7. To ask the Scottish Government how its welfare policies address poverty and malnutrition in older people. (S5O-04547)

The Minister for Older People and Equalities has held regular meetings with the older people’s strategic action forum to ensure that our approach is directly informed by lived experience.

Our immediate priorities fund has ensured that members of the forum received more than £1.16 million to provide direct support for older people, with more than £170,000 going to support older minority ethnic people’s access to hot, nutritious food.

Age Scotland also received more than £870,000 from the fund to enable it substantially to increase the capacity of its existing helpline and to create the infrastructure to maintain that vital service during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Scottish Government has invested more than £110 million in tackling food insecurity caused by the pandemic, including awarding more than £240,000 to Food Train, which has provided meals and check-in phone calls to more than 3,000 older people.

Is the Cabinet secretary aware that, before the lockdown, the Eat Well Age Well project estimated that more than 100,000 older people in Scotland were at risk of or were suffering from malnutrition? That situation has undoubtedly been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, during which vulnerable older people have experienced difficulty in accessing food, the continued closure of day centres that usually provide lunches, and the isolation and loneliness that have an impact on their ability to eat well.

Does the Minister agree with the many organisations that believe that enshrining a right to food in Scots law would ensure that emergency food planning is prioritised and could help to stop malnutrition among the older generation?

The right to food, and indeed all human rights, are being considered by the national task force for human rights leadership. It is developing detailed proposals for a new statutory human rights framework for Scotland, including the right to food as an essential part of the overall right to an adequate standard of living.

The task force is considering the approach that it will take to specific rights, including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, and it is keen to investigate how we might protect people from poverty.

Alongside my colleague Aileen Campbell, I chair the social renewal advisory board, whose policy circle is looking at aspects around food. I am sure that it will issue recommendations that will feed into the advisory board’s discussions.

I hope that that reassures the member that the Government is not only looking seriously at human rights overall, but is very much investigating how we can ensure that a right to an adequate standard of living—including the right to food—is looked at.