Scots tycoon’s radical bid to end scourge of child poverty
ONE of Scotland’s richest men is taking the fight against child poverty into his own hands after growing “frustrated” by soaring rates of deprivation and a lack of progress to combat it.
Sir Tom Hunter is supporting a £7.5 million innovation fund aimed at trialling inventive approaches to tackling the problem and hopes to directly fund progressive ideas that would make a difference.
He said he was looking for hundreds of people like teacher Fiona McKenzie, who co-founded Centrestage which had pioneered a Scotland-wide drive to eradicate food poverty.
Sir Tom also mentioned David Duke a former homeless man who started the Street Soccer Scotland (SSS) to help transform the lives of socially disadvantaged adults and young people through sport.
The billionaire philanthropist said: “We have been working and looking at this for a long time and I suppose it this is born out of frustration and inspiration. My frustration is that we as a country spend a large amount of money on what is supposed to be a civil society. We are supposed to be helping those with a hand up.
“The frustration is that, with all that effort and all the people employed in supposedly doing the job and all the money we put at it, the child poverty statistics are stubbornly probably getting a wee bit worse. Of course, that’s frustrating.
“What I am looking for is to back people who are getting on with it and finding good outcomes for the people we are trying to help. I reckon there are hundreds of Fiona McKenzies and David Dukes all over Scotland. What we are looking for is to try different things and back different people and goodness. If we find things that work, then of course we will continue to back it.”
Child poverty in Scotland is predicted to soar with more than one in three youngsters set to be plunged below the breadline.
Official figures show that in each year between 2014 and 2017, one million people in Scotland were living in poverty, which was up slightly on previous years.
The latest statistics also show eight per cent of people are in “persistent poverty”. After housing costs, 24 per cent of children in Scotland were living in relative poverty in 2014/17, up one per cent on 2013/16. The innovation fund will get £2.5m over four years from the Hunter Foundation with £5m from the Scottish Government.