Dad: £20 child payment will help us eat
Single dad Paul Gallacher has to choose between food and heating every time his growing five-year-old daughter MollieMae needs new shoes or clothes.
It saddens him that he cannot give her everything he knows she deserves as he tries to find work as a trained chef.
But he says an extra £10 a week from the Scottish Child Payment would help the burden on his family finances.
It comes as Nicola Sturgeon is urged by 120 leading poverty campaigners to double the “lifeline” Scottish Child Payment to help desperate families. Paul said: “Before Covid it was tight. “We struggled from month to month on Universal Credit. If I had to get Mollie-Mae something like a new pair of shoes I had to cut back on something else like electricity. Christmas time is the worst time, trying to struggle to get her something for Christmas and put food on the table.. And electricity at this time of year will be £60-70 a week.”
But as a trained chef his biggest upset is not being able to provide her with the best nutrition.
Paul, 47, from Dailly, said: “It is hard to buy fresh food every single week.
“At the end of the month she is not getting healthy food, it is stuff out the freezer or packet foods which isn’t healthy. Fresh food just perishes far too easily, it is hard to store it and keep it good. I do bulk cooking to try to get us through but I can’t cook for a full month because of freezer space. I do what I can but sometimes I have to give her frozen chicken nuggets or sausage rolls which I don’t think is healthy.
“The Universal Credit £20 uplift helped but when it stops we will be away back to square one.
“As a single parent I will struggle financially very, very soon.”
Paul is sad his little girl has to miss out on holidays, day trips and little treats.
He said: “She had one of her wee friends down to play and she brought a wee interactive doll with her.
“Mollie-Mae asked to get that for her birthday but it was way out my price range. I couldn’t even buy her a doll.
“When it was really hot she asked for a slush puppy but I had to say no.
“Her wee face . . . she looked at me as if to say ‘you can’t afford even a pound for a slush puppy daddy?’. “It was sad but she accepts it.”
Paul would love to go back to work but had to turn down two job offers recently. One was for a delivery driver but he needed his own car and the other was for a job in Perth but he couldn’t afford the relocation fees. There were no benefits available to help him.
He is calling on the Scottish Government to extend the Scottish Child Payment to all children and double it to £20.
He said: “It shouldn’t stop when they go into Primary Two. It is the only way kids will be able to get a better start in life.”
SallyAnn Kelly, chief executive of Aberlour children’s charity, said one in four Scottish children are currently living in poverty.
She said: “Even before the pandemic struck the number of children living in poverty was growing. The pandemic made that situation worse and we are looking at rising child poverty.
“We welcome the Government’s commitment to having child poverty targets but we need them to go further and go faster because we think they need to do right by those children.
“They have agreed to extend it to all six to 16-year-olds by the end of 2022.
“They have also committed to bridging payments to the same value for families due to receive the benefit by the end of 2022 but there is a lack of clarity about when that is going to happen. It is a perfect storm where more and more families are suffering financially because of Covid, the £20 top-up money the UK Government gave to those receiving Universal Credit is likely to go and families who were relying on furlough payments will no longer be able to receive them and could lose their jobs. We need to use the powers we have got in this country to support the most vulnerable children in our society. These kids just can’t wait.
“Doubling the child payment would make a huge difference. It would take them from survival to thriving. Of children living in poverty 70 per cent of parents are in employment but not earning enough to keep their families. We would want to try to help the general public understand, when we talk about children living in poverty , it is not the case that they are from families where the parents choose not to work. Let’s do the right thing and lift these children out of poverty and give them the same chances and opportunities that all children should have.”