Latest news with #CentralScotland
Telegraph
02-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
SNP quango ‘squandered' £21m of public cash in benefits errors
A benefits quango created by the SNP government has been accused of 'squandering' almost £21 million of public money. New figures reveal that the cash has been paid out in error to claimants by Social Security Scotland (SSS) since 2019, when it was established. The quango, which employs 4,000 staff and has a budget of £321 million, was set up to handle additional benefits paid out by the Scottish Government, including the Scottish child payment; best start grants and job start payments. Stephen Kerr, the Conservative MSP for Central Scotland who obtained the overpayments data, accused the SNP of 'losing control' of state benefits and described SSS as a 'vast, out-of-control bureaucratic monster'. According to figures released under freedom of information, more than 67,000 overpayments logged by the quango cost taxpayers £18.7 million between 2019-20 and 2024-25. In the current financial year, almost 4,000 overpayments have cost more than £2.2 million. The highest number of errors occurred with claimants for best start goods, a benefit designed to help pregnant women and families with young children to purchase healthy meals. It provides financial support, typically on a prepaid card, to help cover the cost of items such as milk, fruit and vegetables. Since 2019, more than 32,000 overpayments were made. More than 22,000 overpayments were logged for the Scottish child payment, which helps low-income families with children under 16. 'The SNP have completely lost control of Scotland's benefits bill,' said Mr Kerr. 'They've built an enormous, well-paid bureaucracy that has wasted £21 million since its creation – and the more money they pour in, the worse it seems to get. 'Hardworking Scottish taxpayers deserve far better – and they demand it. It is totally unacceptable for millions of pounds of their money to be squandered through blatant administrative incompetence. 'That money should be funding frontline services – or better yet, staying in taxpayers' pockets – not disappearing because of basic, avoidable errors. 'The SNP promised Social Security Scotland would deliver a fairer, more efficient system. These figures show how absurd that claim truly is. It's time the SNP faced up to the reality of the vast, out-of-control bureaucratic monster they've created. They must get a grip and take real responsibility.' Growing social security spend The Scottish Government has said it is committed to using its social security powers to support low-income families, carers and those with disabilities to tackle poverty and provide financial assistance. However, MSPs on Holyrood's Social Justice and Social Security Committee are seeking views on the positive and negative aspects of growing social security spend in Scotland. The committee has highlighted that 2025/26, the Scottish Government is spending £1.2 billion more on social security policies than it gets in funding for social security from the UK Government. According to the Scottish Fiscal Commission, more than £5 billion was spent on social security in 2023/24 with this figure predicted to rise to £8.7 billion by 2030. A spokesperson for SSS, said: 'As we have introduced more benefits, our client numbers have significantly increased with an expected corresponding increase in payment errors, although the number of errors is small. 'Over 1 million individual clients have been paid more than £6.1 billion directly by Social Security Scotland since 2018. The total amount of money given in overpayments represents 0.35% of our total benefit expenditure since 2018. 'We are committed to minimising errors and improving our abilities to tackle them.'
The Guardian
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My unexpected Pride icon: indie breakup songs said all the things I couldn't say to other boys
When I was a teenager, in the late 00s in central Scotland, being gay was something I experienced as painful made me feel overwrought. This didn't match the depiction of gayness I encountered in mainstream culture at the time, which was mostly very cheerful. Almost all of the gay men on my radar were comedians – figures such as Graham Norton and Alan Carr, both of whom I found funny and still admire today, but who were too easy-going and unpretentious to satisfy my desire to see myself as a tortured poet. When I got to university, I found the representation I was looking for – solemn and beautiful – in writers such as Edmund White and James Baldwin, but earlier in my teenage years I had to make do with what was available: romanticising being gay through songs about straight men falling out with their platonic friends. It's a small but furtive canon, halfway between the diss track and the breakup ballad. Standouts include How Do You Sleep?, John Lennon's spectacularly mean-spirited takedown of Paul McCartney; So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Simon's elegiac send-off to Art Garfunkel, who was pained to discover it was about him only years after its release; several songs arising from the falling-out between the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and No Regrets by Robbie Williams, a song about his decision to leave Take That – and specifically Gary Barlow, if you believe the speculation. While focused on the bitter aftermath, these songs portray love between men with a tragedy and grandeur typically only afforded to heterosexual romance. This is exactly what I wanted at the age of 14. The first buddy breakup song I ever loved was Seventy Times Seven by the emo band Brand New, which recounts a falling out between frontman Jesse Lacey and his former friend John Nolan (who later joined Taking Back Sunday and released a cutting riposte of his own). Musically it's upbeat and effervescent, but the lyrics are venomous: it ends with Lacey urging Nolan: 'Have another drink and drive yourself home / I hope there's ice on all the roads / and you can think of me when you forget your seatbelt / and again when your head goes through the windscreen.' In hindsight, it's a bit much. That Seventy Times Seven directed this degree of wounded passion towards another man was revelatory: it allowed me to cast the feelings I was beginning to have as not embarrassing or shameful but the stuff of Great Art, which was how I thought about three-minute-long pop punk songs at the time. Even after I grew out of emo, trading black hair dye for neon shutter shades, I still found myself returning to songs about straight men and their terrible conflict-resolution skills. The following year I developed an intense friendship with a slightly older boy who lived in the next town over and who was, to the best of my knowledge, entirely straight. It was the summer holidays and every night we'd stay up talking on MSN Messenger. There was nothing sexual about our relationship, but it was almost giddily romantic: we were always dreaming up plans to move to the big city together and shared the delusion that, by simple virtue of being ourselves, we were destined to become cultural icons of some description (we possessed no evident talent, so the details were left vague). Whenever we met up, there was one song we would always play, jumping around and pointing at each other as we sang the lyrics. Like Seventy Times Seven, the Libertines' Can't Stand Me Now is inspired by a falling out between two best friends. It was released shortly after Pete Doherty was prosecuted for breaking into co-frontman Carl Barât's flat and stealing a bunch of his stuff – but it is far more wistful. As per the lyrics, Barât and Doherty don't just love each other, they are in love with each other, and the song is as much a reaffirmation of that love as a chronicle of its disintegration: to Doherty's line 'You can't take me anywhere', Barât replies 'I'll take you anywhere you wanna go'. I still find this moving as an expression of forgiveness and support to someone in the throes of addiction, even if the implied reconciliation turned out to be short-lived. The song isn't at all homoerotic, but it is romantic, and I'm glad I got to scream it in the face of a boy who, if I wasn't exactly in love with, I cared about deeply for a three-month spell before summer ended and our friendship petered out. When I was still in the closet, these songs and others like them allowed me to articulate emotions that had to be kept secret, and because they weren't explicitly queer there was no chance of them blowing my cover: being into the Libertines didn't invite suspicion, and if there was any stigma attached to being a Brand New fan it involved being an emo – a damaging enough charge in central Scotland – rather than being gay. As a grown man, I don't have to look to queer representation in unlikely places. But I am grateful to the music that first allowed me to accept that men can experience deep, tender and painful feelings towards each other, and to think of my own desires as serious and worthy of respect.
Sky News
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election: Polls open as public cast votes to replace late MSP
The polls are now open in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election. It comes following the death of SNP government minister Christina McKelvie. The MSP died in March at the age of 57, having last year taken medical leave to undergo treatment for secondary breast cancer. Ms McKelvie, the minister for drugs and alcohol policy, had been an MSP since 2007 and represented the Central Scotland region up to 2011 before going on to serve Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse. There are 10 candidates standing in the Holyrood by-election: • Collette Bradley, Scottish Socialist Party • Andy Brady, Scottish Family Party • Ross Lambie, Reform UK • Katy Loudon, Scottish National Party (SNP) • Janice MacKay, UK Independence Party (UKIP) • Ann McGuinness, Scottish Green Party • Aisha Mir, Scottish Liberal Democrats • Richard Nelson, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party • Davy Russell, Scottish Labour Party • Marc Wilkinson, Independent The contest takes place less than a year before the Scottish parliament election, with the result potentially offering a snapshot of how the political landscape north of the border will look in 2026. Polls will close at 10pm on Thursday, with the votes set to be verified and manually counted at South Lanarkshire Council headquarters in Hamilton. Sky News will be covering the count and result.
BBC News
27-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
How police apprehend suspected paedophiles in Scotland
It's 07:35 in a smart suburban housing estate in central Scotland and the police are about to turn a family's life upside detectives in plain clothes park their unmarked car near a large detached house and knock on the front door.A dishevelled man suspected of sexual communication with a 13-year-old girl answers and, after a brief discussion about their search warrant, the officers go we're watching is a "soft" approach, the polar opposite of a drugs raid. No hard knock, no battering ram, no shouts of "police". Their tactics mean the peace and quiet of the neighbourhood continues inside the house the ripple effects of the unannounced visit are devastating. The man's partner is told why the police are there. The couple's children want to know who the strangers are and the officers try to calm everyone of the detectives, Joseph Wilson, said: "The only thing I can compare it to in policing is delivering a death message."You're telling them the person isn't who they thought they were."Police Scotland's national child abuse investigation unit invited BBC Scotland News to witness its work amidst a marked change in offending behaviour since the Covid Ch Insp Mike Smith said paedophiles were making "extremely dangerous" direct contact with children online more than ever he warned they could do so within 30 seconds of trying. What happens next can include grooming the child, coercing them to send indecent images - which are often shared with other paedophiles - and persuading them to meet encounters frequently lead to sexual Ch Insp Smith said the perception of online sex offenders as uploaders or downloaders of child sexual abuse material was every case now involves direct contact with a child, with offenders using a range of platforms from social media to streaming."For those people who have a deviant sexual interest in children, it's easier than ever to go online and engage with a child," he said."You can probably do it within 30 seconds, depending on the platform. "That's the reality of what we have seen from investigations over the last three years." Teachers, lawyers and police officers The unit carries out 700 child sexual abuse investigations a year - an increase of 30% since year, its officers are taking steps to safeguard between 600 and 800 children, almost all of them in Scotland."People based in Scotland are offending against Scottish children," said Det Chief Insp Smith. "It's a lot closer to home these days. It's on our doorstep.""We are actioning between 15 to 20 search warrants on a weekly basis across Scotland. "Let's be perfectly blunt about it - the demand is through the roof."The offenders are almost always male and come from all walks of life, including teachers, lawyers and police Insp Michelle Burns, one of the unit's senior investigating officers, said: "My team have told me of occasions where they've went in, and someone has admitted to it and said it was a relief that the police were at their door."They've been doing it for a period of time and they were looking for help."Many of the cases come through referrals from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, an American organisation which receives alerts from the tech are prioritised on the basis of the risk to children, either within the offender's household or the wider they execute the search warrant, the police have to gather evidence, arrest the suspect, safeguard any children who are there and do what they can to minimise the impact on the rest of the family. 'It's relentless' At the address in central Scotland, Det Con Helena Scott took devices from the house to a specially-equipped van where their contents were forensically examined."The problem we have with this type of crime is it's relentless," she said."You feel like you're making a difference and the next day you come in, the pile just gets higher and higher and higher, because there are more and more offenders out there and it's not slowing down."Children should have the right to use online platform without them and their parents worrying about strangers trying to take advantage of their vulnerabilities for their own sexual gratification." As the team continues its work, children in neighbouring homes start to leave to go to school. A resident approaches the detectives to ask what is going on. They reassure her they are police officers but reveal nothing beyond Con Scott recalled another case where the suspect's partner asked how long she had to move house, before the local community found out what had said: "The hardest part of our job is dealing with the families, because there's only ever one person responsible for what brings us to the door. "You're effectively turning lives upside down. "It has a huge impact on us as well because it's difficult for us to see it unravel."Det Ch Insp Smith said online platforms need to do far more to prevent paedophiles making contact with said: "Whilst we don't want to place the onus of responsibility on the child, we have to educate our children to be safe online and just like the physical world, one of the key aspects of that is that you shouldn't be engaging with someone you don't know."I do believe it should be a lot harder for a child to be able to engage with a random person online."There's responsibility on tech, there's responsibility on government, there's responsibility on the police to make the online world safer."But there has to be an understanding that this is a global worldwide problem and therefore we need as a society to change the way we view the internet."A few hours after they arrived, the detectives led the 43-year-old man out of the house in handcuffs to be driven to a police station in is the start of a long legal journey which will eventually establish guilt or man was charged in connection with sexual communications and will appear in court at a later date.
BBC News
09-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Gillian Mackay bids to be Scottish Greens co-leader
Green MSP Gillian Mackay has announced her bid to be co-leader of the party. Mackay, who successfully spearheaded the bill creating buffer zones at abortion clinics, said on social media she believes she can "take the party further and deliver great election results" if elected Harvie, who has been in the role since 2008, previously said he is not standing to continue in the co-leader Lorna Slater, who has been in the job since 2019, is standing again. Scottish Green Party members elect co-leaders every two years, with at least one to be of the leadership contest are expected in said on social media: "At a time when politics is dominated by the egos of men, it is all the more important we have women with big voices and ideas in politics." The Central Scotland MSP successfully brought forward a member's Bill at Holyrood creating buffer zones around abortion clinics, preventing any protests or vigils taking place within 200m (656ft).She said that during four years at Holyrood, she has "shown I can deliver on the causes I champion and bring people together behind them".She added: "I believe I am the person who can not only take the party further and deliver great election results, but deliver fantastic things for Scotland and our communities."US Vice-President JD Vance criticised the bill earlier this year, falsely claiming people who live within safe access zones had been sent letters by the Scottish government warning them about praying within their later said Vance's claims were "total nonsense and dangerous scaremongering."
