Scotsman Politics Editor Alistair Grant in Govan for Building a new Scotland launch

Transcript

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00:07 Hello, I'm Alistair Grant and I'm the Political Editor of The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday

00:13 and I'm here in Govan this morning for the launch of the ninth paper in the Scottish

00:18 Government's Building a New Scotland series. This is the series of papers, series of documents

00:24 aiming at setting out an updated prospectus for independence and looking at all sorts

00:29 of different aspects of that. The one today is looking at social security, the social

00:33 security system in an independent Scotland, the benefits system. There's all sorts of

00:40 stuff in this paper. I have to say there's not much in the way of timelines and an overall

00:44 cost of that move from the current system to what it might look like in an independent

00:50 Scotland. I think one of the key things that I've picked out is that there's these ten

00:54 key actions that the Scottish Government wants to take in the very early years of an independent

01:00 Scotland to reform the existing universal credit benefit system. So that would include

01:06 things like scrapping the two-child cap, ending the current system of benefit sanctions and

01:13 Shirley-Anne Somerville, the Social Justice Secretary, was today saying that these actions

01:17 could be taken within five years, so very quickly. I think it's worth pointing out that

01:24 spending on social security is huge, both in Scotland and across the UK. I think the

01:29 Scottish Government currently spends more on social security than it gets from the UK

01:35 Government in funding. So the gap is forecast to rise to £1.3 billion more in 2027-28 and

01:44 those are figures from the Scottish Parliament's independent fact-checking service. So it's

01:50 a huge issue obviously. I think one of the other things to look out for in the Scotsman's

01:55 website this morning as well is I was at an event in Edinburgh last night with Nicola

01:59 Sturgeon at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh. It was an event in which she was talking about

02:04 her life in books, talking about her love of books and there were some quite interesting

02:08 comments she made about the memoir she's currently writing of her time in politics, which there

02:13 will obviously be a lot of interest in when it's published. She's saying she's finding

02:17 the process of writing it a bit harder than she expected.

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