Truss and Sunak – when will you start taking Perth poverty seriously?

Today the tour of Conservative Party members by the two candidates vying to become prime minister arrives in Perth for a hustings.

If Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are lucky they’ll take the chance to see a bit of Perth and Kinross while they’re here; take in the scenery, the bustling towns and the amazing produce.

Many people think of this area, where I live too, as a prosperous place with a brilliant quality of life. Obviously for many that’s true but for far too many it is not.

Look carefully and you would see that in this area one in five children live in poverty.

That’s around 5,000 children, equivalent to the population of Scone.

This rate had been steadily rising prior to the pandemic and mainly fell in the most recent figures because of the £20 uplift to Universal Credit during the pandemic.

A lifeline that was cut in late 2021 by the government that Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss were part of.

And immediate warning signs are flashing all over the area.

Broke Not Broken, a foodbank in Kinross, provided 32 food parcels in May 2019. By May 2021 this had risen to 82. By May 2022 it was 185. A near-six times increase.

And the more than doubling between 2021 and 2022 reflects the massive cut to universal credit in late 2021.

It’s also worth noting that this is in May, before the impacts of the spikes in energy prices will have been felt and when heating costs should be lower.

Like the council area as a whole Kinross is, on average, less deprived than the average community in Scotland.

Yet it has seen a near six-fold increase in what is euphemistically called “emergency food provision” – more simply, hunger.

These candidates for prime minister need to recognise that UK Government decisions have played a role in this.

The withering of the social security system over the last decade has brought the cost-of-living crisis screaming into households across the UK, including here.

And as a minimum they need to double the support available to low income households facing terrifying jumps in electricity and heating bills.

But it isn’t just the responsibility of national politicians to tackle poverty in their area.

Councils can, and must, play a vital role in driving down poverty in their area.

They can also do much more to support and co-ordinate with the third sector who are often best placed to understand our communities and the people that live in them.

Almost every politician in the country – from the council chamber in Perth to the Commons in London – thinks we could, and should, have a stronger economy where more people can thrive.

But that won’t come about by ignoring the reality that many people in our communities face.

In a country, and community as wealthy as ours it cannot be right that people are hungry and face being cold over the winter.

If fixing that isn’t the most important job of our new prime minister, or indeed the council and Scottish Government, I don’t know what is.

• Chris Birt is associate director for Scotland at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.