Children in poverty don’t have time to wait for whatever 'change' actually means to Keir Starmer

The SNP will eradicate child poverty by 2030. It’s a bold claim. But that is the target, the legal obligation, and John Swinney’s guiding moral mission. But today, less than five years and one election to go to that deadline and with 18 years of governing Scotland already on the clock – most of that with the now first minister in charge of the public coffers – there are more than 10,000 children being housed (not homed) in temporary accommodation. A heartbreaking, record-breaking and illegal number that represents the size of a small town.  

And children without a home are by any definition poor. You don’t need official measures of relative or absolute poverty to know that a child living in a state of homelessness, of sleeping in a bed that isn’t theirs, of not having a space to read, write or even draw, is in an impoverished existence. That a child without a place to play, to make friends, to let their imagination run riot, or to just call their own is living a penurious life. That their life chances are cut, their health outcomes diminished, their opportunities stunted, and their aspirations limited.

Children growing up in poverty, however that is expressed, manifested or measured, cannot flourish and this leads to a future less certain for us all, with an emerging adult population suffering from the scars of a collective self-harm. Eliminating poverty, offering every child a place to call home, should be a national endeavour and not one – in a nation as rich as ours – that we should fall behind on.

And while the SNP can self-righteously point south where child poverty levels are, in parts, much higher – a subject to which we will return – it is the SNP government that is responsible for what happens here. And here and now is where its own targets are being missed. And while there is progress in children being lifted out of poverty as a consequence of government actually putting money directly into the pockets of the poor – who knew? – with the groundbreaking but also eye-wateringly expensive and arguably financially unsustainable Scottish Child Payment, which England is being urged to follow, regardless, the damning indictment is that the effects of poverty get hard wired at birth and the statistics show that for a baby’s first 12 months of life, poverty in Scotland is actually getting worse, not better.

Poverty is a pernicious policy problem that blights lives and robs children of a healthy, educated and well-rounded journey into adulthood. And I have spent my career immersed in the harsh consequences of it. 

From housing riddled with damp creating a social shame and an enforced isolation at one end, to chronic illness and child mortality at the other. From working parents queuing to use food banks to fill the empty bellies of children while they go hungry, to young girls missing school for lack of sanitary protection, decent clothes and basic toiletries to keep them clean. From women forced into prostitution and children exposed to all kinds of horrors of exploitation and abuse for pennies, to drug deaths, criminality and alcohol-immersed misery. Poverty is an insidious social disease leading to a lack of aspiration, depression, illness, a multitude of mental health problems and self-harms all spawned by an enforced hand-to-mouth existence. It is also a political choice.

And to its credit, when it comes to a welfare safety net the SNP has stood squarely behind a devolved social security system that has dignity and fairness baked in. The same cannot be said of this new UK Labour government, whose strategy to slash and burn the welfare bill will ironically only increase the need of the needy. And of course, that deserves both our attention and condemnation. 

But let’s not kid ourselves that everything is rosy here in Scotland. Scotland accounts for half of all the UK communities most dependent on out-of-work benefits. In parts of Glasgow, more than half of working-age adults receive unemployment-related benefits, the second-highest concentration of claimants in Britain. Almost half a million Scots are in receipt of a disability benefit, a figure that has risen by over half in just three years with a mental health or behavioural issue accounting for almost 40 per cent of all those getting either PIP or ADP. And we have a disproportionate number of young people not in education or work.

So, yes, the soaring welfare bill is as unsustainable here as it is elsewhere, and something has to be done to create a better future for all. But you don’t drive people back into work by making them poorer. You don’t cure the sick or make the disabled able-bodied by reducing benefits that enable them to function, and you don’t create jobs in the right places for them to be accessed simply by willing them to be there. I’m old enough to remember Norman Tebbit reportedly telling the unemployed to “get on their bike” and find work. That was a Tory government, and this is Labour. But when you have a chief secretary to the Treasury equating cuts to welfare to reducing his child’s pocket money to encourage them into a Saturday job then it forces you to do a double-take on who belongs to which party.

Alleviating poverty should be Labour’s bread and butter. It’s in their DNA. It’s the party that established the welfare state. But by its own clumsy design it managed to win no plaudits last week for what should have been headline-grabbing news when it increased both the national minimum and the living wage. A pay rise that goes straight into the pockets of the working poor. That’s 200,000 Scots better off.

But when the backdrop to good news is a series of savage cuts to the disabled, the sick and the old, then good news is quickly swallowed by the bad. That alone, at the very least, should prompt a swift change of heart and direction because poor children don’t have time to wait for whatever change actually means to Keir Starmer. And I’m pretty sure that the Scottish Labour MPs who I know did not stand for election on a pledge to balance the books on the backs of the poor.