Does the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan deliver?

The Scottish Government has published its final Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan before the child poverty reduction targets come due in 2030.

This Delivery Plan comes against a challenging backdrop, to say the least.

Firstly, the targets themselves are challenging. The 2023/24 interim targets were missed, some by a larger margin than others. Revised statistics will be published later this month, but these are unlikely to close the gap. Doing so requires action at scale, as our previous modelling has shown.

But there is also an election around the corner. The new government will want to take its own decisions around how to meet the targets, rather than inheriting a set of commitments from the previous administration.

This is particularly problematic given the state of the public finances. Additional spend on child poverty measures will require either tax rises or reductions elsewhere in an already-stretched budget. The challenge will only grow over the next few years, as the new government contends with a higher-than-planned public sector pay bill and pressures on the health and social care systems.

What is in the Plan?

In this context, the Plan defers most decisions until after the election. Instead of a delivery plan as such, we are given a “framework”, which identifies key areas of focus for addressing the drivers of child poverty. The framework is based on the three drivers identified in the first delivery plan – relating to earnings, benefits, and living costs – while adding a broader theme on “supporting children and families to thrive”.

The Plan does contain some concrete actions for 2026-27. Most of these come from the £50m Whole Family Support Package and the £61.5m Tackling Child Poverty Fund. These are the two pots of money announced in the Budget – along with, ahem, statutory uprating of the Scottish Child Payment – which the Scottish Government claims are absorbing the savings it receives from not having to mitigate the two-child limit.

It is difficult to pass judgement on the policies that will be funded from these pots. Details are light, and many of the policies are small – thirteen out of nineteen are worth £5m or less. Meanwhile, some of the larger items, such as the £20m Whole Family Support Third Sector Delivery Fund, are themselves funds which could end up being used in different ways.

Some of the policies raise further question marks. For example, the Scottish Government has committed to use Discretionary Housing Payments to mitigate the impact of the UK Government’s freeze to Local Housing Allowances, which has increased shortfalls between rents and incomes. Since most households experiencing a shortfall do not have children, a relatively small number of children will be affected by the mitigation policy. This does not mean that the policy is a bad one, but including it in the Plan does continue a trend of badging policies as child poverty measures when they are not targeted at children in poverty.

Other actions have a clearer rationale. For example, the evidence shows that inadequacies in transport and childcare often act as barriers to parents entering work or undertaking training, so funding for these services makes sense. Meanwhile the promise to provide multi-year grants for advice services answers a persistent request from third-sector organisations, who can otherwise struggle to plan ahead.

Another measure announced in the Budget was the increase to the Scottish Child Payment for children under 1, who will receive £40 per week instead of the basic rate of £28.20 from 2027-28. The SFC expect that around 12,000 children will receive the premium at a cost of £7 million each year once fully rolled out. As we have said before, there is good reason for targeting families with babies, even if a relatively small number of people are directly affected.

The Plan also includes updated modelling. The modelling estimates that the measures to date and those announced in the Plan will keep 110,000 children out of relative poverty in 2030/31. However, it projects that this will not be enough to meet the targets, while noting that it cannot account for the decisions of the next government. The modelling has also been expanded to include additional information on the uncertainty surrounding the model, along with hypothetical scenarios in which benefit take-up and employment outcomes improve.

Also accompanying the Plan is a qualitative impact assessment, in line with materials provided with previous plans. This analysis provides a clear, evidence-based link-up between the themes in the framework and the specific actions in the Plan – although as noted the details are light on many of these actions.

Does the Plan deliver?

The Plan does not set out a route to meeting the targets. While it contains some real actions, the gap to the targets remains wide, with the heavy lifting pushed back to the final few years before 2030. As a reminder, these are legally binding targets that were unanimously agreed across all parties in the Scottish Parliament.

The Scottish Government has justified taking a “framework” approach to the delivery plan due to the upcoming election. While it may not be ideal to publish a five-year plan right before a new government is formed, Scottish elections are held at predictable intervals. A critic might ask why the process had not been better choreographed from the beginning – and whether a new framework is really what’s needed at such a late stage.

New poverty statistics will be published on 26 March, with improvements to the way that benefit income is measured. These will give us a clearer picture on where we sit in relation to the targets – stay tuned for our reaction. Going forward, we’ll also be monitoring the annual child poverty progress reports, which is presumably where the new government will have to set out how it actually plans to meet the targets.