Current status: Answered by Shirley-Anne Somerville on 26 August 2024
To ask the Scottish Government what steps are being taken to provide targeted support for single parents, particularly those facing financial hardship.
As set out in the Scottish Government’s second Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, Best Start, Bright Futures, we remain fully committed to ensuring that all relevant action across government is focused on meeting the needs of the six priority families identified – including lone parent families. This will ensure that support is tailored and ultimately more effective in meeting the needs of families at risk of poverty.
Despite facing the most challenging budget settlement of devolution, we are committing over £3 billion this year to policies which tackle poverty and protect people, including single parents, as far as possible during the ongoing costs crisis. This includes investment in our game-changing Scottish Child Payment, funded early learning and childcare, providing free bus travel for over two million people, and offering free school meals to over 277,000 children.
This investment also includes making £7.8 million available to Local Authorities to mitigate the previous UK Government’s benefit cap as fully as possible through Discretionary Housing Payments. This supports around 2,300 families, of which it is estimated 74% are lone parent families.
Further to this wide ranging support for families, we continue to take action which is specifically targeted to lone parents. Since 2016 the Scottish Government has been providing core funding to One Parent Families Scotland (OPFS) through the Children, Young People and Families Early Intervention and Adult Learning and Empowering Communities Fund. OPFS will receive £371,700 for core funding in 2024-25, supporting their work with and for single parent families, providing support services that enable them to achieve their potential and help create lasting solutions to the poverty and barriers facing many single parents and their children.
We have also allocated £523,966 to One Parent Families Scotland in 2024-25 to support its specialist National Advice and Information Service and debt advice service, which aims to reduce child poverty, provide debt support to single parent households and increase their financial and family wellbeing.
In addition, we have continuously called upon the UK Government to abolish the two-child limit policy, which is estimated to impact almost 1 in 10 children in Scotland. Scottish Government analysis from February 2024 found that removing the two-child limit and reinstating the family element in Universal Credit would lift around 10,000 children in Scotland out of relative poverty in 2024-25.
The Scottish Government will continue to do all we can within our powers and will leave no stone unturned across government as we seek to eradicate child poverty. We remain committed to working with the UK Government to build on the action we have taken to date and to end child poverty once and for all.