Politicians and campaigners seize on Scottish poverty projections

The Scottish Government has launched a poverty-tackling strategy on the back of a Child Poverty Action Group report that 50,000-100,000 more children could end up below the breadline by 2020 as a consequence of UK tax and benefit policies.

Health minister Nicola Sturgeon said the strategy would involve advising households on benefit changes and on finding work, as well as placing an emphasis on children's educational attainment, health and housing.

Current figures suggest that 80,000 children from working families are living below the breadline in ‘relative poverty’ – where household income is less than 60% of the average. For a couple with two children that means living on below £20,500 a year.

Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland used figures from the Institute of Fiscal Studies to arrive at the conclusion that between 50,000 and 100,000 more children would be living in poverty by 2020.

Responding to claims that UK policies would rive up child poverty, a spokeswoman for the UK Government's Department for Work and Pensions told the BBC: "Our welfare reforms will transform the lives of some of the poorest and most disadvantaged in our society, with Universal Credit making three million households better off and lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.”

The child poverty debate follows the launch of a campaign earlier this month aimed at highlighting the "humanitarian crisis" caused by poverty in Scotland.

The Scotland's Outlook campaign, led by a group of major Scottish charities, claimed hundreds of thousands of people were being "battered" by welfare reforms, stagnant wages, rising utility bills, higher living costs and job insecurity.

It claimed more than 870,000 people in Scotland were living in poverty, with a fifth of children in Scotland living below the breadline and 23,000 people having turned to food banks in the past six months.