Select committee: Scottish Affairs Committee
Conclusion 100
Second Report - Welfare policy in Scotland
Published 23 Jun 2021
Addressed to Scotland Office
Scottish Affairs Committee Welfare policy in Scotland All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
At the start of the covid-19 pandemic Universal Credit was uplifted by £20 a week (£1,040 a year).244 The evidence we have heard has been very supportive of this policy and the change has helped Universal Credit claimants enormously during this time. Chris Birt from The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said that the uplift was ‘very welcome’.245 Nina Ballantyne of Citizens Advice Scotland added that ‘I heard somebody interviewed for the news the other day talking about the £20 a week making it barely enough to get by and that taking that away would mean not even having enough to get by’.246 They mentioned in written evidence that ‘Without the additional £20 a week, 8 in 10 CAB [Citizens Advice Bureaux] complex debt clients will be unable to meet their living costs’.247 Suzanne Lavelle of the Southside Housing Association said ‘The £20 uplift to Universal Credit did help, but the fact that that decision was made shows the inadequacy of the current benefits.’248 Professor McKeever, Ulster University explained to us that the reason the £20 uplift was so important to claimants was because ‘the benefit freeze249 that existed for so long [had] undervalued the worth of Universal Credit.’250
From: Scottish Affairs Committee, Second Report - Welfare policy in Scotland (HC 55), 23 June 2021
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 19 November 2021 (deadline 23 August 2021).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The UK Government "notes the Committee's recommendations" and responds to each in turn, accepting little of the report's welfare-policy proposals and referring several to the Scottish Government.
- On the £20 uplift and legacy benefits, it states "There was never any plan to extend the uplift to legacy benefits."
- On work allowances, it states it "has no plans to extend the work allowance to single adults".
- On Help to Claim funding, it "considers the existing resource to be sufficient", and says DWP agreed to fund Citizens Advice Scotland for another year, "up to 31 March 2022".
- On data sharing and Recommendations 2, 7 and 8, it says each data request "must be examined" by DWP as Data Controller, and treats several recommendations as "for the Scottish Government".