Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Meeting date: Thursday, March 24, 2022

Official Report 1134KB pdf

Child Poverty

The next item of business is a statement by Shona Robison on “Best Start, Bright Futures: tackling child poverty delivery plan 2022-26”. The cabinet secretary’s statement will be followed by a debate, so there should be no interventions or interruptions during the statement.

The Scottish Government wants the best start and a bright future for all children. We want them to thrive and realise their potential, and we want Scotland to be the best place for them to grow up. For that to happen, we need to tackle the inequality and poverty that can too often blunt that potential.

There is no silver bullet to tackle child poverty. If there was, we would not be faced with the reality of one in four children living in poverty in Scotland today. No one actor can solve that on their own. A national mission to tackle child poverty is just that: a national and collective effort across society to deliver a bright future for our future generations.

The second tackling child poverty delivery plan is a plan to drive that effort and enable it to happen. Its actions recognise the contribution that all parts of society must make for all of Scotland. It is a road map towards delivering the ambitious statutory targets to significantly reduce child poverty by 2030 as laid out in the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017, which was unanimously passed by the Parliament.

When we published our first delivery plan in 2018, no one could have predicted what would happen in the intervening four years: a global pandemic; a cost of living crisis; the uncertainty and instability of Brexit; and now the illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has brought horror to a nation and a humanitarian crisis to the world.

We have also seen the United Kingdom Government’s removal of the £20 uplift to universal credit, which has taken £1,000 a year out of the pockets of low-income households, and the on-going impact of welfare cuts, including the benefit cap and the two-child limit. Given that context, a very significant risk to the delivery of our ambitions remains, particularly with a fixed budget and devolved powers, and the scale of the challenges has only increased.

Analysis that a number of organisations have done following the chancellor’s spring statement shows that, as the First Minister said earlier, there is no doubt that that was a missed opportunity to give families the immediate support that they need in the face of a cost of living crisis. The Resolution Foundation has predicted that, across the UK, a further 1.3 million people are set to fall into absolute poverty in the next year, including 500,000 children, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said that the chancellor’s lack of action means that he has cut the incomes of the poorest by £446. There is no doubt that the chancellor could and should have done much more to support those who have been hit the hardest.

Since 2018, we in the Scottish Government have made a real difference to families and laid strong foundations to deliver in the future. That includes through our new social security system, our massive expansion of funded early years learning and childcare, and our devolved employability services. Across the first three years—2018 to 2021—of our first tackling child poverty delivery plan, “Every child, every chance: The Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2018-22”, we invested almost £5.9 billion in support of low-income households. It is estimated that almost £2.18 billion of that directly benefited children.

Despite that investment, we know that more is needed. To tackle the cost of living crisis, we have already announced an additional package of measures, including the £150 payment to households. That is in addition to our continued investment of more than £120 million for our Scottish welfare fund and discretionary housing payments.

We are urgently considering how best to allocate the consequentials flowing from the announced increase to the household support fund. We found out about that funding only yesterday, and we will, of course, need to know the details before we make decisions.

Subject to Parliament’s approval, we will also increase the value of eight Scottish social security benefits, including our best start grants, by 6 per cent from April. That rise will ensure that those payments keep their real-terms value for families in the year ahead.

In the plan, our Government will go further in its support in order to provide the support that families need now and to drive progress towards the interim targets that have been set. We will double the game-changing Scottish child payment to £20 in just over a week and extend the payment to children who are under 16 by the end of this year. I am pleased to announce that we will go further still: we will increase its value again to £25 per week per child by the end of 2022. That is five times higher than the £5 payment that we were being asked to introduce less than five years ago. More than 400,000 children will be eligible, and it is expected that the payment will lift 50,000 children out of poverty in 2023-24. That is backed by investment of £225 million in 2022-23, rising to £445 million in 2023-24.

As a result of that increase, by the end of 2022, our package of five family benefits for low-income families will be worth more than £10,000 by the time that a family’s first child turns six, and will be worth £9,700 for second and subsequent children. That compares with under £1,800 for an eligible family’s first child in England and Wales, and under £1,300 for second and subsequent children. That is a difference of more than £8,200 for every eligible child born in Scotland.

That highlights the unparalleled support that is offered by the Government to support children in the early years. However, we will go further still. I can also announce that we will take immediate steps to mitigate the UK Government’s benefit cap as fully as we can within the scope of devolved powers, backed by up to £10 million each year. That will help to support thousands of the lowest-income families, including lone-parent families, which are disproportionately impacted by the cap.

The delivery plan has been enhanced and supported by working in partnership with the Scottish Green group. The action to mitigate the cap is a clear example of that and highlights the commitment in the Bute house agreement to work together to tackle inequality and poverty.

The Poverty and Inequality Commission advised that further investment through social security is needed to meet the interim targets, and I have already set out the measures that we will take. The commission has also been clear about the need to increase incomes from work and earnings and to reduce household costs, and that is what we will do. Therefore, I am also pleased to say that we will significantly strengthen our employment services to support parents to enter, sustain and progress in work.

Our ambition is to support up to 12,000 parents to enter and sustain employment as a result of action taken over the life of the plan. That will be backed by up to £81 million in 2022-23 alone and will include additional investment for our no one left behind approach with local government, which is one of our key partners in the delivery of the plan. That investment will focus on providing both holistic key-worker support to our six priority family types and access to training and skills. It will also enable local employability partnerships to create supported labour market opportunities.

We will also deliver a new challenge fund, backed by up to £2 million in 2022-23, to test innovative approaches to support parents from priority families into work, and we will deliver a brand new £15 million parental transition fund with our local government partners to tackle the financial barriers that parents face in entering the labour market. Families will be further supported by enhancement of our childcare offers and even greater action to tackle the digital divide in Scotland. To support the economic transformation that is needed, we will develop a shared vision for tackling child poverty in partnership with business and employers and will continue to drive progress on our commitment to be a fair work nation.

The plan also sets out steps to ensure that families are able to access an holistic package of support and entitlements when they need it. That includes investing £50 million of whole-family wellbeing funding in 2022-23, improving access to mental health services by investing £36 million over two years and investing £10 million to increase access to holistic advice services in the current session of Parliament.

We will also place the prioritisation of tackling child poverty at the heart of the affordable housing supply programme, continuing to invest to deliver 110,000 more affordable energy-efficient homes by 2032, and we will continue our work to tackle homelessness. We will also tackle fuel poverty for families by doubling our investment for the home energy Scotland loans and grants scheme to £42 million in 2022-23.

To enable us to break the cycle of poverty once and for all, we will also take actions to support the next generation to thrive. That includes continued investment in the Scottish attainment challenge and our young persons guarantee, and enhancing the total student support package over the next three years.

That gives a flavour of the significant and transformational actions that the Government will take forward though our delivery plan to give every child the best start and a bright future in Scotland. Our ambition, intention and policies will help us to achieve our ambitions for Scotland’s children and families, but we have to work differently to improve the outcomes from our investment and make the impact that is needed. That will not happen overnight. It is about delivering whole-system change that is focused on providing integrated services and opportunities for families and helping them to flourish. It is the national mission that we talk about—it is for all of society to take forward.

Our partners have expressed their commitment to that ambitious work. We will seek to identify a small number of early adopters in the first year of the plan, supporting that phased approach with up to £5 million from our tackling child poverty fund, which will enable robust evaluation and learning to support scaling up the approach over the life of the plan. We will also scale up our investment in innovative approaches, building on the learning of our social innovation partnership to test and accelerate approaches that bring together the support that families need to thrive.

In terms of reaching the interim targets, economic modelling cannot precisely account for what could happen, particularly in the context of the cost of living crisis, inflation rises and increasing international instability. However, current modelling, which we have published in full, projects that by 2023, the actions that we have taken to date, together with those that are set out in the plan, could help to deliver the lowest levels of child poverty in Scotland in the past 30 years and keep around 90,000 children out of poverty. Using current projections, we anticipate that, in 2023, more than 60,000 fewer children will live in relative poverty in comparison with when the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act was passed in 2017, with 17 per cent of children projected to live in relative poverty. We also anticipate that more than 50,000 fewer children will live in absolute poverty in comparison with 2017, with 16 per cent of children projected to live in absolute poverty in 2023.

I will be clear: we will not know for certain until data is available in 2025 whether we have met the targets. However, the Government will continue to consider further actions that may be required over the lifetime of the plan to achieve those targets, support families and break the cycle of poverty. That is why we have prioritised additional investment of more than £100 million in 2023-24 to provide immediate support to families and to drive forward the wider changes that are needed to address all three drivers of poverty reduction.

We want to ensure that everyone in Scotland has enough money to enable them to live with dignity, and that is why we have committed to begin work to deliver a minimum income guarantee for Scotland over the longer term. We cannot accept a future in which families have to choose between heating and eating and children are unable to access the essentials that they need to thrive. As a Parliament, we unanimously rejected that future in 2017 when we set our child poverty targets in statute, and we must reject it now.

We have already made such a difference together, and we must continue to do so. This is a plan for Scotland, and we must all work together to deliver on the national mission to end child poverty. The actions that I have set out today pave the way to 2030, putting the targets that have been set within our grasp. Our delivery plan establishes the action that is needed to deliver the best start and a bright future for families and children across Scotland, and I commend the plan to Parliament.