Draft Scotland Act 1998 (Transfer of Functions to the Scottish Ministers etc.) Order 2020

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2020 General Committees

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. Neither I nor the Minister anticipate any dissent, but I have a number of technical questions about the draft order. I will be grateful for a response.

Extra provision for those who have left care is obviously welcome. It is important to recognise the extra burden faced when obtaining employment by those who come through the care system anywhere in this United Kingdom. Will the Minister state for the record what I think is the case, which is that residence in Scotland will be a necessary condition of being able to apply for the grants, but anyone who has come through the care system in any part of the United Kingdom—England, Wales or Northern Ireland—will be eligible to apply for, and to be granted, the same facilities as those who have come through the care system in Scotland?

My second question is slightly more difficult. Probably something in the order of 700,000 people in Scotland are on a zero-hours contract. Such new and unusual forms of employment contract lead to very different work-life balances from those we would have assumed in the past. Clearly, there may be complications for those on low or zero hours in having their employment status recognised for the purposes of the grants. Can the grants be extended to people in that situation? Obviously, these unusual contracts exist in problematic work all over the UK, and it would be difficult—indeed, unfair—for those who are making their best effort to get into the world of employment to find themselves shut out of the scheme because of technicalities.

My final point is arguably much more political. We know that one issue we still face is low pay in work. The grants—£400 for those with children, £250 for those without—are a powerful incentive and go some way to recognising the real costs of moving into the world of work for those who do not have previous experience. Had the Government accepted the minimum wage of £10 an hour proposed by the Labour party during the last election, the uplift would have been considerably bigger, putting £2 billion into the Scottish economy and in effect floating a considerable number of those seeking work way above the level of the grants.

I do not want to be churlish and pretend that this scheme is not welcome, but I hope the Minister accepts that the politics of low pay and of bringing the whole of these four nations of ours up to an acceptable working wage is real. For younger people aged between 18 and 20, the living wage will be little more than £6.45 an hour. That is a low wage by any standard. Clearly, the capacity to lift those people beyond that would make a real difference. Nevertheless, we give our wholehearted support to the order.