Ending period poverty is a real result for real people

Students across Scotland, including Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse’s young people in schools, colleges and universities, now have free sanitary products. They won’t know the indignity of having to make do with a chunk of toilet paper or a sock again.

With £5.2 million in Scottish Government funding, the initiative is the first in the world to make sanitary products freely available to all our students.

Periods. It might make some of us a bit uncomfortable to discuss them but they’re a part of everyday life for virtually every girl over the age of about 12 or 13.

On average, they will continue roughly every 28 days for the following 40 or even 50 years.

It gets expensive and girls have been losing days at school because they couldn’t afford sanitary products.

A report by Women for Independence found that one in five people with periods in Scotland are unable to afford the necessary products, and have been forced to use things like socks, toilet paper, and newspaper instead of pads.

So a number of people became involved in local campaigning here in South Lanarkshire. Several SNP councillors raised the issue within the council’s SNP group.

One great fighter is Councillor Katy Loudon, a fantastic woman who took the whole issue forward at South Lanarkshire Council via her involvement with Women for Independence.

She said: “When I was elected, several of us raised the issue within our council SNP group.

“We found it unacceptable that anyone in Scotland should be unable to access sanitary protection due to poverty, or other issues in their lives, and asked the education department to investigate the best way for us to provide access to free, accessible sanitary products for students.

“I was delighted by the subsequent announcements from the Scottish Government, and by the amount of attention and support that the issue of access to sanitary products has gathered from many different quarters.

“At SLC, a key guiding principle behind our commitment is the protection of students’ dignity and the avoidance of anxiety, embarrassment and stigma.

“We also have ongoing work to do around changing cultural norms about discussing periods.

“Our new employee menopause policy has similar guiding values, and I think it’s very important we continue to shine a light on what many once considered to be taboo issues, but which are crucial to women’s health and wellbeing.”

I am proud of that Scottish Government action.

It’s real result for real people.

In a recent survey by Young Scot, researchers found that around one in four students at school, college, or university struggle to obtain period products.

The survey of 2050 people found that 71 per cent had been forced to ask someone else for a tampon or pad, while 70 per cent said they had used toilet paper as an alternative. We just couldn’t live with the idea that girls were losing days at school because they couldn’t afford sanitary products.

Now we are making ‘period poverty’ a thing of the past.

As well as that, the Scottish Government has plans to go further, building on a successful pilot scheme in Aberdeen last year.

The Scottish Government also provided the charity, Fareshare, with over £500,000 to distribute free sanitary products to women on low incomes across the country, reaching an additional 18,800 people across Scotland.

This is a world-leading important and significant action, one that will be useful to every girl in our local schools and colleges and at the Hamilton campus of the University of Western Scotland.

I hope other governments, including the UK, will follow on the same path.