Child poverty costs £395m a year for Glaswegians

CHILD POVERTY costs Scotland’s largest council almost £400 million a year, a new report has claimed.

Researchers calculated the impact of the problem as being £395 million annually in the Glasgow City Council area — the third highest in the UK.

The cost of child poverty was said to be highest in Birmingham, at an estimated £ 914 million a year, followed by Manchester, where it was put at £446 million a year.

Researchers put the cost of the problem in the Edinburgh City Council area at £156 million a year, with the impact in Fife said to be slightly higher at £158 million.

In North Lanarkshire child poverty was estimated to cost the council £170 million but in Perth and Kinross it was £33 million and in Stirling it was calculated to be £26 million.

An estimated 36,367 children in the Glasgow City Council area are living below the poverty line, according to the research.

As the f igures were revealed, John Dickie, head of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in Scotland, urged councils to do everything they could to “protect families in their area from poverty”.

Statistics from the Scottish Government last month revealed 710,000 people north of the border — including 150,000 children — were living in relative poverty in 2011-12.

A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said it was “not clear from the report how figures about projected costs were arrived at”.

However, he stressed child poverty was “well recognised by the council” and said: “Improvements are being made to the lives of those most affected by deprivation.”

CPAG commissioned experts at Loughborough University — who have already estimated the national cost of child poverty — to produce a breakdown of its financial impact on every local authority in the UK.

Across the UK, child poverty is said to cost £29 billion a year, including £15 billion spent on services to deal with the consequences of the problem.