The poverty plan looks like a bribe for silence

The Scottish Government and the First Minister personally have told us that 'ending' child poverty is their priority. Yesterday, the Scottish Government published its latest child poverty strategy. Today, you will barely find mention of it in the morning news. What is going on?

To understand it is worth looking at the actual proposals in the poverty strategy. This will not take long, as this document is entirely typical of recent Scottish Government strategy. It is virtually all made up of re-announcement of pre-existing actions, some rather tenuously linked to child poverty.

Much of the rest is made up either with political rhetoric (there are effectively short essays by both the First Minister and Cabinet Secretary) or jargon (“An enduring framework to drive progress”, “an intersectional approach that considers how different factors overlap”).

Some of the content seems predicated on a reader not thinking about it too much – part of this 'package' is a grant scheme where homeowners can apply for grants to support the cost of house upgrades. Few people in poverty will own their own homes, so they won't be eligible. Other claims you will probably believe were already delivered – the Scottish Government seems to have been rolling out universal childcare provision for a very long time now.

In terms of new content, the Scottish Government itself identifies four actions. One is to invest £64 million in the Tackling Child Poverty Fund. We are finding it quite difficult to identify exactly what that Fund is. There is an existing Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund and a Whole Family Wellbeing Fund, both of which have been presented as poverty eradication programmes.

But the former has given grants averaging £100,000 to local authorities, and the latter has given tens of thousands of pounds each to a small group of NGOs. This new funding appears to be directed at expanded childcare, grants to employers and a scheme to help 500 women in pregnancy.

Then there is £20 million for the aforementioned Whole Family Support Third Sector Delivery Fund, all of which will go to professional NGOs. There is a £30 million fund for colleges, which seems only tangentially related to poverty. And there is £9 million to mitigate a cut in housing allowance from Westminster.

It is quite difficult to work out what is new here, what is a continuation of the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan of 2018 or the Best Start, Bright Futures: Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan of 2022, what is pre-announced and what is an expansion (or simply a continuation) of an existing programme.

That is because, to echo a comment from Audit Scotland on the last plan, “It is challenging to definitively track spending on addressing child poverty”. That is a tactful way to say there is a lot of smoke and mirrors here. Another comment is even more to the point: “The Scottish Government does not collect or publish information on the proportion of spending on universal policies reaching low-income families.”

We know from experience that the deciding factors that alleviate poverty are the nature of the economy and the strength of universal services, along with housing costs. That there is no serious tracking or assessment of these issues raises questions about the seriousness.

Even at a macro level, this does not persuade. There are a variety of assessments of what increased proportion of total GDP needs to be spent to end poverty, and it varies by country. But the range is between about 0.5 per cent and about two per cent. By comparison, all identifiable new spending in this plan amounts to less than 0.05 per cent.

The Scottish Government has been telling us for more than a decade now that it is going to end child poverty. It hasn't; things have got worse. This is unsurprising since its approach is almost wholly based on creating grant funds with almost no structural reform steps taken at all. It is an approach which has failed, yet this new plan is a carbon copy of the approach of the last two.

There is absolutely no reason to believe this is going to have any great effect. Any impacts will be absolutely dwarfed by the likely economic impacts of Israel and the US's war on Iran. This plan is almost cynical in its lack of seriousness, and it has therefore inevitably been criticised.

Yet that criticism is polite and understated. Why? The key is to look at who ought to be criticising the government and who is actually getting the new money. It is very difficult not to see this as a cynical move to buy off critics with generous funding. The NGOs that should be shouting loudly now have just been given £20 million between them via the Whole Family Support Third Sector Delivery Fund.

There is a very good reason the First Minister wants us to suspend disbelief and “judge him in five years”. There is absolutely no chance this will work. We aim to finish each Daily Briefing with a solution, but you can't fix child poverty in a paragraph. What we can offer is this: Common Weal does not take money in return for silence.

If you support us with a donation, we will continue to call out bad, cynical policy for what it is.