Seeking security: interview with Scotland’s social security minister Jeane Freeman

Jeane Freeman is wrestling with the concept of death.

As Scotland’s social security minister, charged with improving people’s lives, she must put a timescale on someone dying. It’s not easy.

How long should someone who is terminally ill be given to live in terms of assessing their welfare benefits – when they have months, weeks, days to live?

The current UK benefit system immediately fast-tracks a claimant who has six months to live. They are automatically cleared without need for assessment and go straight onto the highest award possible.

But with a new social security system being built in Scotland, Freeman can rethink some of the established rationale behind the 15 per cent of the UK’s current social security spend that is to be devolved to the Scottish Government.

Under the Scotland Act 2016, the first tranche of the £3.3bn-worth of benefits paid to almost 1.5 million Scots and covering eleven social security benefits, including Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Disability Living Allowance, are soon to become the responsibility of the Scottish Government, with a full transfer by the end of this parliament.

By 2021, Freeman says: “The Scottish Government will be making more payments per week than they are currently making per year.”

But assessing need is complex and Freeman is discovering that terminal illness and how that is defined is just one of the more unexpected grey areas.

“Currently, that decision rests on a six-month diagnosis in relation to benefits, but people have raised a genuine concern around that,” she says.

“For example, MND, where people are going to die from that condition but it might not be within six months. So what do you do?

“I am still grappling with this, but for me, I have to hear what the medical and health professions tell me, and one of the things that they say, all of them say, is that it’s easier for a doctor to say you will die in the next five days, or in the next four weeks, but the longer you ask, the harder it gets because, as one of them said, people are people and they constantly surprise.

“So, you might think someone has got two years and they die much sooner or you might think someone has a very short time and they last a lot longer.

“It is a really hard one, because that diagnosis has a significant impact on people,” she says.

“You have to remember how people feel about being told they have a terminal illness, but I also have to be really conscious of who I’m asking to make that decision when it comes to the payment of benefits.

“It won’t be the social security agency, it will be health professionals.

“This is a hard thing for medical professionals to do, and my point is that they’re the ones I’m asking to do it, so I need to hear, where would they feel comfortable.

“The point I’d make to everyone who wants me to extend it, and of course, I could simply make it two years, three years, four years and hang the cost, I could do that and loads of people would be happy, but if I’ve got a health professional using medical judgement who refuses to tick that box because their judgement says, ‘I have no idea’, then it’s not actually deliverable.

“So, it’s a grand bit of gesture politics, but it’s not going to make any difference in practice.

“And never forget, as the Chief Medical Officer reminds me, this is about individuals and that the medics have got professional guidelines to adhere to too.

“I completely understand why people think six months is too short, and therefore unfair, so I need to try and find a way of marrying the legitimate concerns of the medical profession with the legitimate concerns of people with conditions like MND. And that is hard.

“The medics will also tell you that there are implications in telling people that they’re going to die in, say, two years.

“They could go off and do things they’ve always wanted to do, give up their job, cash in their pension, go off and do stuff, blow their savings and then they live on past what was expected. What then?

“Or you tell someone that they’re going to die in a year, and maybe they change their treatment, maybe they say, ‘Well, if I’ve only got a year, I’m not going to do the chemo and I’m not going to do this or do that’.

“So there are huge implications. Which is why I really am passionate in saying to fellow politicians that it’s not for a bunch of politicians to just come up with the answer. What would we know?

“There’s more to this than just the financial support, important though that might be.

“There’s a whole bunch of other stuff around the psyche and the reaction and the responses to being told you have a terminal illness. You need to think about all of that.

“This has been undoubtedly one of the hardest elements for me to deal with in this whole process of establishing the new system and our approach.

“Initially, I think I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, we need to sort out terminal illness’, we need to sort that out because instinctively, six months feels too short, and then you start applying your mind to it, and you start the discussions and you start thinking and you think, ‘Oh, boy, this is not straightforward, there is more to this’.

“I am pretty sure wherever I end up on it, it’s going to be one of those ones which is not perfect.

“There is no perfect answer here. It’s not a mathematical equation where there’s right and wrong.

“You just must do your best to be confident about the process you went through to get there, what you used as your evidence, how careful am I in separating out the reasoning and the emotion, and then settle on it.

“Then it’s up to the parliament whether or not they accept that, and in my capacity to explain how I got to where I get to.

“But that’s the kind of only way you can handle one of those decisions where there’s no right answer – no absolute right answer.”

Freeman likes to find answers. She’s a fixer. Her career, like her politics, has meandered from the student wing of the Communist party to the mainstream SNP. She’s been a nurse, head of a criminal justice charity, a civil servant, a Labour special adviser and independence campaigner to an SNP minister.

Throughout, there has been a common thread of social justice, of remedying the social ills that beset Scotland.

She has also served on many of Scotland’s public boards and received an OBE in 1996 for her work with offenders.

Freeman was brought up in Ayrshire by her mother, a nurse, and her father, an aircraft fitter, who was also a trade unionist and who instilled in her a strong sense of community, hard work and fairness.

‘Achieving success is meaningless unless others have it too,’ he once told her, and the words clearly stuck.

As a special adviser to Jack McConnell when he was first minister, she worked at the heart of the Labour project.

She was one of McConnell’s most trusted aides during the first four years of his administration and had a reputation as an enforcer, ensuring civil servants implemented Labour policies.

She stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate in council elections in Edinburgh’s New Town and was famously, and inexplicably, rejected by the party, along with other notable women including Susan Deacon, who appealed, when she stood for selection for the first Scottish Parliament.

An experience which clearly still smarts.

Such was her close association with Labour that when she left McConnell’s employ and set up her own public affairs consultancy, she was dubbed one of the “Labour mafia” by her now SNP colleague and former cabinet secretary Alex Neil, who said all you needed to get a place on a public board or win a government contract was a Labour Party membership card.

She says her drift towards the SNP was a gradual one which basically began with her questioning why the devolved administration couldn’t do more.

“It was a couple of things, really, partly the experience of working with Jack. My job was very much behind the scenes, working with the civil service on particular briefs, finance and health mainly, but a lot of it was fixing things that might not be working.

“I learned loads and I appreciated the civil service much more than when I worked in it, and I could see the real skill and talent that is in there, but gradually I was thinking that if we can do that but not that, why can’t we do that?

“That questioning was grumbling away and then there were some things that I thought we should’ve done that we didn’t do – dealing with the issue of children being held at Dungavel [immigration detention centre] being the main one where I really thought we should’ve been stronger.

“But ultimately, the connection between the party in Scotland and the party in Westminster was a huge factor in the decision-making there and I just thought, why? Why if it’s the right thing for Scotland to do, then why are we not doing it?

“It was gradual, and I remember saying to Susan [Freeman’s partner] at one point when I’d listened to a speech that Nicola had made, that I hadn’t got a single reason to disagree with a word she’d just said. So why not, what’s stopping me?

“And realising that all through my political career, whether in parties or not in parties, I’d never actually thought about ‘why not independence?’ It was just an assumed. It was never up for debate. It just wasn’t a factor.

“And when you start thinking about it, you start thinking, ‘why not?’ And basically, it became a ‘why not independence’ question for me.”

Freeman was one of the high-profile co-founders of Women for Independence during the referendum campaign and joined the SNP shortly thereafter.

She was earmarked as a potential MSP early on, by Nicola Sturgeon no less, and elected to the Scottish Parliament in May 2016 amid very early predictions about which post she would be offered in Sturgeon’s ministerial team.

Health and justice seemed the most obvious given her background, but she was appointed minister to the newly created post of social security, charged with setting up a new public body to encompass the benefits that were to be devolved to Holyrood.

It’s hard to imagine a better qualified MSP for the job.

Freeman brings a confidence, maturity and an unprecedented depth of political experience gained from working within the civil service – she was one of four appointees to the civil service during its first external recruitment exercise alongside the current permanent secretary, Leslie Evans – and out with.

“I think if I’m honest, age helps,” she says in answer to a question about how she approached the challenge.

“It never crossed my mind for one minute that I would not be personally leading this and be responsible for the decisions that we’re taking and that the job of officials is not for me to hide behind, but to take their advice, hear their advice, but make my own decisions.

“It is undoubtedly the case that ministers and their officials work much more closely in Scotland than is the case in Whitehall, much more closely, and so we can be across the detail in a way that Whitehall ministers aren’t.

“Their officials are much more, it appears to me anyway, likely to be decision makers, which is not the case here, or does not need to be the case here.

“It’s entirely down to how you as a minister want to behave and how you want that relationship to work.

“Some might say that I’m way too interested in making all the decisions and wanting to run it and control it, etc, myself, but I don’t want to be an official and I am clear that at the end of the day, I will take accountability for this, so I want to know what’s going on, and be making the decisions about what’s going on.

“I read two things early on, one by accident, and I can’t even remember the name of the novel, it wasn’t particularly great, but it was a political novel about a government minister who because of other things going on in politics and personal life, signed something off without reading it, which of course came back to haunt him, so I learned to read everything.

“The other thing I read was an analysis of why Universal Credit got into difficulty and it was because decisions were made about timetables and when things would be done in order to get through a debate in Westminster, as opposed to ‘is it doable?’

“And that was really important because if you remember in the early part, there was a lot of criticism about us going too slowly, and that was external and political criticism, and I just had that in my head about I am not going to bow to this, because if I commit to doing things more quickly than we’re planning, this is going to fall on its face.

“So, we’re just going to stick this one out, and stick with it. We will deliver, as we have always said we will deliver, by the end of this parliament.

“I guess what I was conscious of at the very start was two things: one is that I’ve learned over the years is that if you want to understand a problem and you want to fix it, you need to involve the people who know it best, the users of the service, and that no matter how clever you think you are, you’re not going to get that right without them.

“And secondly, there was, and is, a huge amount of distrust by people about the current UK welfare system.

“Some of it is well founded, some of it perception, but it’s there, and I needed to find ways to involve people so that they could begin to give us the benefit of the doubt.

“Government is government and other than political anoraks, people don’t make the distinction too much between what the UK does and what Scotland does, so if I’m going to try and create a new service in Scotland, I needed to help people move away from thinking it’s just the old one with a kilt round it.

“So that’s why from the summer of 2016, we did the consultation the way we did it, by getting out.

I wanted to hear from folk who currently use the benefit system, and to hear directly from them, so we deliberately designed the consultation process so that I could personally go to as many of those events as possible.

“I went to loads so that I got a feel for what people were then talking about, about their personal experience, what actually happened to them.

“I think it’s really easy to think that we understand how people feel, and I do have memories of being poor and not wanting that electricity bill to land on the doormat and not know what to do, but that’s not where I am now.

“So I’ve got a memory and while I understand the facts and the details of the benefits and the technicalities of it all, that’s not the same as hearing how this feels to people.

“It’s really important to me that people are having their voices heard, and I think that as long as you are really straight with folk and say that I can’t fix everything that’s wrong with the system, I can’t increase every single benefit to the benefit that we might all agree it should be at, but here’s what I can do, then actually, I think, too often, we underestimate how mature people in Scotland are.

“They get it. What they don’t like is feeling that there are things you know that you’re not telling them. That you are nodding wisely but you’ve no intention of doing it, and that they’re not heard.

“That’s why one of the founding principles in all of this, for me, is about respect and that matters so much.

“Respect isn’t the same as agreeing. Respect is listening and being straight with people, so it mattered a lot to do that.

“And a lot of it was hard, to be honest. It was hard. There was many an occasion when you would feel your eyes filling because you just think that what has happened to this person is so wrong, so unnecessary.

“One of the things I learned from it was that whilst people do care about the level of benefit and support they get, they care a lot about how they’re treated. A lot.

“Which is why we thought the experience panels could work. So, let’s do more than hear what folks say. Let’s get them in on it to help us fix this, to ask, how do we fix it?

“It can be really easy to work away on policy almost at a theoretical level and what really matters is understanding the people this is going to affect.

“We’re in no way finished this, but even something as straightforward as when we were looking to introduce the Universal Credit choices, and staff worked really hard on what an individual would see on their screen and how we’d word that and so on, we did lots of iterative work with people in job centres about what was clear language and so on.

“And here’s something that would never have occurred without consulting with users of the system, which was to give the choice over rent first, before you give the choice over whether it’s paid fortnightly, in terms of how it appears on the screen.

“Because what they would then tell us is that ‘If I know that my rent’s taken care of, I’m more comfortable with the idea of getting my money twice a month, so I’m more likely to choose that, but if you give me that choice first, I’m not going to take it because I’m going to be worrying about my rent.’

“We would never have thought that until we asked. 

“That was taking what we planned to put onto their journal screens and saying, ‘Right, I want you to go through that, tell us how easy it is to just work it on a piece of IT. Tell us what you think of the words, is this clear, do you know what you’re doing now,’ and they did all that and then they went, ‘Oh, you need to swap that round, you need to give us the rent choice first, and here’s why’. Simple, really.”

Freeman says she still has the capacity to be shocked by some of the personal experiences she has heard during the consultation exercise and I ask her if there is any one person that she has in her mind’s eye when she’s thinking about how she wants the system to operate.

“I have, actually. I’ve got a woman, she just jumps into mind.

“A woman that I met in the Borders who has MS, she had also had a cancer diagnosis at one point, and who had been refused the mobility component and put on the lowest standard level of care award in the transfer from DLA to PIP.

“She’d gone for appeal and at that point, she had gone to Citizens Advice to help her with the appeal, and the advice she was given was that while she had good days and bad days, she should go to that appeal in her wheelchair no matter how she felt on the day.

“And she did, and she won her appeal.

“And what sticks in my mind was that she was crying as she told me that because she felt that she cheated.

“I just thought, you didn’t cheat, the system made you.

“That was a year on for her and she still felt guilty. A woman with MS and cancer. She felt guilty. That’s heartbreaking.”

The other significant influence in Freeman’s approach has been her ex-husband. They married in 1980 and separated in 1983.

Months after they parted, he broke his neck and as a result, is now tetraplegic.

“I’m a former nurse, so I got straight into the, ‘Oh, I can fix this’ mode,” she says. “But he was having none of it.

“He said it wasn’t working between us before the accident, so it was not going to work after it.

“This was 1983 and watching him get his head round what had happened to him, what that meant, forcefully resisting attempts to make him dependent, being very forceful in his independence and wanting to live independently, it really altered my thinking.

“Watching him argue with a perception that because he was now tetraplegic, he would go into the equivalent of sheltered accommodation, where he would go out on day trips and basket weave, and seeing his absolute determination not to do that, and all of us working with him to find a way that he didn’t have to do that, was life-changing.

“He got a flat in the Grassmarket – at that time Community Service Volunteers ran a scheme so he had a volunteer in return for bed and board, etc – he set up the Lothian Coalition of Disabled People, he married again, he went off to Australia to work and he now lives there and works in that field in Australia.

“Dougie just changed my attitude about capability and how it’s actually the barriers that we put in people’s way that are the barriers, not their physical or other capacities that are the barriers.

“Us. We are the barriers.

“I was listening to a programme on the radio yesterday … and they were talking about medical training and one of the doctors said that we should go back to where we start, which is, ‘do no harm’, and I think folks who are going to be eligible for the benefits we will have control of have got enough to cope with to get through their lives, so let’s not make that more difficult.

“If we can help, we help them, let’s do it. If we can’t, we can’t. But, at the very least, let’s not make life any harder.”