Chamber and committees

Good morning to the panel and to the minister.

Thinking about the current childcare offer and the plans that were announced in relation to expansion, to what extent does the Government expect the childcare policy to reduce child poverty in time to meet the 2030 targets that were set through the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017?

I am interested in that analysis, because we have had a lot of discussion in committee about the need to have good data and to analyse exactly what has happened in relation to the expansion to 1,140 hours.

I am particularly interested in one and two-year-olds, particularly those who are care experienced and those who are in households where people are not in work. What depth will the research in relation to the one and two-year-old offer go into to better inform how we move forward?

I have a brief supplementary question on the uptake of the Scottish child payment. The cabinet secretary will recall that I asked the First Minister about the concern that 60,000 families might miss out on payments. He gave the guarantee that work was being undertaken to ensure that we reach as many families as possible. Will the cabinet secretary update the committee on the progress of that work?

I am interested in pulling together the various strands of our discussion to look at the cross-cutting nature of anti-poverty work across Government. How are you embedding those actions on child poverty across Government? I appreciate that that is a broad question, but it would be useful for committee members to have an overview, after which we can delve into the detail.

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is regarding levels of attainment in modern studies in the most recent Scottish Quality Authority exam results in Renfrewshire. (S6O-02518)

I am glad to hear the cabinet secretary’s answer; she knows how important modern studies is in teaching good citizenship and respectful debate. Young people and their teachers across Renfrewshire work extremely hard to achieve their results in the subject.

What would the cabinet secretary say to a colleague who was encouraging the denigration of young people’s exam results in order to attack a political opponent? Will she join me in condemning the actions of her colleagues in local Scottish National Party branches, council groups and even the Scottish Parliament who seem to believe that the life chances of pupils at Park Mains high school, which is an excellent school in my region, are fair game in desperate political attacks?

I will give way in a moment if Mr Doris will allow me to make a little more progress.

The Parliament unanimously backed the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017, which set legally binding targets to reduce the number of children experiencing the effects of poverty by 2030. In the past decade, however, 40,000 more children in Scotland have been pushed into poverty. Thirty-nine per cent of children from an ethnic minority household now live in relative poverty, and the percentage of babies in poverty has gone from 27 to 34 per cent. Mr Doris’s party has been in government, so I will give way to him if he has something to say in that regard.

I thank Bob Doris for bringing the debate to the chamber. There are few issues as pressing and important as tackling child poverty, and it should be the focus of far more of our time in the chamber and far more of our collective energies in working on the solutions to tackle it and all its root causes and facets. The life chances of our young people are crucial to how we thrive as a society and as a world, and it is clear to me that we need a change of approach at UK level and Scottish level to lift more children out of poverty.

I am proud that the previous UK Labour Government lifted 2 million children and pensioners out of poverty, including 200,000 children in Scotland alone, through fundamental reform of the social contract, introducing the national minimum wage and tax credits and revitalising support for families with children across the UK.

The next Labour Government will focus on doing the same: growing our economy, spreading wealth to all parts of the country and fixing the economic carnage that has been unleashed by the Tories. It will deliver a new deal for working people by strengthening workers’ rights, ending zero-hours contracts, delivering a proper living wage and ensuring that everyone is paid enough to live on without having to rely solely on benefits to supplement poverty wages—

I would like to make some progress.

The next Labour Government will fundamentally reform the universal credit system and introduce a child poverty strategy that will ensure that driving down child poverty runs through every aspect and policy area of Government, delivering a proper safety net for those who need it. It will ensure that people can pay their bills, particularly their energy bill, and not fall into a debilitating cycle of debt. I will come on to speak about debt in more detail, including the crucial work that is done by organisations such as Aberlour Child Care Trust in that regard.

I give way to Kevin Stewart.

The minister has said that a future Labour Government would do nothing to lift children out of poverty. Would she agree with me that raising the national minimum wage to the level of the living wage, banning zero-hours contracts, ensuring rights for workers from day 1, increasing sick pay and carrying out a fundamental reform of universal credit and the entire UK benefits system would fundamentally lift children out of poverty? It would lift children out of poverty just as the previous Labour Government lifted a million children out of poverty—200,000 of whom lived in Scotland.