Kirk leaders attack Nationalists for failing to help Scotland’s poorest

THe Church of Scotland has accused the SNP government of abandoning the poor with its “disappointing” spending plans for the next three years.

In a strongly-worded attack on the government’s budget, the Rev Ian Galloway, convener of the Kirk’s Church and Society Council, states that finance secretary John Swinney failed to put forward measures to help Scotland’s poverty-ravaged communities.

The claims were backed by another senior Kirk figure, the Rev Ewan Aitken, who said it was difficult to see what the budget had delivered for the country’s most vulnerable families.

Mr Swinney’s spending review, which is worth about £30 billion every year, outlined spending measures in areas including health, housing and education, aimed at preventing social problems emerging.

But Mr Galloway argued that the government failed to deliver any measures to tackle soaring levels of inequality and accused the SNP of promoting economic growth at the expense of penioners and children becoming ever deeper mired in poverty.

Mr Aitken, secretary of the Church and Society Council, suggested that the SNP government had failed to react at a “time of crisis” in the country and warned that low-income families faced a cold winter ahead because of a sharp rise in fuel bills.

He said: “The government should always operate with a bias towards the poor and the first question it should be asking is how will this help the poor?

“It [the budget] was disappointing at a time of crisis, when we should be working even harder to tackle poverty.

“There were some good things in there such as the preventative spending measures, but there should have been more of a focus on investing in education and early years intervention on areas such as literacy.

“We wanted to see hard evidence that there was a focus on that and that the government was thinking about what would most help those at the poorest end of society.

“John Swinney has gone for spending on a lot of long-term areas, but there’s a challenge about what we do now on fuel poverty, for example, as people are going to be cold this winter.”

Scottish Labour’s finance spokesman Richard Baker welcomed the Kirk’s intervention and said that church ministers were right to want to see “more of a focus on tackling poverty”.

He said: “The Church of Scotland is right to highlight concerns about the impact of the budget on the most vulnerable, at a time of growing concerns about the pain caused by cuts to public services.

However, the Scottish Government claimed that “equity is at the heart” of Mr Swinney’s spending measures.

A spokeswoman said: “In the face of a £3.7bn cut to Scotland’s budget by Westminster we announced a record 25,000 Modern Apprenticeship places, increased spending on post-16 education, maintained free bus travel for older Scots, programmes to combat fuel poverty and retained the Council Tax freeze.”