Elaine Stewart: Poverty is worse than it was in the 80s

It’s been at least 10 years since I’ve walked around Ayr’s high street. It’s nicer than I remembered, more pedestrianised, and the Christmas lights are on, but one thing remains the same: there are a lot of empty shopfronts. There’s a feeling a lot more could be going on. That’s a sentiment shared by Elaine Stewart, the new MP for the area, as she points out the lack of people as we walk to a nearby coffee shop. 

She’s lived in the Doon Valley all her life and has been a frequent commuter into Ayr. She’s telling me what she thinks the town and other areas need to do to rival its smaller neighbour Prestwick, which in the last two decades has developed a modern-day bustling high street, filled with restaurants, cafes, and small independent shops. In the months since winning the Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock seat, Stewart has been setting up her office and she tells me she would have liked one of the empty units we pass on the main street, but they are too expensive. It’s a problem that’s squeezing out many existing and potential business owners by the looks of things.  
The constituency hasn’t been Labour’s since 2015, despite historically being a Labour stronghold. Stewart admits that when she first threw her hat into the ring for election, she didn’t think she had “a hope in hell of winning”.

An overall Labour victory was expected, but the scale and the manner of victory, particularly in Scotland, surpassed the hopes of even the most optimistic Labour members.  

It’s seats like Stewart’s – which is large in area, holding urban, rural, coastal, and former mining communities – that perhaps weren’t expected to be lost by the SNP. But the message of improving people’s lives by improving infrastructure in small towns and villages, and rejuvenating Ayr’s town centre, proved to be a huge selling point. 

“From the January when I was selected, I spoke to about 9,000 people, right across the constituency and when I was on the doors the word ‘change’ was constantly being used by folk. It was really resonating,” she says.

The lack of opportunity, a lot of which is particularly prominent in the former mining communities Stewart serves, has created very high rates of poverty, and, even more alarmingly, child poverty. Figures published in the run-up to the general election by the End Child Poverty Coalition found that this constituency is the eighth worst for child poverty across the 59 constituencies areas in Scotland [boundary changes ahead of the general election reduced that to 57 Scottish constituencies]. The area had seen child poverty rise from 25.7 per cent in 2014/15 to 31.6 per cent in 2022/23.  

Stewart says that it was an exposure to abject poverty while working in the third sector that spurred on “a socialist side” to her politics. While her family didn’t have a lot when she was growing up, it wasn’t until she began working at her local adventure playground in her early 20s – funded as part of an ‘area of priority treatment’ – that she “fully began to understand what poverty and deprivation meant”.  

“The first night we opened, 70 teenagers turned up. And that’s when I realised, I didn’t quite understand the level of deprivation some people in my area were experiencing.  

“I remember taking a group to Belgium. It was £30 per child, and there was this wee family that wasn’t able to pay. We raised the money to be able to take the kids and it was my job to go and speak to the mum. When I chapped the door and she answered, I saw a house without carpets or wallpaper, which I’d never seen before.  

“Another time I took a group to Girvan, and there were two wee ones with three pairs of pants between them for the whole week. It wasn’t right and that’s where I started looking at how we make things better, not just for the kids, but for the families.” 

Stewart tells Holyrood that things did start to get better. There was a period in the 1990s and 2000s where things improved, but she says “the last 14 years have become so much worse – worse than it was in the 80s”. 

“Nobody, let alone kids, should be eating out of foodbanks. It’s processed foods, tins, and packets of noodles. That shouldn’t be happening in this day and age. In the area that I live and work in, there are no jobs – we are fourth-generation unemployed, and that’s where it stems from.  

“We don’t have children getting up and seeing their parents going to work every day.” 

The fourth-generation unemployment Stewart speaks about stems from the mining industry collapse. The last mine in the Doon Valley closed in 1978. Before then, the industry dominated the area, which was then a major hub in the UK, employing 3,000 miners at its peak, while creating thousands of other jobs in canteens, transport, electrics, and construction.  

Stewart reflects on how the area she lives in has changed. “Back then there was money, shops, there were 13 pubs at one time – there are just two now.” 

Her parents both worked at the mines; her father went down the pits and her mother worked in the canteen. She recalls their level of dedication to provide for their family.  

“My earliest memories are waking up in my gran’s and not remembering how I got there. They would wrap me up and carry me down before they went to bed. I would always wake up and my cousins would be there because gran was the caretaker for all of us. She had maybe 10 of us in the house at the one time.  

“You’d either be going straight from school to gran’s and staying, or you’d be going down at night when they were on day shift.” 

It was an attractive industry for many decades. Her grandfather, who was a journalist and a trade unionist in Motherwell, decided to move to the area. Despite its attraction, it didn’t come without its risks. “Within six months of coming to Dalmellington, he got killed in the pits. He had been caught between two buggies of coal and my gran was left with six kids.” 

She tells me it’s people like him, and the issues that are still blighting the community, from which her politics emanate. The social impact of the closure is well documented, but perhaps it can be lost on some just how profound that impact still is. 

While opportunities are scarce in the area, she paints a picture of a very broken system that affects so many aspects of people’s lives.  

“It’s £7.50 for a return ticket from Dalmellington to Ayr. I was speaking to the Department for Work and Pensions and the Job Centre earlier today, and I said if people are missing appointments there’s a good chance someone’s having to think ‘do I feed the kids or do I pay the bus fare to get in?’”  

Stewart stood on a message of “levelling up” towns like Dalmellington and I ask her how that would be done. She says it’s about bringing work back to these areas. The only new jobs that have become available in the last few years have been through a few care home openings.  

“It’s about allowing people in the coalfield areas to have the same parity of access to opportunities as everybody else. You just need to go down Prestwick High Street, it’s beautiful, with loads of niche shops, bustling. Come to Dalmellington, nothing.” 

After only five months in government, Labour has come in for some criticism around decisions it has made. One of the early decisions to scrap the universal Winter Fuel Payment has caused a great deal of friction with the Scottish Government, which has since confirmed it will reintroduce a universal payment from next year. 

But Stewart says it should be means tested. “I think we will be looking at how we can support people better and asking should people be means tested. But I think for people who are in the benefits system, if that’s where you are, then you probably don’t have the money to be means tested.” 

One benefit introduced by the Scottish Government which has been hailed as “a gamechanger” by some is the Scottish Child Payment. However, despite modest reductions in child poverty since its introduction in 2021, levels have remained high. Stewart doesn’t believe this is the kind of support that will move the needle.  

“We need to support people back into work, give them a purpose to get up in the morning. Years ago, we had the Future Job Fund, which supported people back to work, it gave them an uplift to give them a decent wage, and money to support childcare. That worked. 

“It’s all about getting people back into work. It helps their wellbeing, the economy, and most importantly their kids.” 

While Stewart has gripes with the Scottish Government, she blames the previous Conservative UK Government for the sheer level of poverty in her area. Even as an MP, she is still volunteering at least 10 hours a week at a local charity because things are so desperate.  

Sitting on the Scottish Affairs Committee, she tells me she has had a lot of time to speak to and question the Scottish Secretary. She says Ian Murray’s bi-monthly meetings with First Minister John Swinney have been really positive.  

“We can see things are starting to move, that relationship [between governments] is changing. And to be perfectly honest it’s got to change; they need to embed themselves as a partnership that’s working together for the people of Scotland.”