TURNING UP HUNGRY TO SCHOOL
In our local family centre, 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 toys.. now they contain basic food and essential clothes
of taxable income – “is not a large enough sum by itself to result in a statistically significant reduction in child poverty”.
Our country’s leaders have a duty to look after the poor, deprived and vulnerable.
Yet we know from the SNP’s latest blueprint for independence – the 354-page Growth Commission report which Nicola Sturgeon endorses – that it will never happen if Scotland opts for independence.
Independence means rocketing debt – £100billion by the end of the 2020s – and high debt interest payments which eat up the SNPs meagre (0.5 per cent) annual rise in public spending and leave no additional money available to tackle poverty.
For years, the SNP have dined out on the myth that independence is the only route to a fair society.
But the nationalists have abandoned social justice in their headlong rush to abandon the UK. No one can now see independence as the route to social justice – it is the barrier to it.
As a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research has argued, the most effective means of reducing relative child poverty would be to combine a living wage and higher child benefit with an increase in the child element of tax credits.
According to research by the Resolution Foundation, the tax credits we introduced under the last Labour government reduced the number of children living in poverty in the UK by a quarter by 2004 and by nearly half by 2010. Since then, UK child poverty has risen to 4.1million kids and is projected to
rise to 5.2million in 2022. Gordon Brown will be discussing this issue during an appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today
If the Scottish Parliament wish to address child poverty, they have the power under the Scotland Act 2016 to top up tax credits.
If there is any doubt on that, I would support greater powers enabling the Parliament to act. What we must not do is allow thousands more vulnerable children who today need and deserve the best start in life to be condemned, through no fault of their own, to permanent poverty.