Slashed budgets can’t cut child poverty

The Scottish Government, by forcing councils to cut services, has made their promise impossible to keep

It is wise to judge a government not on what it says it will do but on what it has actually done with power.

Talk is cheap; politicians of every hue blithely make promises they cannot keep as they battle for election. What matters is what politicians do once they are in office. Do they keep the promises they made? Often, they do not.

The gap between political promise and policy delivery is almost always caused by a lack of money. It’s not that ministers don’t want to do as they pledged, it’s that circumstances prevent them.

The scottish government has promised to take decisive action to lift tens of thousands of children out of poverty. Ministers say a combination of measures has the potential to transform the lives of 30,000 children.

This is the sort of progressive stuff that the SNP are so adept at promoting. There is, however, a problem: the organisation that represents Scotland’s councils has warned that cuts to local authority budgets will scupper their ability to meet targets on reducing child poverty.

Since the SNP came to power at Holyrood in 2007, local authorities have been subject to the most swingeing budget cuts. A prolonged council tax freeze coupled with falling budgets has meant the loss of vital support services – often accessed by the poorest – across the country.

Nobody in the political mainstream would argue against trying to raise the living standards of children in poverty. Theirs is the sort of plight that unites left and right, nationalist and unionist.

Child poverty is a disgrace and, of course, it is right that this Scottish Government should make a priority of tackling it.

But if this is to be a serious effort then ministers must be more honest about the challenges and the cost of meeting them.

For more than a decade, the party preferred to cut services rather than allow local authorities to increase council tax. One doesn’t have to be an expert in the field of child poverty to see how government rhetoric on the matter has been desperately undermined by the reality of local authority funding.

A realistic debate on properly tackling child poverty must have room for debate about income tax rates and about current government priorities.

Could an MSP dare moot tax rises to help the poorest without being screamed down? Could another suggest the refocus – from rich to poor – on the benefits currently offered by the Scottish Government without being accused of the greatest malevolence?

The current government approach of identifying the problem and then financially undermining efforts to tackle it is simply not good enough.