a council
like Glasgow needs a direct link with the Home Office or do you
have that?
Mr Cairns: I believe we do have
it. I would have to check, though, to be honest, because it is
one of the areas of responsibility that is not directly mine.
I am attempting to answer for, as Mr Sarwar knows, a rather large
local authority.
Q791 Mr Devine:
He tells us it is the best.
Mr Cairns: He is right of course.
We do have a direct link to the Home Office, but whether or not
that link, as Jon probably wants to say, works as effectively
in allowing us to manage some of the knock-on issues is another
question.
Mr Harris: Having been on various
groups involving all the regions in the United Kingdom on this,
my judgment is we probably work better than most in terms of our
strategic migration partnership, but there are huge issues in
terms of joining up the funding, for example there is funding
made available to the police authorities in England and to local
authorities to build cohesion which we do not as yet have access
to, so there are issues there but in terms of a working relationship,
it is probably better than most.
Q792 Chairman:
On these asylum issues, obviously we recognise the importance
of this and the difficulties, local government and the Home Office,
at least we are making an effort to resolve these issues, but
there are people in Glasgow, for example in my constituency, who
are Poles and Slovakians and they do not have any benefits like
the asylum seekers have, benefits in housing, they do not have
the capacity to get a job and they are living in overcrowded houses
there. I know as a matter of fact that in two-bedroom flats there
are eight to 10 people living in my constituency. How are we going
to tackle that?
Mr Cairns: How are we going to
tackle it?
Q793 Chairman:
They cannot speak English as well, it is very difficult for us
even to communicate with them. This is the first time I have in
my time in Westminster in my constituency that white community
members and Asians are ganging up together against Poles and Slovakians.
It is very unfortunate, but the issue is there.
Mr Cairns: The issue is there.
The issue manifests itself in MPs' surgeries, MSPs' surgeries
and the surgeries of locally elected members, that is where these
things are brought to a head in the first instance. We have also
got to grasp the reality of this, which is that economic migration
is a fact. The UK is probably the most open labour market in Europe,
if not in the world, certainly one of the most open labour markets,
and because we are experiencing economic growth we will inevitably
attract labour. From one perspective that is not necessarily a
bad thing. If you take the houses of multi-occupancy question,
for instance, again I would not profess to be an expert, but the
business of attempting to regulate this rests with the local authority
and the finances available to help address it rests with the local
authority. There is inevitably a challenge between addressing
the needs of that group of people and the fact that across the
entire country there is probably a deficit in social housing generally.
You can see how we are constantly trying to juggle these different
forces at the same time.
Mr Harris: I think in terms of
the migrants, as was said, they are mainly economically active
individuals who either come on their own or without children,
therefore the impact is generally overall positive. There are
issues in terms of exploitation because of the wages and the amount
of access to affordable housing, but these things have to be put
in the context that overall, from a Scottish perspective, we are
looking to build our population, particularly in terms of people
who are economically active. I think there are possibly issues
that we need to consider in the longer term and how we assimilate
because if I was looking at the impact, there are certain concentrations
where the impact on public services is quite significant. It is
not just in the cities, in particular Edinburgh and Glasgow, but
even in our rural communities you can suddenly get a situation
where the number of languages in a primary school has increased
from maybe two to six. I know in one school in Edinburgh in one
school year the number of languages they were dealing with increased
from two to ten. It does have an impact in terms of how you deal
with that upfront and I do not think we have always got that done
as we should.
Mr McCrossan: On rural areas,
to reinforce that point, I think it is generally seen as a positive
because there are economic issues and particularly in the building
trade and hospitality—it is difficult to get the statistics—there
has been a huge influx, probably much more so in rural areas than
people realise. There are issues beginning to emerge. Ultimately,
there is an issue about cohesion because the pattern does appear
to be people come expecting not to stay long and then change their
minds. That is already emerging as a trend, that the majority
saw themselves coming on a temporary basis and a much higher proportion
than that are now beginning to stay longer. We have seen in the
initial stages in things like English as a second language, a
huge rise in demand but also it is manifesting itself in schools
in terms of children coming in with different languages and fairly
inadequate additional support for that. In the longer term I think
it is a real cohesion issue and we have to start thinking about
that now and have a much more highly developed strategy than we
have got.
Q794 Mr Devine:
The Government has got a laudable aim of eradicating child poverty
by 2020 and in Scotland the 2005 target was actually met. I am
just wondering what specific role local authorities see in targeting
child poverty and what assistance the Westminster Government can
be to any strategies that you are running?
Councillor McGuigan: I think there
is a number of issues there. They have met the target and the
target that is now being aimed at is a very admirable and proper
one. I think what local authorities will have to continue to do
is to look in a number of areas. Education is an absolutely key
area where we have to see young people succeeding as far as their
attainment is concerned. If you take standard grades here in Scotland,
there has been almost a continuous improvement over the last ten
years, but if you take the bottom fifth among those, then their
position has not changed at all over the last ten years and that
is a very worrying thing. There are things there that local authorities
have to be looking at much more seriously to find out why it is
that they are unable to make a difference at that particular cohort.
Housing is another area where we have a major problem as far as
socially rented housing is concerned. We have overcrowding in
some of these houses and that, again, disadvantages young people,
that exacerbates child poverty. Those are certainly areas that
I think local authorities have to ensure they are working determinedly
to improve the situation there.
Q795 Mr Devine:
What do you think of the Government's strategy of basically saying
people stay on in school until they are 18—there is an increase
in apprenticeships; unless they have gone for apprenticeships—exactly
what you are talking about? India is producing more graduates
a year than the whole of Europe put together and China is clearly
going to be a big player in the world economy in the next five
or ten years. I am just wondering what we need to do in education
and do you agree with the Government's strategy in that direction?
Councillor McGuigan: I do not
think we should be afraid of requiring young people to give a
commitment to the role they play within our society and if that
means they can best be equipped to play that role by staying on
at college or school or participating in training, then that is
absolutely necessary, and I think it is quite right and correct.
It is not unusual, this happens right across Europe, Germany is
an example of that. We have to be careful, though, that we do
not become obsessed with a paper chase that has been going on
in this country for maybe the last 25 years, that the qualifications
that you got was more important to get into university to pursue
a degree. We forgot that we need people who have other skills
and other competencies and I hope that we will start to give a
shift of emphasis to that. That is not in any way to put a lid
on people's aspirations to achieve their maximum potential educationally,
but it is also to applaud and recognise that there are people,
perhaps, who are not going to be academically the most gifted
and talented people but they are absolutely necessary for a successful
economy. Those are areas that I think we have to be looking at.
Mr Cairns: Could I pick up a number
of points in relation that. Others might disagree again, it is
not whether or not people stay on in education at 24 or 18, it
is what they do while they are there that matters. The key to
getting people out of poverty in most cases is for them to be
in well remunerated work. If you look at the future labour market
demand statistics, again I have Glasgow level figures—the
Scotland level figures would probably not be much different—at
the moment in a city like Glasgow the percentage of jobs requiring
no qualifications whatsoever, zero skilled jobs, is 20 plus per
cent in the current labour force. Within ten years, the percentage
of labour force requiring zero qualifications will fall to 9%.
There are two things that follow from that. One is unless a good
percentage of those people acquire qualifications, then they will
either not work or be trapped in very low skilled jobs. The consequence
of that would be higher poverty and the more chilling consequence,
if we do not do this, is that we will not provide the labour to
meet demand in terms of skills, therefore the country will not
be competitive and therefore the general situation of more of
us will become poorer. You asked a couple of questions on lone
parents, I want to try and zero in very quickly on child poverty.
You asked questions about child poverty. One of the problems about
child poverty is that it tends to manifest itself to a greater
extent among single-parent families and, again, the most preferential
route out of poverty for those people is well remunerated work,
not just any work but well remunerated work. That requires that
people again can acquire the skills to do that and they can access
provision to child or dependant care in the right places at the
right time and at the right price, because if you can do those
things and you make it possible for somebody to work and also
make it possible for them to acquire skills, if you have sufficient
flexibility around the benefits system to allow people to do that,
they will acquire skills which will allow them to progress in
the labour market. That moves the whole economy up the value chain
and will lift families and children out of poverty. It sounds
glib, but it really is that fundamentally simple.
Mr Crighton: Could I add one point
to something which you were saying there. This information you
gave about the changing demand for skills and the number of people
who have not got skills in the labour market, to reinforce that,
I think the research shows that for quite a lot of young people
whose parents have not got any skills either, they continue to
aspire to the same kinds of jobs that their parents are either
doing or have done. Certainly in Edinburgh we are seeing the vanishing
of the manufacturing industry but, just like in Glasgow, the number
of jobs where you do not need skills and qualifications is contracting
but there is a layer of people who still aspire to a manual and
unskilled job. I think there is a lot to be done in schools to
connect to the actual labour market and to change the aspirations.
It is not just to say, "There won't be that kind of job for
you, I'm afraid", but, "You are quite capable of doing
this new kind of job". It means that we follow that through
in a way you build up people's aspirations and help them think
that a job in a shop or a hotel is not a thing which your dad
would not have done it, so "I'm not going to do it".
I believe there is a lot to be done within the schools, particularly
in secondary school, about building up vocational options which
allow people to embrace those opportunities.
Q796 Mr Devine:
Jim, you seemed hell bent earlier on that there should be a different
approach in urban areas to the rural communities. Would that apply
as well to tackling strategies in child poverty?
Mr McCrossan: In a sense, I mentioned
earlier, for instance, that even though we have identified areas
of deprivation, the worst 15%, we have 80% of income-deprived
people living outwith those areas so it is just more complex to
target that. What we find, though, that has worked, and this has
been a theme through the session today, is partnership, working
between agencies with child poverty or issues which I am more
directly concerned with literacy and numeracy. There is rarely
one problem operating in isolation, so that is often the key to
taking a more holistic approach, probably even more so in a rural
area where you are working less with spatial concentrations.
Q797 Mr Devine:
Again, is it fair to say that here is the Government with its
target of reducing child poverty by 2020 up there and in your
areas that you are talking about, like the rural areas, Argyll
and Clyde, do you feel the Government are there at that level?
Obviously health is there, local authorities are there, various
others, but are we there?
Mr McCrossan: I think the links
are more tenuous, and this has been touched upon earlier. It is
in relation to reserved matters, but the key ones, these ones
we are talking about, those are not. It is not across the board
or a generalised problem, I think it is quite a specific problem
in these key areas.
Q798 Chairman:
Do you agree that in urban areas poverty is visible? If you go
and see housing conditions, graffiti and other things, you can
say, "Right, this is a poverty-stricken area", but when
you visit rural areas it seems to be nice. When I go for a holiday
or a day out to Inverness, I never feel that the poverty issue
does exist there because it seems to be nice, reasonable houses,
but when they want to buy a loaf of bread or pint of milk they
do not have the transport, and if they have a car, fuel is very
expensive. How can we deal with that issue?
Mr McCrossan: It is really based
on what I am saying. They used to say you cannot eat the scenery
and, in actual fact, a lot of it goes to conceal the problems
because you can have—and we touched upon this earlier—communities
where there is affluence and poverty side by side in rural areas
and it is less visible and people are often less willing to identify
themselves in that category too. There is not a simple solution.
As I said before, what we have found that works is working more
closely with our partners who deal with different aspects of the
problem and that is really the only way forward in terms of identification
and supporting people.
Q799 Chairman:
Something which was really worrying after taking evidence in Inverness
was they do not have any data or information on what percentage
of people and who are the people living in poverty in those areas.
Mr McCrossan: There is some. As
I mentioned earlier, 80% of income deprived people in Argyll and
Bute are outwith the recognised areas of deprivation, which are
quite small anyway. The Scottish average is, I think, 64%, so
there is a problem of visibility but it is about targeting particular
themes. As I said before, you find looking at people's literacy
problems, not always but they may well have drug issues, mental
health problems, whatever, so we have to work with colleagues
who are working with people with a range of problems because you
find it is often the same people and that is the way to identify,
locate and target the work.
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