I, too, thank Evelyn Tweed for securing this important debate. I am always pleased to have the opportunity to talk about social security in Scotland.

The truth that the motion uncovers is that lifting people out of poverty is not just about pledging money; it is equally important that the support gets to those who need it most. We can promise all the money in the world but, if people in need are not accessing it, what is the point?

Here in Scotland, we need to do more. As Evelyn Tweed pointed out, one in four eligible people are not claiming the young carers grant and 39 per cent of eligible people are not claiming funeral support payments. Both of those benefits are administered by Social Security Scotland. Those numbers represent real people who are not getting what they are entitled to.

It is clear that more needs to be done and, to my mind, it is clear that the most effective way to improve uptake is to remove the biggest barrier, which is the poor distribution of benefits. After eight years of devolved social security, we are still seeing processing times that are sky high. We are seeing websites crash, long forms that people find difficult to fill in and applicants being unable to go through Social Security Scotland for help. The poor experience of people when they interact with the agency puts them off doing so again in the future. That leads to many people claiming some but not all of the benefits that they are entitled to. If we can ensure a more positive user experience, we can increase the likelihood of higher uptake.

As members will know, the Social Security (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill is passing through Parliament now. It offers all of us, across parties, a real opportunity to use amendments to improve how Social Security Scotland works, to ensure that more people get what they deserve and that we hold the agency accountable for its performance day in, day out. I would be keen to work with the minister, the cabinet secretary and others as we lodge stage 2 amendments.

I will briefly bring up one other topic that a number of stakeholders have brought to my attention over the past few months. In Scotland, people need to interact with three different bureaucracies to access the full range of benefits that make up social security. Claimants have to interact with the DWP, Social Security Scotland and, sometimes, their local authority to access the support that they need. It has been put to me that the interaction between those three agencies is not necessarily seamless and that it sometimes puts people off if they have to apply three times to three different agencies to get three different types of benefits.

In a country of our size, we need to do more to bring together those three bureaucracies so that information can be shared better between the three of them and so that people who find it difficult to interact do not have to do it three times. I would appreciate the minister’s giving an opinion on that matter and on how to encourage the smoothness of those vital interactions. I am sure that he and all of us will agree that the better those agencies interact, the easier it is for claimants to access all the support to which they are entitled.

If we want to encourage people to access their full allowance, we must ensure that the process by which they do it is as easy as possible. Our first step in doing so is to ensure that we are providing a usable and easy-to-access service. We have made progress, but we still have a long way to go.