250,000 children still trapped in poverty despite three-year battle

Published on Saturday 8 November 2008 19:16

SCOTLAND has made no progress in its battle against child poverty over the past three years and a quarter of a million youngsters remained trapped on the bread line, an influential think tank will claim tomorrow.

The number of children living below the official breadline has flatlined north of the border since 2005, the report by the respected Joseph Rowntree Foundation will reveal.

Governments north and south of the border have committed to eradicating child poverty by 2020, an ambitious target that some campaigners fear may now be missed as the UK slides towards recession.

One in four children in Scotland remain below the official poverty line, a family income of 226 per week. Most of them live outside the traditional deprivation hotspots, such as Glasgow's East End, with many from low-income working households in rural neighbourhoods.

Researchers from Rowntree will tomorrow spell out their concerns over poverty in their biannual report card on Scotland's war on need.

They will stress that Scottish figures for child poverty dropped dramatically in the late 1990s and the first few years of this century, and are now a fifth lower than they were when Tony Blair came to power and made his pledge to wipe out the problem.

That drop was quicker than in some other parts of Britain, including Wales and the north of England. And the overall level remains substantially lower than the UK average of one in three.

But anti-poverty campaigners yesterday said the independent research proved Scotland could not afford to be complacent.

John Dickie, of Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, said: "The fact that one in four of our children is still officially recognised as living in poverty remains an absolute scandal. Half of all children in poverty live in families where someone already works and as the economic situation worsens even more families will be looking to a hopelessly inadequate benefit and tax credit safety net."

Dickie and other campaigners, including some close to Joseph Rowntree, now fear that the recession may make it difficult for Westminster to deliver on its core pledges, not least because much of its strategy on child poverty has been to get unemployed parents into work.

"There is a lot of work being done to prepare some people on benefits for jobs that may not be there," said Dickie. "That's why the priority for the UK Government must be to invest the 3bn needed to boost child benefit and tax credits for families in and out of work."

Scotland still has some of the worst levels of absolute poverty for children, with Glasgow's Yorkhill hospital reporting that as many as one in five of the youngsters it treats show signs of malnutrition.

Dickie stressed that most of the levers for fighting poverty where in the hands of the UK Government. He and other campaigners took heart from 1bn in tax credit and benefit improvements in recent budgets from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, which campaigners expect will give help nudge poverty figures down from their current plateau.

Donald Hirsh, a consultant who works for Rowntree, said there were also key areas where the Scottish Government could make an impact, including improvements in childcare.