Thoughts from Barnardo's Scotland Director, Martin Crewe, during Challenge Poverty Week:
Barnardo’s Scotland is the biggest children’s charity in Scotland. We support thousands of young people and families across a variety of services and projects. Despite this variation, one common theme arises again and again for the families we support: poverty.
During Challenge Poverty Week 2022, Barnardo’s is shining a spotlight on the experiences of our families and the urgent actions that we believe need to be taken at all levels of government to tackle poverty.
A lack of income underlies and compounds many of the challenges faced by our families, causing additional stress and poorer mental health.
Just this month, one of our services has heard from a mum with two young children who recently lost her job – the family has been forced to temporarily stay with a friend because they’ve run out of money for food and heating. Barnardo's has secured food vouchers for the family to prioritise money for the electric meter, to support them to stay and be warm within the family home.
Heartbreakingly this is no isolated case, it is just one of dozens of situations that we are coming across every week - and families shouldn’t be forced to rely on charity to afford their basic needs.
We know that the effect of living in poverty can have a huge negative impact on the life chances of young people, with children growing up in poverty more likely to have health problems, less likely to achieve good qualifications and more likely to be in the care system.
In fact, ‘The Promise’ to reform the care system for young people has recognised the impact of poverty, stating that “it is impossible to review Scotland’s ‘care system’ without properly considering the pervasive impact of poverty”. We know that children growing up in poverty are over-represented on the child protection register and are more likely to be removed from their families. Even pre-pandemic, our services in Barnardo’s reported an increase in families experiencing destitution, which has a significant impact on parental mental health and family relationships, as well as leading to social isolation and exclusion.
Our joint research report with the NSPCC – ‘Challenges from the Frontline’ – which was conducted just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and published in 2020, demonstrated the impact of austerity on the availability of support services to families in Scotland, with available support decreasing across the 2010s at the exact same time we witnessed an increasing need for help.
Now with inflation sky-rocketing in the current cost of living crisis, it’s no surprise that our services are seeing a level of need on an unprecedented scale.
As members of the End Child Poverty coalition, Barnardo’s Scotland has supported calls on the Scottish Government to both introduce and then increase the Scottish Child Payment. Most recently we have been supporting the campaign to double the bridging payments for the Scottish Child Payment for families who are still waiting for the full roll out of the benefit before the end of the year.
We’ve also been calling on the Scottish Government to re-introduce a Winter Support Fund. Last year the Winter Support Fund enabled Barnardo’s to give financial support to many families - we are already witnessing record requests for support this year and that will inevitably increase further as energy bills and food prices continue to soar throughout autumn and into Scotland’s cold winter. We hope the Scottish Government will provide similar winter funding this year to give families some much needed help and assurances over the coldest and darkest months ahead.
Every family across Scotland is faced with rising bills this winter and many are barely coping as it is. That’s why we will be providing significant and direct support from our own Barnardo’s funds on top of any money that comes from the Scottish Government.
Although we believe that we need an immediate, emergency response to meet the scale of the challenge caused by the cost-of-living crisis, particularly over the winter period, it’s also right that the long-term goal of the Scottish Government’s efforts to tackle child poverty are focused on prevention of the cause rather than treatment of the symptoms.
It's concerning that the latest Audit Scotland briefing on child poverty and Scotland’s progress towards meeting our child poverty targets suggest that action so far won’t be sufficient to meet the 2030 targets.
At Barnardo’s, we believe in the potential of every child – but for our young people living in poverty, it becomes much harder for that potential to be fulfilled. The current cost of living crisis is hitting hardest for those families who are already struggling, and that’s why we need urgent action now.
