Extra £5 would be timeous action

ON behalf of the Give Me Five campaign and the undersigned organisations we are writing to you, in advance of the draft 2019/ 20 budget, regarding the Scottish Gover nment’s new i nc ome supplement.

In a society that believes in justice and compassion, it cannot be right that one million people in Scotland – including 230,000 children – are currently living in the grip of poverty. We therefore welcome that the Scottish Government’s new Best Start Grant will be introduced before Christmas – which will help with the additional costs of having children and the reintroduction of payments for second and subsequent children. We also, in particular, strongly welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to using its new social security powers as a tool for tackling poverty, by introducing a new income supplement for families on low incomes.

As you will be aware, the Give Me Five campaign believes that topping up child benefit by £5 per week would potentially lift tens of thousands of children out of poverty.

Child benefit provides a stable and reliable source of income for families which is spent on children, helps hard-pressed families and prevents children from falling into poverty. As a non-means tested entitlement, it has a high take-up rate and is less expensive to administer, and we continue to believe that topping up child benefit would represent a most effective and impactful way of delivering the new income supplement.

Aside from the particular delivery mechanism, though, and while recognising that the Scottish Government is currently undertaking a process of evaluating different options for the supplement, we are seriously concerned that the stated timescale for delivering the income supplement – i.e. by 2022 is not reflective of the urgency with which it is required.

More and more children and their families will be pulled into poverty in the coming years – particularly as the freeze on working age benefits and the Universal Credit rollout continue to have an impact.

With our organisations witnessing each day the impact that poverty has on the lives and life chances of children and their families across Scotland, it is clear to us that families need this support much sooner than 2022. We therefore urge you to use the Budget to bring forward the introduction of the income supplement in recognition of the pressing need to both prevent and reduce poverty.

We recognise that each Budget involves making difficult choices about our society’s priorities and resources, and that bringing forward the delivery of the income supplement would involve a significant spending commitment this year.

But the ambitious poverty reduction targets set by the Child Poverty Act require equally ambitious – and timeous – action and investing money now to unlock families across Scotland from poverty does not, we believe, represent a difficult choice.

Children born into poverty today should not have to wait for four years to be freed from that poverty. Yours sincerely,

John Dickie, Peter Kelly, Satwat Rehman, Dr Sharon Wright, Grahame Smith, Mary Glasgow, Janis McDonald, Rev Dr Richard Frazer, Professor John McKendrick, Professor Stephen Sinclair, Marie Ward, SallyAnn Kelly, Honor Hania, Norman Kerr, David Liddell, Craig Samuel, Anna Ritchie-Allan, Hugh Foy, Tressa Burke, Ella Simpson