Scottish Child Payment policy must always follow the evidence

Eighteen months after Common Weal discovered that John Swinney’s claim that the Scottish Child Payment would discourage parents from working, new research shows that the opposite is true.

Scotland appears to have a real problem with the way that it does policy development that we need to talk about with increasing urgency. You may already have a sense of this from my recent articles on Burnham’s approach to developing a National Care Service or even our recent briefing on John Swinney’s approach to pensions in an independent Scotland but there’s another story from last year that appears to have returned with a crescendo.

Back in April 2025, Swinney made a statement to the press stating that he was opposed to proposals from childrens’ charities to increase the rate of the Scottish Child Payment – one of Scotland’s recently devolved social security payments made to poorer families with young children – because he believed that an increased rate would discourage parents from entering or re-entering the workforce.

When this news came out we immediately submitted a Freedom of Information request to ask what evidence they had to back this statement up. Specifically, we asked what proportion of households receiving the SCP were households that contained no working adults. If we have that data point, then we can track it with time. If the SCP increases and then so does the number of workless recipient households, then we can correlate the two effects and see how increasing benefits decreases the incentive to work.

The Government responded saying that they weren’t even tracking this data. They had no evidence to suggest that a small or substantial rise in SCP would lead to people not working nor that the SCP was “at the limit” of what it could be before such an effect occurred.

This is an unacceptable way to announce polices. It should not be that the First Minister can just arbitrarily decide whether or not something is true.

It may well have been that a rise in SCP would incentivise parents to not work. It may well be that adding £10 per week would start to cause this effect. It may well not show up until parents are given £10,000 per week.

But this is a testable hypothesis. Data on this can be gathered. In this case, it wasn’t.

Until now.

“In short, there was no evidence of negative impact on the labour market when taken as a whole.”

This week, the Scottish Government quietly published the results of a study into the increase in SCP that did happen in April 2025 and then again in April 2026. I say quietly published because while it appeared on the Government’s webpage of new publications, it did not appear in their daily 4pm bulletin of the stories they think are important to push and nor have I seen any news reporting on the topic (literally the only other person I could find who appeared to have spotted this report between publication and me writing this was Prof. John Robertson who runs the Talking Up Scotland blog).

As with a story I did on a report into the potential for a Scottish Minimum Income Standard in May 2025 which was similarly published without fanfare and then almost completely ignored (though we may soon get some kind of Minimum Income for Artists out of it). This is once again a time when a fairly substantial story has been noticed not because the Government actively wanted it to be noticed or because the mainstream media were employing enough people that they could dedicate some of them to make sure that the stories were noticed but because a handful of activists happened to be paying attention to the front page of a website that receives dozens of new reports each day, and they just happened to be doing so at the hour or so when the story was visible before it got pushed off the front page and buried forever. This is not good for Government scrutiny.

But back to the report and the results of the study. In short, it found precisely the opposite of the First Minister’s evidence-free claim and found a result much more in line with virtually every other similar study into the work impacts of out-of-work social security.

In short, there was no evidence of negative impact on the labour market when taken as a whole. The vast majority of recipients (around 70%) felt that receiving the SCP had no impact positive or negative on their life (which is not to say that it didn’t, merely that they didn’t feel like they had to change their behaviour as a result of getting the payment. It may well be that they would have had to cut back on spending if the payment was stopped so even where they felt it didn’t have a positive impact, it may have been preventing a negative one).

Only around 4% of respondents said that they or their partner had stopped work or reduced their work as a result of the payment. Once again, and in challenge to the FM’s claim, this is not necessarily a negative impact. A parent reducing their overtime to spend more time with their child is not necessarily a bad thing for the child even if it is for John Swinney’s GDP spreadsheet.

On the other hand, 3% DID unambiguously spend more time with their child during a longer parental leave (which still counts as being “in work”), 4% found that the payment let them start work where they previously weren’t working, 7% were enabled to work longer hours (perhaps the SCP helped with childcare costs) and 14% used the SCP to help with costs associated with their work (e.g. travel or clothing). The report also notes gender differences where women were more likely to decrease their work hours (even when they were the main earner) while men were more likely to increase their work hours and that the way this plays out in single-parent households may indicate that lone mothers face “unmeasured barriers not faced by lone fathers”.

In aggregate though, it does appear that an increase to the SCP has no overall impact on the labour market. Judged by these figures, it appears that the payment may help support some people to work more than they otherwise would have (again, it is possible that the payment helps with childcare costs and other additional costs that come with juggling work and raising a child). Any moment where there is a risk that the payment could reduce work appears to be limited to very specific circumstances such as when taking on more work pushes someone above the threshold for earning Universal Credit and thus causing them to be ineligible for the SCP as well. This means that it is means-testing of social security that is having a negative impact rather than the amount of benefit being received and should be another case in point for more universalism such as via a Universal Basic Income that supports parents regardless of their other or changing circumstances.

Most importantly though is the lesson that this report should send to the Government not just in this policy but in policy-making as a whole. Evidence matters. It should not be acceptable to make statements that affect the lives of people who are, on the whole, already financially vulnerable without having evidenced cause to do so. Certainly, scapegoating poor parents as being lazy and prone to shirking work the moment they are no longer compelled by the threat of destitution to do so (the fundamental implication beneath Swinney’s comment) is not compatible with the stated goal from the same politician to eliminate child poverty.

Public policy must always follow the evidence. Politicians must stop making claims that they cannot back up with evidence. It is beyond me that this is a lesson that still needs to be learned.