Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2024
If Kevin Stewart and others will allow me, the way that I will approach this debate is by putting forward some of the things that we can do in the Scottish Parliament with its powers and the powers of the Scottish Government. It is right that we look at the issue that is in front of us today and what we can do to change things here.
A quarter of children in Scotland live in poverty. To go back to the Deputy First Minister’s point, there has been progress, but a quarter of all our children in Scotland live in poverty. We have not done enough, we have not moved fast enough, and we need to do more. Almost a quarter of a million children live in poverty, and that level has remained largely the same since the Scottish National Party came to power.
The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 requires the Government to ensure that fewer than 18 per cent of children are living in poverty by 2023-24 and that fewer than 10 per cent of children are living in poverty by 2030. However, we are not seeing anywhere near enough progress on that.
It appears that, like health and climate targets, child poverty targets are simply more vague goals that the SNP Government hopes to achieve rather than objectives that it is delivering. The SNP Government has the power to create new benefits. Although I welcome the action that the First Minister has mentioned, such as the Scottish child payment, that is not enough. Under the SNP Government, the number of households in temporary accommodation has hit a record high. In 2023, more than 15,000 households were in that situation. That represents an 8 per cent increase on the previous year. As my colleague Miles Briggs said in his intervention on the First Minister, what makes the situation even worse is that 9,860 children were recorded as being in temporary accommodation in Scotland. That in itself was an 8 per cent increase on the previous year.