Child poverty 'gradually rising' before pandemic

Child poverty was "gradually rising" in Scotland before the Covid pandemic, according to new statistics.

The latest official government figures for the three-year period to March 2020 suggest that poverty overall had stabilised in Scotland.

But they show that more children had slipped below the poverty line.

It is estimated that 24% of children in Scotland - 240,000 each year - were living in relative poverty after housing costs.

Relative poverty is a measure of whether the lowest-income households are keeping pace with middle income households across the UK.

The report presents three-year averaged estimates of the proportion of people living in poverty.

It found little change in poverty levels for working-age adults (19%) and pensioners (14%).

However, the statistics suggest that after a long fall between the late nineties and the 2010s - from 32% in 1994-97 to 21% in 2010-13 - child poverty rates have been gradually rising again.

By March 2020, nearly a quarter million children were in poverty. Two thirds of them live in working households.

That problem is even worse in the UK as a whole, with more than four million children - or 31% - classed as living in poverty.

Yet this is only a glimpse of what Scotland was facing before Covid. The stats don't capture the impact of the pandemic, where those in lower-paid jobs and deprived communities were hit hardest.

Nor do they capture the impact of the new Scottish Child Payment introduced just last month. Families on benefits receive an extra £10 per child under six years old each week.

The Scottish government hopes the benefit will lift 30,000 children out of poverty and plans to roll it out for six to 16-year-olds by 2022.

That roll-out could be undermined, however, due to ongoing problems around the sharing of data between the DWP and Social Security Scotland, which administers new devolved benefits.

This issue is likely to be a primary focus for Westminster's Scottish Affairs Committee when it publishes its inquiry into welfare policy in Scotland this summer.