Child Poverty - It Shouldn't Happen Here

I was shocked to hear the news today that there are 3.5 million children living in poverty in the UK.  And the figures are set to soar in the coming years. 

Today Save the Children has published its report ‘Child Poverty in the UK in 2012: It Shouldn’t Happen Here’, which has found that the UK’s poorest children are bearing the brunt of the recession. 

The report is based on a survey of parents and children, and I welcome the opportunity to expose the voices which are so often hidden from the debate which rages over the economy.  One of the most telling things which it has exposed is the extent to which children are aware of financial hardship. 

The Coalition Government says it is committed to eradicating child poverty by 2020, but it’s difficult to see the evidence of this when figures like these are revealed. 

I’m pleased to see children and families getting a voice through this report, but it just shows the impact which austerity measures are having.  It’s difficult to believe that children in the UK are going to school hungry, without adequate clothing, every day.  We must do all we can to help those without a voice. 

That’s why I support the proposals for not just a minimum wage, but a living wage.  I welcome the consultation into the Living Wage (Scotland) Bill and look forward to contributing to this in the next few weeks.

Is anyone asking ‘Who is my neighbour?’ in the independence referendum debate?

 A week is certainly a long time in politics.

I was on the radio last week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b0195lv1 Good Morning Scotland – 2hr12mins into the show) talking about the question of Scottish independence (an issue I should say the Church of Scotland has not and will not be taking sides on!).

My main points were:

• This is an issue that is beyond politics and concerns the whole Scottish people, so it cannot be left to politicians alone, nor should we be focussing on process questions as the important ones.
• We should be asking  what kind of society do we want to live in? What is the vision that we want as a kind of society for all the people of Scotland to live in relationship with all its neighbours, both near and far.
• Will change or status quo make any difference to the really important thinks, such as child poverty.
• In the debate, politicians need to be informed by the reality of people’s lives on the streets, otherwise it will be an impoverished process.  It will be enriched by involving all of Scotland’s people in a debate about the values that we want, and how we can reduce gross inequality.

I would be very interested to hear from blog readers what their take of last week’s events has been.

Child Poverty and the growing distance between ambition and reality

Headline news today was the publication of an Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report Child and Working-Age Poverty from 2010 to 2010.

The IFS research says that child poverty rates are set to increase substantially, despite the Government’s child poverty strategy which sets targets for reducing child poverty.

We are members of the End Child Poverty campaign in Scotland. A spokesperson for the coalition of campaign groups, charities, faith groups and trade unions in Scotland said:

"This analysis by the IFS shows that the new Universal Credit being introduced by the UK government cannot reverse the impact of massive cuts to welfare benefits, rising inflation, stagnating wages and higher unemployment. In a rich country that already has shamefully high child poverty levels, this news is devastating. If allowed to happen, it will reverse the progress made over the past decade and set us back to the rapidly rising child poverty rates of the 1980s and 1990s."

We are calling on the UK Government to take immediate steps to reduce child poverty if it is going to stand any chance of honouring the commitments made in the Coalition Agreement.

The group is also called on the Scottish Government to do more to ensure the ambitions set out in its child poverty strategy are supported by its budget decisions.

The importance of giving children the best start in life is underlined by our report from 2009 on Growing Up in Scotland. 

Scottish Government – September 2011 Spending Review

Today John Swinney MSP made a statement in Holyrood on the Scottish Government’s Spending Review.

Now I’m not a financial expert and it is far too much detail to take in straight away, so here is my first gut reaction.

What I think is interesting

In his statement Mr Swinney also talked about how bold he wanted to be in terms of preventative spending. In 2011 the General Assembly urged the Government to consider the opportunities created for young people by adopting a preventative spending model when setting education budgets. Support for Family Nurse Partnerships and commitment to a Reducing Reoffending Change Fund are exciting developments.

It is also important to recognise the increase in the Scottish Living Wage to £7.20 per hour. The Church of Scotland supports the Living Wage as one way to help tackle in-work poverty.

The aspiration of the Government to care for the earth, through prioritising a move towards a low carbon economy, is to be welcomed. More investment in renewable energy so we can play our part in global efforts to properly steward resources is also welcome.

The announcement of £3million for new work to tackle sectarianism is also an important way the Government can enhance and complement the work that we are doing in Churches and communities across Scotland.

Issues of fuel poverty have hit the headlines recently and we are pleased to see that the Government has responded to this growing need with several programmes intended to tackle fuel poverty. It is to be hoped that the Government will take action to ensure that these funds are accessible to people in the private rented sector.

What I am sorry not to see in there

There seems to me no substantive discussion of poverty. I sincerely hope that the omission of strategies and initiatives specifically to tackle poverty are not a sign that the Government is abandoning its commitments to work to help those in our society in greatest need.



Poverty is a real problem for a huge proportion of people in Scotland, yet this crucial statement about the future direction of Government funding for the next three years does not address it seriously as a problem.

By having a ‘relentless focus on economic growth’ (their words) is the Government suggesting that they won’t be focusing on anti-poverty work?

This looks as though the Scottish Government is avoiding some of the difficult questions of inequality and the distribution of wealth in Scotland today. It is not enough simply to create wealth through economic growth and be blind to the consequences. We have to be far more sensitive to how wealth is distributed and the destructive impact greater wealth can have on communities and the environment.

For instance, talking about growing Scotland’s transport infrastructure through supporting a new Forth bridge and the Aberdeen bypass does little to tackle the growing carbon emissions from the transport sector.

In 2010 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland called on the Government to recognise the destructive impact of inequality on the wellbeing of all, the disproportionate impact of cuts in services on the poorest, and therefore to poverty proof all budget decisions.

The focus of budgets and spending reviews should not just be a list of financial announcements but demonstrating a deep understanding that the economy is there to serve society, and not the other way around.

Reflecting on the Poverty Truth Commission

If George Osborne wants to explore with any seriousness what would give a hint of reality to his assertion that “we are all in this together”, he could not have done better than attend the closing session of Scotland’s Poverty Truth Commission on Saturday afternoon in Glasgow City Chambers. At the beginning of the Commission, two years ago, before a gathering of four hundred witnesses, a number of people with direct experience of poverty set out the challenge that their experiences have an essential contribution to make if we are serious as a society about tackling poverty. Also present were a number of people of the kind that we think of as having real influence, from the world of politics, the media, academic life, the police, business, and the Church. The outcome was the forging of a partnership between those with the experience of poverty and those with the influence. Together over the past two years they have wrestled with the need for change, and together they have taken, by way of an example of that need, the cause of kinship carers to Parliament in search of a little more justice for some of the people whose voluntary effort already goes way beyond anything the government might conceive. A big society already exists – big hearted, and at a big cost to those involved.


There are two questions that might be asked as Scotland’s Poverty Truth Commission reached its final session. What has been achieved, and what has been begun?

So what has been achieved? Recently I was asked to speak in Germany about the Church of Scotland’s work in our poorest communities. At the end the local mayor said: ‘Very good, but you have not told us how to end poverty.’ Neither has the Poverty Truth Commission. Child poverty figures are once again on the rise, and despite claims that the cuts programme is fair, all the indications are that once again the poorest among us are already being hit the hardest. Inequality is rooted in our society in ways that are hugely resistant to change, and only action and resolve from all of us together can make that happen.

Yet the Commission has brought change which may yet prove of lasting significance. It has demonstrated that with due attention paid to process, meeting style, appropriate support and acute listening, the many and varied gifts of people who have learned about poverty the hard way can be brought to bear as part of the solution. The learning that has made this possible is now available to be built on in other settings.
It has also provided evidence of the lie that is at the heart of the rhetoric about benefit fraud. Churches across the UK managed to extract an apology from Lord Freud when the Chancellor lumped together figures for error in the system with those for fraud and made the issue appear three times its actual size. After spending most of my adult life working in and around some of our poorest communities, I have met some people who are good at playing the system, even illegally. However they are few in comparison to the people who lead frugal, disciplined lives on amounts that many of us would find it hard to envisage existing on. The Commission has given a platform to some of the yearning and aspiration that exists in people who our society has failed, and demonstrated that they do not need to be portrayed in the ways that sadly prevail without much opposition.

Saturday's closing session presented a series of challenges that we ignore at our peril.

Too much of the way we have tried to deal with poverty has treated those most directly involved as objects, rather than those with the skills and experience to shape our response. In regeneration initiatives, little of the resources invested – other than the physical building of houses – stays in the poorest communities. It is time for a change, and as the Poverty Truth Commission is all too aware, that has only just begun.

UK Government breaks the law on Child Poverty Act?

The long-awaited UK child poverty strategy is to be published before the UK Parliament breaks for Easter recess today. This document will lay out how the UK Government, alongside Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and local government counterparts, will reach the targets of eradicating child poverty by 2020.

This week it has emerged that the Child Poverty Action Group has written to senior Government ministers criticising the late arrival of the strategy, which should have been published by 25 March 2011. They've already missed that deadline, but the Government has assured MPs that the strategy will be published before the recess.

It is not just the date of release that the Government is dragging its heels on. The 2010 Act requires a commission to be set up, whose role includes giving advice on the writing of the UK strategy. DWP minister Maria Miller, recently wrote that "our plans for establishing a Commission will be set out in the Child Poverty Strategy, to be published shortly." This is the wrong way round! The independent commission was intended to inform the writing of the strategy, and to scrutinise the proposals, not to be set up after the strategy has been published.

I hope that this, along with Save the Children's recent concern that the recent UK Budget announcement failed to address child poverty, isn't an indication of this issue dropping further down the list of priorities of our government. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats supported the Child Poverty Act when they were in opposition: so what is causing this reticence to comply now?
To take the challenge of tackling child poverty in this country seriously, the UK Government needs to be serious about implementing this law. I wait with interest for their response.

The Child Benefit Conundrum

Economic recessions have the consequence of pressuring governments into implementing austerity measures that sometimes produce contradictory results. This has clearly been the case for Chancellor George Osborne in the proposed measures to end child benefit after 2013 for families in which at least 1 earner pays 40% tax. The proposed measure has had the unforeseen effect of having some families with joint incomes way above the threshold remaining legally entitled to the benefit, whilst other families with only one salary above the threshold loosing the benefit. The Coalition Government will undoubtedly tinker with the proposed measure to make its effects less contradictory, but what is really at stake is the principle of universality.


Social benefits are intended to alleviate poverty and to soften the sharp edges of capitalism. Making some social benefits universal makes sure that all people get them. It is a simple way of ensuring that all mothers receive financial support without the hassle of forms and means-testing which may be overly complicated and inefficient. In the case of child benefit, this support costs the tax payer £11 billion a year and has been taken up by practically every mother in the UK.

Although some might suggest that the principle of universality is irrelevant in a financial crisis, I think exactly the opposite. Universal benefits send a very clear measure of what is valued within a society. In this case, a universal child benefit states that we are valuing our children, our future. It also states that we value the choice that families might make in deciding whether one family member can afford to stay at home to look after the children. Since it costs close to £200,000 to bring up a child parents must not be penalised by opting to remain at home to raise their children. Finally an attack on the universality of child benefits changes the concept of what we have been entitled to as citizens and residents of this country since WWII. This should not be done just as a cost-cutting measure and without due consultation.

The social price our children will pay

As public spending cuts loom and the news present us with huge quantities of information about the impact of those cuts I am convinced that our children will be seriously affected.


According to the Scottish Government 21 % of children in Scotland live in poverty. As the Coalition Government forges ahead on an ideological stand to reduce the deficit at record-breaking speed, services will get cut, people will be made redundant and many more children will face life within a jobless household.

Neither children nor the unemployed pay taxes, but a social price will be paid by both; for children this will be at school. Not all children arrive on an equal standing to primary school. Poverty breeds educational under-achievement. Scotland is understandably proud of its educational system but influential studies have noted the chronic under-achievement of children from the poorest families. Children from more advantaged households significantly outperform children from less advantaged homes and the gap increases as they grow up. There is a national commitment through the Child Poverty Act 2010 to eradicate child poverty by 2020. Will this commitment be scrapped as a result of the cuts?

The Church of Scotland has had a long commitment towards eliminating child poverty in Scotland and is in full support of The Better Odds at School campaign to be launched today by Save the Children. The campaign proposes to address the under-achievement gap by investing in extra resources for schools to support children in poverty. These resources are not called for in isolation, but as part of a strategy that targets under-achievement from early years onwards and that recognises the need to support parents in helping their children achieve their full educational potential. We need campaigns and actions like these to prevent our children from becoming collateral damage of the spending review.

Growing up in Scotland

THE number of children living in poverty in Scotland is totally unacceptable.


According to Save the Children today, 95,000 young people, almost 10 percent of all children in Scotland, are living with families that have less than £33-a-day to spend. The poorest families in Scotland are on average £113-a-week short of enough money to cover essential costs.

A year ago this week, we launched our Growing up in Scotland Report at Holyrood and presented the full report at last year’s General Assembly highlighting this issue. Poverty as this level questions our status as an advanced society.We will continue to campaign and to lobby parliamentarians north and south of the border to act to end child poverty.

In my parish in the Gorbals I see real human suffering because of poverty that grinds down the human soul and prevents people from believing that they matter. The news also released today in the Social Attitudes survey that only a minority of people in the UK think we should seriously address issues of inequality fills me with dread for the future.
Yet our politicians can take a powerful moral lead on this issue and whoever is in charge of running the UK and Scotland in 2010 will have the power to prevent poverty from blighting the lives of thousands of families everywhere and restore our claim to be an inclusive society.

Where does child poverty sit in our priorities?

I am in the Ruhr area of Germany for a consultation on child poverty, as part of an international consulting group with people from Brazil, Argentina, USA, Indonesia, the Philippines, Rumania, Hungary, Holland and Italy. Here we have the church in an affluent part of the world exposing its work to an extraordinary group of people including some from very difficult contexts. It is a great privilege to be here, and to be reminded that we in Scotland are connected to the rest of the world both in creativity and in facing up to real problems in our society. For us there is no option but to put the ending of child poverty at the top of our list of priorities. Currently, though, we are falling behind the targets we have set. Have a look at some of the statistics.

Credits
Photograph by RM London.










CreditsPhotograph by RM London