Parliamentary Questions
Poverty
March 2009
Willie Coffey (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP): To ask the Scottish Executive what arrangements are in place to enable disabled peoples’ organisations to be involved in formulating policies to tackle fuel poverty.
Alex Neil: The Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum’s remit includes monitoring the implementation of the new Energy Assistance Package; the Forum plans to set up an Equalities Working Group to ensure its work is inclusive. An equalities impact assessment has been carried out on the new package. Publication of this is imminent.
March 2009
Willie Coffey (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP): To ask the Scottish Executive what consideration has been given to extending eligibility for enhanced measures under the Energy Assistance Package to pensioners in receipt of attendance allowance but not the guarantee credit element of pension credit.
Alex Neil: I can confirm that Attendance Allowance is a qualifying benefit for the Energy Assistance Package. Pensioners in the private sector who receive Attendance Allowance will be eligible for enhanced measures under stage 4 of the package if they live in a home with very poor energy efficiency. They would also, like anyone over 60, be eligible if they have never had central heating installed.
Michael McMahon (Hamilton North and Bellshill) (Lab): To ask the Scottish Executive how it is ensuring that the additional costs faced by families living with disability are addressed in its work to tackle child poverty.
Stewart Maxwell: The Scottish Government is taking a wide range of measures to support families living with disability. For example, we provide substantial funding (around £3.3 million in 2008-09) for a range of organisations directly supporting families with disabled children. We also provide funding to the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland to develop training, advice and information on tax credits and benefits for frontline workers working with children with disabilities and their families.
We have also clearly committed to the UK Government’s child poverty targets. We will do all within the powers available to us to help achieve the interim target of halving child poverty by 2010, and the goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020. We are also liaising closely with the UK Government on their initial proposals for a Child Poverty Bill.
However significant short term action to combat child poverty and to meet the additional costs faced by families living with disability requires extra investment by the UK Government in tax credits and benefits. The Scottish Government does not currently have responsibility for personal taxation and benefits but we are working in the context of the National Conversation, to develop key principles for how the benefits and tax credits system could operate to tackle poverty and income inequality in the event of fiscal autonomy or independence.
We recognise that such families may be at risk of fuel poverty and so we announced in November that from April this year our new Energy Assistance Package will provide a range of help for low income families with a disabled child, to reduce energy costs and lower fuel bills which may include free insulation or central heating.
We set out our new approach to tackling poverty and income inequality in Achieving Our Potential, which together with the frameworks on health inequalities and early years, commit to a concerted approach with our partners to tackle disadvantage and promote equality for people with disabilities.
November 2008
John Park (Mid Scotland and Fife) (Lab): To ask the Scottish Executive what steps it is taking to reduce fuel poverty.
Stewart Maxwell: We are doing what we can to improve the delivery of the fuel poverty programmes we inherited from the previous administration, but our review of fuel poverty in Scotland published in May, highlighted that the central heating programme is not effectively targeting the fuel poor. We re-established the Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum to advise on how to refocus the programmes to achieve maximum benefits for the fuel poor and get back on track to meet our 2016 target. We are now scrutinising the forum’s recommendations published on 10 October, and will present our report to Parliament shortly.
In the meantime, we have allocated an additional £10 million to the central heating programme for this year. This will ensure that many more pensioners receive central heating this winter, and we recently announced our intention to extend the fuel poverty programmes from April next year to provide for the first time more than the basic insulation measures to families on income support with children under five or with disabled children under 16.
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