2 out of 5 Scots kids could live in poverty by 2029
Labour grandee despairs of the growing number of kids trapped in deprivation and calls on the SNP Government to use their powers to stop the tide of families who are struggling to cope with low wages, a child benefit freeze and universal credit chaos
Report reveals more than 400,000 children face shocking depravation.
AS BOYS and girls all over Scotland return to school for the new term, more than ever will turn up undernourished, deprived and ill-equipped.
The full and grim extent of worsening child poverty has been revealed in a little-known paper, commissioned by the Scottish Government. It shows that more than 400,000 Scottish children face the prospect of falling into poverty during the coming decade.
Almost two Scottish kids in every five could be in poverty by the end of the 2020s – as poverty numbers rise from just under 31 per cent of children in 2018 to 34.5 per cent by 2020 and then to about 38 per cent by 2027.
This represents a doubling of the number of youngsters in poverty since 2010.
This shocking arithmetic of deprivation – far worse than at any time during the Margaret Thatcher/John Major years – and the failure to address the suffering of our most vulnerable children makes me both sad and angry.
As the report shows, the escalating poverty crisis is driven by the freezing of child benefits, the substantial cuts to social security benefits and tax credits and the introduction of universal credit, which will be fully rolled out in Scotland by 2023.
Indeed, once universal credit goes nationwide, with children over the age of seven qualifying for a free school meal only if their parents earn less than £7400 from paid work, about one million fewer kids across Britain will be eligible than if the old system prevailed.
While today half the children in out-of-work families are in poverty, the figure will exceed 90 per cent by the late 2020s as the benefits freeze bites hard.
But two thirds of children in poverty are in families where the breadwinner is in work – and not earning enough to escape poverty.
Sadly, in today’s gig and zero hours economy, the old social contract – that if you worked hard you would make a decent living – no longer holds.
Kirkcaldy, where I grew up, now has the fifth worst area for child poverty in Scotland and the worst outside Glasgow.
In East Kirkcaldy, 40 per cent of youngsters are in poverty but soon, on current projections, it will affect every second child.
In the Cottage Family Centre that serves this area, there were 100 children in need of Christmas parcels in 2011. Two years ago, it was 700. Last year, it was 900.
In 2011, the parcels were Christmas toys – now they contain basic food and essential clothes.
Here, the under-pressure local food bank has seen a doubling of numbers in the past year, not least because of universal credit.
A few years ago, the problem was that benefit Giros ran out a few days before the next payment. Now, they run out within a day or two of people receiving them and families can often fall victim to loan sharks.
A report by the independent National Audit Office this summer was stark – universal credit is failing to achieve its aims and there is no evidence it ever will.
The UK Government’s own survey of claimants showed that 40 per cent of them were falling behind with bills or experiencing real financial difficulties.
About a fifth of claimants struggle to make and manage their claim online. And universal credit, which was supposed to simplify the benefit system and cost less to administer, is costing £699 per claim, against an ambition of £173 per claim by 2024-25.
While cuts have been imposed by the UK Conservatives, the Scottish Government’s own report is blunt about the failure of the SNP to address rising poverty – failing to use the substantial powers the Scottish Parliament now have.
As the report concludes, the “tax and social security reforms recently announced by the Scottish Government will not fundamentally change the overall trajectory of child poverty in Scotland”.
The welcome increase in carers’ allowance, it says, “does not affect enough households with children to cause any measurable impact on child poverty”.
The much-publicised Best Start grant, which is to be introduced next year, is “not large enough to make an appreciable difference to the poverty rate”.
The SNP’s heavily advertised tax cut – worth just 40p per week for low earners on the first £2000