Behind the curtain: Sturgeon rehearses conference speech at home
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon rehearses her SNP Campaign Conference speech from her home in Glasgow: Ms Sturgeon will use the speech, due to be broadcast today, to announce plans to double the payments in the flagship child benefit scheme in an attempt to ‘end the scandal’ of child poverty.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will today announce plans to double the payments in its flagship child benefit scheme in an attempt to “end the scandal” of child poverty.
The £10-a-week Scottish Child Payment (SCP) will rise to £20 in what the SNP hailed as a “major expansion” of the initiative.
However, it remains doubtful whether the doubling of the payment will meet the Scottish Government’s child poverty targets.
Both the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and IPPR Scotland have called on the benefit payment to be lifted to £40 a week.
Ms Sturgeon is expected to announce the key election pledge today, pointing out that the increase will benefit more than 400,000 children across 250,000 households.
The SNP leader will also unveil plans for “bridging payments” to low-income families with children aged between six and 16, who have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
At present, the SCP provides a payment to low-income families with children up to the age of six, but it is set to expand to all children under the age of 16 by the end of next year.
Ms Sturgeon will say that she wants to make ending child poverty a “national mission” for the next parliament.
She is expected to say: “It’s time to end the scandal of child poverty and this will help to do it. It is a down payment on what will be possible when we have the full powers over tax and social security that only independence can deliver.”
No definite date for the proposed increase has been announced, but the SNP said the payments will rise over the course of the next parliamentary term.
Ms Sturgeon will also explain that if re-elected, the SNP will provide the bridging payments – four quarterly instalments totalling £520 – to all low-income families with children in receipt of free school meals this year, and again in 2022.
Only last week, the IPPR Scotland think-tank said the Scottish Government should introduce a new social renewal supplement, paid for by higher rate taxpayers, to raise the SCP to £40 a week. Such an upsurge in the payment, it said, would help lift more than 50,000 children out of poverty.
It also proposed the introduction of lone parent and disability premiums to the SCP to help those families “further below an income floor”.
Last month, meanwhile, an analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that Scotland was on course to miss its interim child poverty target by 4 per cent, leaving 40,000 children trapped in poverty as a result.
It said that unless the payments were lifted by £30 for each child at a cost of around £380 million a year – the introduction of the SCP was still not enough to help meet that target.
The Scottish Government has set the interim target of having no more than 18 per cent of children living in relative poverty by the end of 2023-24, down from the current total which sees almost a quarter (24 per cent) of youngsters affected – the equivalent of around a quarter of a million children.
In a separate policy pledge, Deputy First Minister John Swinney is to tell the campaign conference that every school child in Scotland will be given a new computer if the SNP is elected.
Many pupils struggled to access online learning while schools were shut during lock down. A data exercise undertaken by ministers last year identified 77,000 Scots youngsters who did not have sufficient digital access.
Meanwhile, emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act this year showed concerned families went direct to ministers asking for help getting laptops and tablets, while concerns about other issues, such as youngsters being frozen out of software platforms like Microsoft Teams were also raised with ministers. The Scottish Government has funded the distribution of more than 63,000 devices such as ipads and Chromebooks through £25 million of funding.
Under the new programme, every school pupil in Scotland will be provided with an age appropriate laptop, Chromebook or tablet for use in school and at home – with each coming with a free internet connection. The £350 million scheme will also provide technical support and training for teachers.
Within the scheme, councils will be funded to improve schools’ electronic infrastructure, such as networking within schools and internet bandwidth.
Mr Swinney will tell the party in his speech to the conference: “We put tens of thousands of new laptops and Chromebooks in the hands of children learning at home during lockdown. But I want to do more.
“Covid has reinforced the need to break down the barriers to learning. A child cannot do their homework on mum or dad’s phone. And they cannot study online if they can’t connect to the internet. These tools are no longer luxuries. They are the basic building blocks of a good education.”
Scottish Conservative education spokesman Jamie Greene said: “The SNP left too many pupils without access to vital devices for learning at home over the last year. They ignored our calls for more support for online learning for months but it seems that now an election campaign is under way, they are willing to admit they didn’t do enough."
The SNP government has come under fire for its education performance. A report from Audit Scotland published showed the poverty-related attainment gap remains wide and existing inequalities have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.