Hansard

The Scottish Government has published the latest annual progress report on child poverty, which provides an update on progress towards Scotland’s ambitious child poverty targets and on implementing our second tackling child poverty delivery plan, “Best Start, Bright Futures”. This final report against that delivery plan not only sets out the wide-ranging action that has been taken in the past year, but offers a moment of reflection on all that has been achieved in the past four years and since the Scottish Parliament set in statute a shared ambition to tackle the scourge of child poverty in our country in 2017.

First, on progress against the targets, the latest child poverty data, which was published in March, reflected recent action by the Department for Work and Pensions to improve poverty statistics from 2020 onwards. That includes making a link to benefits data so that the statistics more accurately account for income from social security.

That latest data shows that 21 per cent of Scottish children were living in relative poverty in 2024-25, with rates having been revised to 16 per cent in 2023-24—the year of Scotland’s interim target—and standing substantially below the UK average. It is important to note that the Department for Work and Pensions will continue to make changes to poverty statistics in the coming years. Although that creates uncertainty in the short term, once the DWP’s work is complete, it will help all of us get a clearer picture of poverty and the impact of our action in Scotland.

I want to look next at delivery in 2025-26. Against a cost of living crisis, continued Westminster austerity and a volatile international situation, the Scottish Government invested more than £3.1 billion in support targeted at low-income households last year, with spend benefiting children rising to almost £1.5 billion. In other words, spend targeted towards children is almost three times higher than it was in 2018-19, having risen by more than £960 million each year over that time. That has enabled ongoing investment in key measures such as our Scottish child payment, which it is estimated will keep 50,000 children out of relative poverty this year. It has allowed us to make free school meals available to more than 360,000 pupils, saving £450 a year for families who take them every day, and to mitigate the United Kingdom Government’s benefit cap, which has the potential to support more than 9,000 children.

It has also allowed us to go even further. For example, we have launched our £3 million bright start breakfast fund, which has created almost 9,000 breakfast club places and provides firm foundations for our new national breakfast club offer. We doubled housing acquisition funding to £80 million, in a move estimated to take between 600 and 800 children out of temporary accommodation. We further empowered our partners by expanding our fairer funding approach, giving 51 third sector organisations multiyear funding to deliver essential services and action on child poverty. As a result of the UK Government’s long overdue decision to scrap the two-child limit, we reinvested money previously committed to mitigation to provide immediate support to families struggling with the cost of living over the winter months.

On our continued focus on delivery and prioritisation of action on child poverty, the report published today details nearly 100 actions that, since 2022, have been completed or are delivering at scale, including more than doubling the value of the Scottish child payment and expanding the payment to all eligible children under the age of 16. The actions also include further expansion of the provision of free school meals and investment in our extra time partnership with the Scottish Football Association, which provides free breakfast and after-school and holiday club places to around 5,000 children. That particular action is making a real difference to families, day in, day out, and is improving children’s lives and outcomes.

I cannot talk about the past year without acknowledging the publication of the UK Government’s delayed child poverty strategy. Although it included the long-overdue decision to end the two-child limit, which has lifted a weight from the shoulders of families across Scotland, the strategy overall represents a missed opportunity to deliver action at the scale that is needed. With the conscious decisions to keep the benefit cap and continue the freeze on local housing allowance rates, the UK Government is knowingly continuing to push thousands into poverty. We will continue to mitigate those cuts for families by investing more than £159 million this year, but we should not have to paper over the cracks left by UK Government policies. That is why we will continue to push for UK ministers to scrap their proposed cuts to the universal credit health element, scrap the benefit cap, end austerity and work in close partnership with us to match our investment and, most important, our ambition.

We are ambitious. In March, I updated members in the chamber on our plans to drive further progress on child poverty in Scotland through our new delivery plan, “Bringing Hope, Building Futures”. Since then, we have wasted no time in taking forward the actions that we committed ourselves to. In just a few months, we have allocated £19 million to local employability partnerships and regional transport partnerships to help improve the availability and affordability of transport for parents and tackle the barriers to work, enabling a wide range of ambitious action that responds to local need.

We have launched our whole family support third sector delivery fund, which seeks to deliver new and enhanced support for families. The fund has received more than 80 ambitious bids from third sector organisations and partnerships; those bids are being assessed, and we will give an update on the awards in the coming weeks.

We have also made a further £8.7 million in discretionary housing payments available to local authorities to help mitigate the impact of the UK Government's local housing allowance freeze. That action is forecast to benefit up to 31,000 children this year, with families already seeing the benefit of that support.

Our delivery plan commits to substantive action over this parliamentary session, from our multiyear funding commitment to devolved employability services and delivering a new national breakfast club offer to investing a record £4.1 billion over the next four years as part of a wider investment of up to £4.9 billion in affordable homes. Together with the steps that we have taken to date, it is estimated that policies in our delivery plan will keep 100,000 children out of relative poverty this year.

However, we are not stopping there. We have heard loud and clear the call that further action is needed, and that is exactly what we are committed to. The Government has come back refreshed and even more determined to deliver for families; to ensure that essential food in our supermarkets is affordable; to introduce a £2 nationwide cap on bus fares to lower the cost of people’s commute; to deliver on more apprenticeships; and to commence a review of employability services in the first 100 days of this session of Parliament. Critically, we have also committed to delivering a transformational national expansion of childcare support to every child in our country from nine months old to the end of primary school by the end of this session of Parliament.

Over the past eight years, the Government has delivered life-changing policies, which is why child poverty in Scotland is lower than the UK average. In that time, our evidence base has grown, thanks in large part to the families and partners whom we have worked with. We have heard and responded to calls from families, child poverty stakeholders, the Poverty and Inequality Commission, Opposition parties and many others, including calls to expand and improve access to childcare, deliver holistic family support, secure funding for the third sector and tackle public debt. We have taken action that is making and will continue to make a real difference to families.

However, many of the policies that we are investing in are not captured in our income-based targets. That can lead to the debate and calls for action being skewed towards increasing social security, even when other policies lead to direct savings for families or drive systemic change across our public services. That is why I confirm today our intention to undertake a review of the types of targets that we use to measure our impact on child poverty. We need to review the targets to ensure that our approach is grounded in the best available evidence, continues to drive the right actions and supports sustained long-term progress for children and families. We need to know what makes the most difference for families.

The review will enable us to use the considerable evidence that we have generated and work with partners to explore how we can use targets to drive focus and action where it is most needed and, as a result, take a balanced approach that focuses on prevention, immediate support and longer-term outcomes that are right for families. I look forward to working constructively with members from across the chamber to inform the review.

This Government remains unequivocally committed to eradicating child poverty and driving meaningful change for families. Our action to date, our new delivery plan published in March and the ambitious commitments on which this Government was elected are testament to that. We have already made great progress in Scotland, and we will continue to go further to ensure that no child’s life is limited by poverty. Supporting families with the cost of living and eradicating child poverty will be the defining mission of this Government, and we are committed to working across the chamber and across Scotland to deliver on our shared mission.