Keeping 100,000 Children Out of Poverty

This analysis is obviously very welcome, demonstrating the clear impact in child poverty reduction of this SNP Scottish Government’s policy priorities.

Of course, no child in our wealthy country in this day and age should be living in poverty – that these interventions are even necessary is a damning indictment of fourteen years’ Tory austerity.

Yet while the Scottish Government is doing its utmost to address the reality and support struggling families, the UK Government still will not match these commitments to address the poverty it has created.

So as well as highlighting what is being achieved in Scotland, this latest modelling also lays bare the scale of the impact Westminster could make but chooses not to.

GRAEME

It is utterly unacceptable that, in 2024, children continue to live in poverty in Scotland. That is why we have very deliberately chosen to invest in our public services, and the social contract which binds the Scottish Government to the people we serve.

From the introduction of the innovative and transformative Scottish Child Payment – described as ‘game-changing’ by frontline organisations and already improving the lives of so many children and families across Scotland in real and immediate ways – to investing £1 billion to tackle the poverty-related attainment gap, continuing delivery of the Whole Family Wellbeing programme, providing £50 million to develop and scale up holistic family support and investing around £1 billion every year in high quality early learning and childcare, ensuring Scotland delivers the most generous funded childcare offer in the UK.

The economic modelling published today estimates that the actions we’re taking will mean the relative and absolute child poverty rates will be 10 and 7 percentage points lower than they would have otherwise been. That’s 100,000 children kept out of relative poverty and 70,000 kept out of absolute poverty next year. These are the lives of children across Scotland, in every single community, being improved by the action we are taking.

While we all know the challenging financial situation Scotland faces, the Scottish Budget continues to prioritise tackling and reducing child poverty. Against a backdrop of the UK Government’s two-child limit and continued austerity, we are taking real action to lift children out of poverty and improve their chances in life.

We know that the UK Government could lift a further 40,000 children out of poverty in Scotland this year if they made key changes to Universal Credit. That includes introducing an Essential’s Guarantee and scrapping the two child limit.

Every child in Scotland deserves a life free of poverty and I will continue to do everything in my power to make that a reality.

FIRST MINISTER HUMZA YOUSAF