Current status: Answered by Shirley-Anne Somerville on 25 March 2025
To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to reduce child poverty in South Lanarkshire.
Eradicating child poverty in Scotland is a national mission and the top priority for this Government.
The Scottish Budget for 2025-26 outlines wide-ranging investment to deliver progress on our national mission to eradicate child poverty. This includes investment in breakfast clubs, to expand the provision of free school meals to around 25,000 more children and to develop the systems to mitigate the two-child limit.
We are continuing to invest in direct support through social security, including the ‘game-changing’ Scottish Child Payment. Recently published statistics show that the Scottish Child Payment has provided over £1 billion of payments to eligible families since its launch in February 2021 to the end of December 2024, of which £62 million was issued to eligible families in South Lanarkshire. As of the end of December 2024 the families of more than 326,000 under 16’s across Scotland were actively benefiting from Scottish Child Payment, with over 19,600 of these within the South Lanarkshire local authority area.
Through our Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund, we awarded South Lanarkshire Council a total of £79,897 over 2023-24 and 2024-25 to support its ‘Pathways out of Poverty’ project. This project is working with families with a disabled child to test a holistic, person-centred model of support.
We are also supporting the Wise Group to deliver its relational mentoring programme, and in 2025-26 will make nearly £2.2 million available to allow ongoing delivery across six local authority areas, including South Lanarkshire. This investment will allow Wise Group to provide wraparound support to around 2,000 households in these areas.
In 2025-26, the Scottish Government continues to allocate over £3 billion a year to policies which tackle poverty and the cost of living for households.
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.