Minimum Income Guarantee: Experts by Experience Panel report

Reflections and recommendations

Reflections

Involve would like to thank the 38 members of the Scottish public who took part in the Expert by Experience Panel, committing their time and energy to learning about the Minimum Income Guarantee, hearing and discussing their values, views, experiences, and opinions with each other, and together developing the above eight principles.

The work of the past two years was recognised in the last meeting by Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Shirley-Anne Somerville, who thanked the Panel and acknowledged that the Panel's recommendations will challenge the Expert Group's thinking and that of the Scottish Government as they design and deliver a Minimum Income Guarantee. Constructive feedback is important to recommendations to push the government to go further and better to ensure successful policy.

Recommendations

The independent Minimum Income Guarantee Expert Group will provide recommendations to the Scottish Government on what they consider to be feasible steps towards delivering a Minimum Income Guarantee in Scotland. The views of the Expert by Experience Panel that have been shared throughout this process will shape and inform those recommendations. In particular, the principles summarised above will be used as tests throughout the policy design.

Therefore we recommend that:

• the full range of recommendations made within individual panel meetings are taken into consideration by the Expert Group when making decisions on any specific area the Panel has deliberated upon.
• the final recommended principles developed by the Panel are widely shared both within the Expert Group, the Minimum Income Guarantee Secretariat and aligned partners.
• that the full report of the Expert Group embeds both the recommendations made within Panel meetings, and the principles developed by the Expert by Experience Panel.

Beyond this, future decision makers including the Scottish Government, are asked to carefully consider the outputs from this process so that lived experience of financial insecurity remains at the core of the design and implementation of a Minimum Income Guarantee in Scotland.

Introduction

The Minimum Income Guarantee Expert by Experience Panel brought together a diverse group of people with lived experience of financial insecurity to support the design of a Minimum Income Guarantee for Scotland.

The Expert by Experience Panel was set up with the intention of drawing on the lived experience of panel members to ensure policy design meets the needs of those it aims to help.