Kirsty Blackman

For over five years, I have been raising the issue of impact assessments and the fact that they do not make sense. I see the Opposition Front Benchers nodding along, because they know that I have been raising that issue. Impact assessments are done on a stupid basis that does not make any sense, and certainly not in today’s world. If the Opposition Front Benchers had only changed it when they had the opportunity, we would not be in this situation today. But the Labour party has the opportunity to change the way we do impact assessments so that they actually make sense. They should be about not just whether businesses will be impacted to the tune of £5 million, but what matters to people and whether their lives will be impacted by a change in policy. That is the point at which impact assessments should be done. We do not have an impact assessment for this policy. Do the Labour party and the UK Government know that single women are three times more likely to be missing out on pension credit than single men? Does the Labour party know that pensioners who are black or from Asian ethnic backgrounds are more likely to be in poverty than white pensioners? Does it therefore know that this decision has a differential impact on minority communities? Is that why it has refused to share the impact assessments with us? How will this policy grow the economy? How will ensuring that pensioners, who we know spend in their local communities, have less money to spend in those local shops grow the economy? The issue with all of this is not whether we have a Tory or a Labour Government. It is that Westminster consistently fails to work for the people of Scotland.