Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 20 April 2022
The member must have anticipated that I was just about to talk about our second tackling child poverty delivery plan, which was published last month and was widely welcomed by stakeholders across Scotland who have a deep interest in tackling child poverty.
The plan sets out ambitious actions to provide immediate support to families who have been impacted by the crisis and to drive sustainable progress towards the child poverty targets that the Parliament has set, backed up by £113 million of additional investment this year. It includes delivering a new parental employability offer to help parents to access and make progress in employment, a new parental transition fund to tackle the financial barriers that parents face in accessing the labour market, and immediate steps to mitigate the UK Government’s benefit cap, thereby supporting up to 4,000 low-income households each year. That benefit cap was, of course, introduced by the Tories in coalition with the Liberal Democrats back in 2013.
We have already doubled our unique Scottish child payment to £20 per week from the start of this month, which immediately benefits around 104,000 children under the age of 6, and will now go even further. By the end of 2022, we will increase the payment to £25, at which point it will be made available to eligible children under the age of 16, providing £1,300 per child per year with support that is not available anywhere else in the UK.
That is not all. We are also taking wide-ranging action to support households and tackle the crisis. From this month, we have uprated eight social security payments by 6 per cent, which is double the rate that has been offered by the UK Government. As Alex Cole-Hamilton knows, disability benefits are administered by the Department for Work and Pensions on our behalf under agency agreements, so we were constrained by having to apply the same rate as the DWP, or 3.1 per cent.