Interview with Roseanna Cunningham

When Nicola Sturgeon took over from Alex Salmond as first minister, she put tackling inequality at the heart of her government, taking it back to the economic first principles established in 2007 by her predecessor ‘to create opportunities for all to flourish through increasing sustainable economic growth’.

That had been a direction of travel pushed off-course by the firefighting that was required in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008, when the government had to become, according to Finance Secretary John Swinney, “utterly focused on growth”.

Swinney told Holyrood magazine at the beginning of this year that with the economy more stable, Sturgeon, as the new first minister, was able “to take us back to that first principle of creating opportunities for all to flourish and that is where the focus of inclusive growth now comes from.” He said that tackling inequality went hand in glove with growing the economy.

That inclusivity ethos was bolstered by the appointment of five new members to the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisers, whose stellar background, steeped in tackling inequality, all reflected that change, of course. They included the respected former chief medical officer, Sir Harry Burns, who, despite all his medical insight, once famously said that simply putting more money into someone’s pocket could do more to improve their health than any other intervention.

“People who do not feel in control over their lives struggle because the system does things to them,” said Burns. “It doesn’t work with them and help them create ‘wellness’ for themselves…when things happen that alienate people, they lose that sense of control and a whole range of biological, as well as psychological, things occur.”

And it was in recognition that a more holistic approach to the economy was required, that Sturgeon created a new cabinet role, cabinet secretary for fair work, skills and training, to join the dots between training, work, the economy and fighting inequality. She promoted veteran politician Roseanna Cunningham, MSP for Perthshire South and Kinross-shire, former environment minister and the then minister for community safety and legal affairs, to the wide-ranging post.

Perhaps no one was more surprised than Cunningham herself by her promotion. Sturgeon and Cunningham’s personal relationship has never really recovered from the party leadership contest in 2004 when Sturgeon first stood against Cunningham to be leader, and then worse, made a pact with Alex Salmond in which she stood aside to let him run with her as his deputy. It turned out to be the winning combination.

Cunningham was said at the time to have felt “betrayed”. But in true cohesively disciplined SNP style, any lingering antipathy has never leached into any hint of political disloyalty from Cunningham. And despite what was clearly an unexpected elevation at the hand of Sturgeon, Cunningham brushes off the suggestion of any surprise in her characteristic manner and instead admits that she was initially “in a mild state of shock” simply at the breadth of the brief rather than who proffered it.

“It definitely took me a day or two to master what the exact title of the brief was,” she says. “But because it was a brand new brief, I also didn’t have a set of parameters to restrict me and there has been an element of it growing as we’ve gone along.

“But it does all fit together. The skills and training aspect of it is obviously of fundamental importance in terms of the economy, and in particular to young people, but that can’t be divorced from the fair work side of things. The fair work side is effectively the new part, which is where we’re putting a focus on something quite different, indeed different to [what] almost any other government, devolved or not devolved, has ever done.

“In essence, the fair-work agenda is, yes, about pay, but it’s also about working conditions and it’s also about the kind of work people do, and of course you can’t divorce that from the skills and training side because – and this is something I say frequently – that first experience young people have of work can colour their entire attitude to work for the rest of their lives.

"So if they get a really good experience as their first experience of work, if they are treated fairly, if they feel that they have real opportunities to move on, if they feel the sense that it is something that they can grow and develop in, then that colours their whole attitude to work for the rest of their lives and that is also part of the fair-work agenda. The two things, therefore, although they can look as if they are quite separate, in reality, they do mesh and I see them as being fundamentally linked in terms of that all-embracing fair work agenda.”

Cunningham has been set a mammoth task. Her brief has, as she explains, become by necessity one of many moving parts, but when coupled with the concept of in-work poverty as a depressing fixture of the UK lexicon, she has also had to wrestle with the notion that work doesn’t always pay.

“In-work poverty is a relatively new thing,” she says. “But the really horrifying thing is the extent to which it is becoming almost accepted. It’s become almost institutionalised, as if there’s a kind of sense out there that it is just a given rather than it being a shocking reality.

“It wouldn’t have been that long ago that getting a job was how you got out of poverty. Education and work were the two ways you got yourself out of the bit and if we have a situation now where you are seeing a kind of measurable in-work poverty, which seems stubborn and doesn’t look like it is shifting anytime soon, then that is, I think, a really dangerous thing for an economy as a whole.

“But that being said, I think at first the fair work agenda looked a lot like it was going to be overwhelmed by the whole living wage debate and you have to be careful with that because whilst the living wage is a very iconic part of tackling in-work poverty, it’s not the only thing that will solve this problem.

“I have these conversations with employers all over Scotland and understandably, there are some sectors of the economy that find the whole living wage thing quite challenging because they have effectively got a model of business that is predicated on minimum wage payment. And I don’t want to belittle them, as it is challenging for a lot of businesses, but they will talk to you about the things they won’t be able to do if their wage bill increases and I have to have the conversation the other way round and ask them, if the wage bill doesn’t increase, where are the customers coming from?

"It is a circular thing and there’s a truism that a small amount of money given to people who don’t have a great deal of money goes much further in the economy than a big amount of money going to people who already have a great deal. So effecting that kind of transfer is really important.

“What can be interesting is that you find in some sectors there are some employers who want to make this overt stance about their opposition to the idea of government telling them what to do and then they go away and discover that they’ve only got maybe half-a-dozen or less staff who are not actually on the living wage and then they are kind of like, duh…

“That’s why I said earlier, the living wage is quite iconic in all of this, but it’s not the only thing. I have had reported to me instances of some employers who pay the living wage but the working conditions are not what you would want, and equally I have been to see employers where the good working conditions were such that the fact they weren’t paying the living wage didn’t seem to matter so much either.

“I often tell people about a factory I went to in Lanarkshire where the factory manager had worked a shift system out where it meant the staff had a four-day weekend every second weekend. Now that’s huge for lots of people and I could see that for a lot of staff working there, it wasn’t so much the wage that was the issue, it was the fact that they had this thing that they probably would find very difficult to replicate anywhere else.

“I have also heard, for example, from employers in the hospitality industry that while they are not paying the living wage, they give staff their meals or provide drinks and so on, and I don’t know whether any of these circumstances are ever offered as an alternative to money, but essentially they are making an assumption about what staff think is the best thing of value. Maybe staff would rather have the money and decide to go and have a sandwich rather than a lavish sit-down meal. They’ve just not been consulted. That’s the important bit.

“Level of wage is important and I don’t think we should ever diminish the importance of it because money in people’s pockets is important for all sorts of different reasons, but it isn’t the only thing that’s important and that’s why we need to look much more widely at working conditions and account for all things that happen in a workplace.”

The good news for Cunningham is that employment figures in Scotland are relatively positive. Between October and December 2015, Office for National Statistics figures show the overall Scottish employment rate rose to 74.8 per cent, outperforming the overall UK rate. Cunningham’s government has also been able to take credit for the employment level – 2,636,000 – being the highest on record and youth employment being at its highest October to December level since 2006.

However, behind those positive statistics, lies a grimmer reality. There are more Scots in work than ever, but one in five of those is low paid – more than 40 per cent of working-age adults in Scotland living in severe poverty are also living in households where at least one adult is in employment – and with the proportion increasing, there has been an emerging pattern of low pay, insecurity and zero-hours contracts, making in-work poverty a depressing norm. Her task may be to establish Scotland as a fair-work nation, but currently it looks depressingly like a low-pay nation.

It is on the back of this that last year Cunningham established the Fair Work Convention, a group tasked with creating a blueprint for fair work, ensuring there are more goodquality, well-paid jobs at all levels throughout the public, private and third sectors. It is due to report at the end of next month. She says she is excited about what it might recommend.

“We wait with great anticipation for the Fair Work Convention report next month, because that in itself will help us with how we’re rolling out that side of the portfolio in the next few years. This is important,” says Cunningham.

“It is important because the fair-work agenda in Scotland is not just about creating more jobs, it is about how we can create better jobs. That is crucially important. The government’s economic strategy rests on the idea that a growing economy is needed to reduce inequality, but that we also need to reduce inequality to have a growing economy. That is a really strong message.

“There has already been the Working Together Review that Jim Mather [former SNP minister] had done and, of course, there had been the Wood Commission, and those pieces of work were two parts from each side of the equation – employment practices and skills – the two big things that became my starting point.

“However, it is probably fair to say that right at the start we wouldn’t have understood how far the brief was going to widen out and we have also been kind of overtaken a bit by events over the last year in some areas because with the Trade Union Bill, the issue of the devolution of employability services and with the introduction of an apprenticeship levy, we’ve had three things from Westminster that weren’t in scope when the portfolio was first created. Some things have inevitably assumed a huge importance that you wouldn’t necessarily have been able to plan for, but, of course, that’s what politics is all about.

“I guess the apprenticeship levy was more like an out-of-field scenario, the Trade Union Bill was a pretty shocking proposal and, while the devolution of employability services started off looking like a tremendous opportunity, [George] Osborne then got up in November and changed the entire playing field – that came out of the blue and became really a very difficult situation to have to deal with.

“We’ve had to spend an enormous amount of time and effort to try and get in and around and underneath these things, so some of the work that’s had to be done since I took on the role is not necessarily what you had anticipated or wished for.”

There’s a sense from Cunningham that in this brief she feels even more acutely the frustration of not having all the political powers at her disposal. Does it feed even more into her personal arguments for independence?

“Oh, absolutely. I think the minute you begin to get into this conversation about the fair-work agenda, you realise how difficult it becomes when you don’t actually have the powers. Take the apprenticeship levy, for instance. The apprenticeship set-up is all devolved, but what Westminster has done has created, through the introduction of what is effectively an employment tax, an enormous headache for Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and didn’t really give us a moment’s thought when they did it.

“I have since been involved in numerous telephone conferences, meetings and yet more meetings and, again, it’s an example of the time and effort you have to put in to simply find out what on earth is going on. We still don’t even know what the mechanism will be for returning the money that has been raised through this employment tax in Scotland and we don’t know how much will be returned to Scotland. It’s also blatantly obvious that they [the UK Government] had given no thought to companies that work on a cross-border basis.

"Our concerns in the Scottish Government are the same concerns of Wales and Northern Ireland so we’re not sitting here just having a bit of a whinge to ourselves. The problem is that an employment tax has been introduced without any thought to the impact that was going to have on the devolved policy agenda.

“The reality is that we are hoping to develop a labour market strategy, but how do you develop a labour market strategy if you don’t actually have powers over the things that can impact on that labour market? These are big questions and in some cases we have to effectively put down our marker for what we think is the ideal scenario and then begin to look at how we can start to get into that, but without necessarily having the powers.

"So I talk about using the soft power of government – you encourage, cajole, lead by example, and you put a debate out there that then some companies will want to be part of. The whole living wage debate is about that, the Scottish Business Pledge is about that, and it’s about creating an atmosphere and a debate and a space where companies can be pulled in and helped to come to that same realisation.

“It’s not an easy thing to do, because we don’t have the power to do some of the things that we would like to do and then, for example, you get Osborne’s bombshell about the new national living wage which is introducing an age differential at 25, which I think has the capacity to create real problems for people. I have to say, if you are going for a job at 24 and somebody in the interview waiting room is 26, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what an employer might just happen to do in these circumstances.”

Surely not having the full suite of powers is never an excuse for doing nothing?

“No, it’s not an excuse for doing nothing. And we haven’t done nothing. We’ve actually done quite a lot. From being a part of the UK that had the fewest number of accredited living wage employers we are now, in population terms, the bit of the UK with the highest number of accredited living wage employers. Scotland has the highest percentage of people earning the living wage or higher than anywhere in the UK, except in the south-east of England – and I don’t mean London.

"The Fair Work Convention and the whole Working Together Review has been enormously ground-breaking. We’ve rolled out our Developing the Young Workforce programme, which is a seven-year commitment giving access to high-quality, work-based learning opportunities to all young people, and given one of the things you get attacked for in government is short-termism, with the DYW programme, we’re basically saying we’re not in this for the short term, we’re in this for the long term.

“And on some of the small things that we can do: we have an employer recruitment incentive which got paused in December and will reopen in April and I’ve said when it reopens I want it focused on folk who have a disadvantage of some sort. There’s a recruitment incentive for employers to start thinking about the issue of recruitment and how and where and from what groups they are recruiting.

“And on that, I frequently say we have issues with skills, so why if you have a skills gap, would you not ensure that your recruitment was allowing you to access 50 per cent of the population, the 50 per cent that is women? Why would you also not be thinking about the whole load of people out there with all sorts of abilities that we are overlooking simply because they have some disability?

"I sat at the economic forum that we did before Christmas and we were talking about the digital sector and there were some people there who got up and said candidly that some of the best coders they had working for them were people on the autistic spectrum and you could see other people in the room just suddenly thinking about that. There is a logic to that and, therefore, there is potential that we are perhaps overlooking. So it’s about the recruitment processes, not just constantly falling back on the way things are always done. You know, I can’t stand that whole ‘the way it’s aye been done’ attitude. We can do things differently and we do do things differently.”

One of the big ways of doing things differently between Cunningham’s time as a minister in Salmond’s team and as a cabinet secretary in Sturgeon’s has been the gender split, with a 50/50 ministerial team. Is this a sign that one battle of the sexes has been won?

“No, no, no, no, no, no. You’d have to say the debate has shifted considerably, but I wouldn’t say the battle is won. But we’re now in a place that is so different to where it was. I mean, I was first elected 20 years ago to Westminster and this is miles on from where we were 20 years ago. Although, to be fair, when I got elected in 1995 that was a 50/50 parliamentary group – mainly because there was only four of us!”

I remind Cunningham that she had spoken movingly at an event last year about her father’s attitude to her as a woman wanting a career, never mind becoming a politician.

“Ah yes, but he was of an age, of a generation, and a product of where he grew up, that just couldn’t see that. He just couldn’t see it. I don’t think badly of him or blame him or anything, but people forget how recently that was the norm. I doubt very much you would get many fathers thinking that same way now and even my own father, when I became an advocate, was pleased as punch.

"But it would just never have seemed conceivable for him that his girl child, from the kind of background we came from, could ever have been a politician. Ever. Look, my dad was born in 1912. It was a different world and with different sets of expectations. What did girls do? They got married, they had children and they were housewives and that was basically my father’s model of seeing what a girl’s life was going to be like. I don’t think that’s how people see it now, so there has been enormous change.

“I remember him being quite bemused when I first signed up to do politics part time at university. I was seventeen years old and proudly announced that I’d paid my money and was now doing politics and he just looked at me and said, ‘what the bloody hell does a girl want to do politics for?’ Well, ‘Hi Dad’.”