Meeting The Scottish Child Poverty Targets - Is It A Case Of Too Little, Too Late ?

6th July 2023

Tackling child poverty is a stated priority of the Scottish Government. Yet recent data has displayed little progress towards eradicating poverty and Scottish Government modelling now shows, with its current set of policies, the interim 2023/24 statutory targets are likely to be missed following a ‘deterioration in the macroeconomic situation'.

The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 set out Scotland's ambition through a set of child poverty targets,. This article looks at the data to understand why the progress hoped for has not been realised.

Why has there been little progress to date in tackling child poverty?

The most recent data shows that child poverty trend looks fairly flat (chart 1). The most recent period covers 2019-20 to 2021-22, and showed the number of children in poverty actually rising slightly compared to the previous period, matched by an increase in the total number of children in Scotland. This left the headline 2019-22[1] rate at 24%, the same as 2018-19 to 2020-21.

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