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The milestones in the contract relate to assessing performance and provision. As for outcomes, the Government and the Parliament will be watching to ensure that the standards are being met and the service is being effective for people, and that will happen in due course.

The fact that VoiceAbility will be present in all health boards is an illustration of its comprehensive geographical engagement across the country. There are wider considerations, such as collaboration with different organisations and the wider engagement on awareness that Jeremy Balfour rightly highlighted, and local government will need to be kept informed about and included in the awareness-raising process. We will, of course, engage on that. However, I highlighted the issue of a presence in all health boards as part of the considerations around the contract to illustrate the geographical availability and the fact that there will be a comprehensive service throughout Scotland.

I will let Ruari Sutherland talk about engagement with VoiceAbility on that matter, but I can say that it is committed to providing an accessible service, as it has done previously.

The Government is committed to providing accessibility in general when it comes to social security. Indeed, we have introduced local delivery teams in Social Security Scotland to help and encourage people to apply for benefits, and the same considerations, as you would expect, have been an important aspect of what we are doing here.

First, I want to emphasise that the Government absolutely values the role played by unpaid carers. We are the Government that introduced the carers allowance supplement in 2018 to ensure that carers no longer receive what Emma Roddick has rightly pointed out is the lowest of benefits, and we introduced the young carer grant. Both benefits are unique in the UK and are two of seven brand new benefits that we have introduced to provide, as Evelyn Tweed rightly made clear, more financial support for the people of our country.

Through our social security powers, we now invest more than £350 million a year in supporting carers through carers allowance, carers allowance supplement and the young carer grant. That is a significant investment. Since September 2018, around 574,000 carers allowance supplement payments totalling £149.4 million have been made to around 120,000 carers. Carers continuously in receipt of carers allowance and carers allowance supplement will have received over £2,270 more than carers in the rest of the UK.

Like members round the table, I would like carers to receive more support. That is what we are working towards together. Like Emma Roddick and Marie McNair, I encourage the UK Government to increase the rate of carers allowance. That would mean more than 900,000 carers across Great Britain receiving increased support and mean that our supplement would go further.

We recognise—this is an important point—that, as Pam Duncan-Glancy emphasised, the pandemic has identified a need for greater flexibility in how we support carers when society faces significant changes in circumstances. That is why, last year, we used emergency coronavirus legislation to introduce an additional payment and why we are introducing such a payment again this year. That is what the bill is all about. To prevent the need for primary legislation in the future, the bill includes a power to enable ministers to introduce regulations that increase the amount of the carers allowance supplement. That is an important enabling power that we put into the bill.

In this financial year, we have secured the resource for a doubling of the December carers allowance supplement, which is why we prioritised introducing the bill. I thank the committee for its work on the expedited process for the bill, which is the first one of the parliamentary session to get to stage 2. We have done it at that pace to focus on ensuring that we get the resource to carers in December.

I appreciate members’ ambition and desire to provide more assistance. Today and on Tuesday, Mr Balfour talked about political choices. We have political choices to make, just as we have financial ones, and the Government chooses to make a difference where it can. We chose to mitigate the low value of the carers allowance through the supplement to the cost of around £40 million a year since 2018. We did that because we want to make a difference. We chose to mitigate the bedroom tax at a cost of £70 million a year. We chose to introduce the Scottish child payment and bridging payments to support thousands of children and put £130 million into the pockets of families in this financial year.

Those are the political and financial choices that the Government makes every year within its fixed budget. The important point is that we have a fixed budget. Last year and this year, we chose to pay an additional carers allowance supplement of more than £230. We might be able to make that choice in the future, depending on our budget and what else we do with Scottish carers assistance as it develops into a replacement benefit for carers.

We have choices ahead. Through the development of Scottish carers assistance, we are considering options for the longer term that will increase our support for carers through our social security system. We will begin our consultation this winter on proposals for the delivery of Scottish carers assistance. That will require us carefully to consider the balance to be struck between extending eligibility for, and increasing the amount of, Scottish carers assistance.

As I said in the stage 1 debate, future increases will be considered in the context of the circumstances faced by carers and the financial constraints that we face. If we were to commit over future years the resource that the amendments ask for, we could not utilise it, potentially, to support carers in other ways. That is why we need to consider the issues in the round, and is why I cannot support either amendment and urge committee members to reject them.

Currently, advocacy services and advice services—of course, there is a distinction between them—provide advocacy and advice on a range of social security benefits, many of which are reserved. If people are looking for support with reserved or other benefits, some of those services will still be available to them if funding choices are made in that regard.

I must emphasise that we went through a regulated procurement process. Bidders were encouraged, as you will appreciate and as was appropriate. We have gone through the process and that is the outcome.

There is a need to avoid double funding. That is a question of prudence in public finance that the Government always has to consider.

Pam Duncan-Glancy makes an important set of points, which we took seriously throughout the consideration of the process. In a moment, I will bring in Ruari Sutherland, who has had a lot of engagement with VoiceAbility in the lead-up to, and since, the award of the contract. Those are important considerations, which VoiceAbility has included in its service delivery elsewhere in the UK, and they are important considerations for the organisation now as it builds the service in Scotland.

Ruari, can you say more on that?

Thank you. I am grateful for the opportunity to join you to discuss the legislative consent memorandum and the associated legislative consent motion, which was lodged in the Scottish Parliament on 10 September. I am grateful for your swift consideration of the issue at short notice.

As you know, the UK Government has introduced legislation to suspend the triple-lock formula for calculating the amount by which state pensions and benefits that are linked to earnings should be uprated for the year 2022-23. The Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill was introduced on 8 September. It gives UK ministers powers to uprate pensions and benefits that are linked to earnings by 2.5 per cent, or in line with the increase in prices, instead of in line with annual earnings.

It also proposes to give equivalent powers to the Scottish ministers to uprate industrial death benefit in Scotland. The provision will affect about 300 recipients of industrial death benefit in Scotland. IDB is devolved, but is currently administered by the Department for Work and Pensions under an agency agreement. Industrial death benefit is paid to the spouse or dependent of someone who died as the result of an industrial accident or disease. It was abolished in 1988 for deaths occurring after 1988, and new claims were abolished in 2012.

We were informed of the decision by the UK Government only on 6 September. In light of the tight timescales that have been afforded to us, the need to protect the payments of the 300 IDB clients, and our overriding commitment to safe and secure delivery of Scottish disability benefits, we have considered carefully how to proceed.

I consider an LCM to be the right course of action to enable uprating of IDB, which is required under the terms of our agency agreement with the UK Government. If the agency agreement with DWP were to be terminated, we would have, in a short space of time, to make arrangements to administer IDB, which would be very challenging.

Because industrial death benefit can be paid only when it relates to a death that occurred before 1988, many of the 300 cases are more than 30 years old and are all held on paper files. If the Scottish Government were to decide to administer IDB according to the timescale, it would need to identify relevant Scottish cases and transfer them from clerical files to a new system, which would be time consuming and would require significant resource. To build, in effect, a new benefit, and to progress primary legislation on an expedited basis within the timescale, when the benefit delivery programme is already operating close to capacity, with child disability payment, adult disability payment and Scottish child payment roll-out all happening this year and next, would not be achievable.

Designing, building, procuring, securing the necessary agreements and collecting the required data for a new system would require significant time and resource. For context—this is important—the legislation to introduce the Scottish child payment took 17 months, and the carers allowance supplement took two years from announcement to delivery. Therefore, for practical and delivery reasons, on balance I consider an LCM to be the right course of action.

Moreover, the only alternative legal mechanism to a legislative consent motion would be to introduce equivalent Scottish primary legislation. We would need to have primary legislation in place before the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions concludes her review of benefit rates by mid-November, in order to ensure that the 300 recipients of the benefit would not fall out of payment. That would mean that scrutiny would have to take place under an emergency timetable with all stages of the bill happening in one day after the October recess. The agreement of the UK law officers, the Lord Advocate and the Secretary of State for Scotland to expedited royal procedures would be required so that the Bill could be similarly enacted by 26 November. Even if that were feasible, I would not consider it to be good use of parliamentary time.

Overall, co-operation in this instance is therefore necessary to maintain the agency agreement for IDB, and to protect the delivery of our existing programme. I emphasise that we continue to support maintaining of the triple lock, and that we oppose the decision to suspend it by the UK Government. It is a decision that we have no control over, and of which we had very little notice.

I should also say for clarification that the committee will have noted the letter from the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee, which has considered the LCM and deems it to be acceptable in the circumstances. The DPLR Committee has also identified a minor error in the memorandum, at paragraphs 4 and 8, which refer to the current bill creating a discretionary power to uprate, whereas the bill places a duty to uprate on the secretary of state and—in devolved areas—on the Scottish ministers. Letters to this and the DPLR Committee will be forthcoming to clarify the point.

Thank you, convener. I look forward to questions.

I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy for her support for the course of action, and for that important question.

You will be aware of the significant resource that has been invested in capacity building, structures, IT equipment and systems, and—of course—in the agency itself. There has been significant investment in staff, which is ongoing; the recruitment process continues at pace. Significant resources are going into Social Security Scotland.

I am not fully sighted on all the evidence that the committee heard this morning, due to having been on my way to the committee. I am, of course, aware of stakeholders’ various considerations in terms of what the wider social security programme looks like, and of what we are doing in the round.

The social security system is at a crucial point of delivery. Roll-out this year in the months ahead of the child disability payment will be a significant milestone, and the adult disability payment will come next year. We will undertake safe and secure transfer of existing cases as quickly, safely and securely as possible. We have to do that in a way that builds strong foundations for the system and—this is most important—delivers payments to people who are expecting them. We will need that capacity and strong foundation in the years ahead to ensure that we do not have a two-tier system in which some people in Scotland benefit more than others as a result of case transfer. There are all those considerations.

I feel that now is not the time to talk about disability benefits in the round, although I am sure that it is something that we will talk about collectively in the weeks ahead. The Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government is coming to committee next week; I wonder whether the wider programme will be something that you wish to discuss with her.

In Social Security Scotland we are building an agile electronic system through which people can make paper-based applications if they wish. That is because we are committed to that through the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018, in which there is the principle of inclusivity in order to ensure that people can apply in the way that is most suited to them. Such applications are appropriately processed into our wider IT infrastructure.

The 11 benefits that we are delivering, 7 of which are new, are electronically managed and organised. The paper-based cases are historical cases for which responsibility has been devolved under the Scotland Act 2016. We are administering them under an agency agreement for a number of reasons, among which are the practicalities that have been highlighted.

I will bring in officials in a minute. As I said in my opening remarks, the industrial death benefit was closed some time ago, which is why cases are in paper format.

Matthew Duff might want to say more.

No, because we are currently delivering that with the DWP under an agency agreement. The costs are to ensure that we have the appropriate staffing for a strong foundation, and so that we can deliver social security in Scotland proficiently through the period ahead, as we have done since 2018. We are on a trajectory to have similar costs to the DWP for administering social security. We are doing the work in an appropriately efficient and professional manner, as you would expect.