Draft Carer's Assistance (Carer Support Payment) (Scotland) Regulations 2023 (Consequential Modifications) Order 2023 Debate
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Gerald Jones
Main Page: Gerald Jones (Labour - Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney)Department Debates - View all Gerald Jones's debates with the Scotland Office
Draft Carer's Assistance (Carer Support Payment) (Scotland) Regulations 2023 (Consequential Modifications) Order 2023
Gerald Jones Excerpts(6 months ago)
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Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mrs Harris.
As has been said, the order will allow the Scottish Government’s carer support payment to go ahead with the necessary parliamentary approval. The carer support payment will be administered by Social Security Scotland and will replace the carer’s allowance, which is currently administered by DWP. The order is not controversial and we do not oppose it.
I do not wish to delay proceedings unnecessarily, but I want to put a few things on the record. The Scottish National party said that it wanted powers over social security devolved in order to build a different welfare system from that of the UK Tory Government, but it has left those powers in their hands due to its slowness in setting up a Scottish system. It is welcome that, according to the Carers Trust, 80,000 carers will be able to benefit from the carer support payment, but there are an estimated 800,000 people in Scotland providing unpaid care, including 30,000 young carers under the age of 18. The total value of unpaid care is estimated to be £12.8 billion per year.
The devolution of social security has been somewhat chaotic from the beginning. It was delayed multiple times over several years, and the wait times for some benefits have spiralled to even longer than the current Tory-run DWP waiting times in Scotland. The people of Scotland deserve to have two Governments on their side, which, unfortunately, does not seem to be the case at the moment. As I said at the start, we do not oppose the order.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
Will the Labour party commit to replicating what the Scottish Government have done by broadening qualification for carer support and increasing the amount received by carers?