No evidence for Swinney’s claim that increasing the Child Payment will discourage work

At the end of April, John Swinney claimed that he wasn’t going to increase the Scottish Child Payment to the £40 per week that many are calling for because he believed that the current rate of £27.15 per week was “at the limits” not of the affordability of the Scottish Government but of the point where Swinney believed that it would discourage unemployed parents from taking up work.

In other words, he believes that going above £27.15 per week will result in poor parents not working and simply living on the benefits instead.

This is a testable hypothesis but in order to test it, we need to know how many households there are in Scotland that receive the Scottish Child Payment that contain no adult workers or pensioners. If Swinney is correct, then if the Payment is increased then that number should go up.

So shortly after Swinney made that statement, we submitted a Freedom of Information request asking for the number of households receiving the payment that also contained no workers or pensioners. We received a response this week saying that the Scottish Government couldn’t answer that question because they don’t gather that information as it isn’t required to determine eligibility for the social security.

In other words, John Swinney has refused to take an action that would lift 20,000 children out of poverty because of a belief about poor parents that he has no evidence to hold, has done no research to back up and is not gathering the data to determine even if he wanted to do that research.

There is evidence around this topic from places like studies of Universal Basic Income - another social security payment that is not dependent on work status and is often claimed to reduce the “incentive” to work. In almost all of those studies, especially the longer term ones, receipt of a UBI even many times greater than the proposed £40 per week Child Payment does not, on the whole, reduce the number of hours worked by recipients. In many cases, it gives part time and precarious workers the stability to risk finding a new full time job or to take on jobs that are more enjoyable and less stressful (chronic stress is a significant harm caused to children who grow up in poor households).

The only hook of evidence that can be lowered towards Swinney’s claim is that some UBI studies do indeed show a decrease in work hours for some parents - often mothers - with young children but these almost always show parents with demanding full time jobs reducing their hours to spend more time with their children rather than unemployed parents refusing to work at all.

Swinney claims he wants to eradicate child poverty in Scotland but is refusing to actually do so because he believes that parents have to be forced into working under the threat of impoverishing their children. He believes that poverty is a moral problem to be solved by blaming the poor, rather than an economic inequality problem solved by taxing the rich. He could be providing leadership to actually end poverty in Scotland, instead of choosing to make claims about poverty that he has no evidence to back up.