You could raise Scottish Child Payment if you wanted to, Mr Swinney

The Herald Scotland

01-05-2025

Hmmn. The trouble is, this jars with pretty much everything he and his ministers have said about it before. Just last summer Mr Swinney hailed 'our game-changing Scottish Child Payment', which had helped keep '100,000 children out of relative poverty'. It has been hiked several times before, with each increase explained as part of the drive to meet what Mr Swinney calls his 'top priority' – meeting the target of reducing relative child poverty to 10 per cent by 2030.
Child poverty is falling in Scotland while it rises in other parts of the UK largely because of this policy, a source of justified pride for ministers.
How strange then that just as the latest accounting shows an interim target has been significantly missed, the First Minister backs off raising the child payment any further.
Read more by Rebecca McQuillan
Campaigners are fed up and confused, and understandably so. They want to understand what Mr Swinney is basing his concerns on. After all, most recipients of the Scottish Child Payment (SCP) are in work, are they not? The Scottish Government's own analysis shows the child payment isn't putting people off getting jobs and campaigners are aware of none that suggests raising it further would do so, certainly not at a scale that would outweigh the benefits.
It's easy to overemphasise the impact that social welfare has on working rates. The effects depend on which benefits are raised and by how much, the nature of someone's work and their individual circumstances. The academic literature does not show that incremental benefit increases significantly impact working hours.
Anti-poverty organisations have been asking for the child payment to be increased over time to £40 from its current weekly level of £27.15. One told me that the idea this would stop people getting jobs was fanciful. Recipients are more likely to say the payment helps them overcome obstacles to work, by going towards transport, childcare costs, education or training. Many households are still reeling from the impact of years of inflation, and the inflation rate is still above the Bank of England's target.
The Scottish Government itself has always made clear it sees welfare benefits as critical to reducing poverty. Scottish ministers promise to start mitigating the two-child benefit cap next year and loudly attack the UK Government for reducing welfare benefits – but now, at the same time, are slamming the brakes on the SCP. Mixed messages indeed.
The IPPR think tank says 20,000 children would be lifted out of poverty if the SCP were set at £40 per week.
So why would Mr Swinney, who has staked his reputation on driving down want among low-income families, suggest limiting the most effective anti-poverty measure we have?
Find all articles in our Scotland's Forgotten Children series here
Cash, of course. Funding the SCP already costs the Scottish Government more than £450 million a year and the public finances are stretched to breaking point. Swing open the big iron safe under St Andrew's House and there's a cavernous emptiness. The UK Treasury is in the same impoverished state.
Perhaps it's not surprising that Mr Swinney doesn't want to put the financial argument front and centre since if he did, he'd have to parry endless questions about how he was finding the cash for road-building or civil service pay rises or arts funding but not child poverty.
But it's just a bit too convenient to suggest the benefit is a work disincentive. If you were really concerned it could eventually have that effect, there would be things you could do without freezing it. You could taper it down as a person's earnings rose. A more straightforward alternative would be to allow people who went into employment to continue claiming it for a period, so they could adjust.
All governments have a duty to use public funds responsibly, but there are few more responsible uses for our cash than this. Independent modelling suggests a rise to £40 in the SCP would cost £261m more. Money well spent: far too many children live in damp cold homes, miss out on the joy of trips and activities, and know what hunger feels like because there isn't enough money coming in. Lifting children out of poverty is a moral mission, but it's also the soundest of investments.
John Swinney during his interview with The Herald (Image: Duncan McGlynn) Poverty is wildly expensive. One of the underlying reasons for the UK's sluggish economic growth is poverty. Poverty is hugely costly to the NHS. Children who grow up with financial security do better at school and have better health throughout their lives. They work more. As Mr Swinney himself puts it, there is an 'economic and social imperative' to tackle child poverty.
The Herald and 23 anti-poverty organisations are calling for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted by the UK Government and that is an essential staging post on the route to eradicating child poverty. If Labour don't abolish it, they will face their own reckoning. But the target Mr Swinney talks about so much is Holyrood's and many of the levers lie in his hands.
Is there any realistic hope of reaching the 2030 target without substantial increases to the SCP? No, say campaigners. Employability schemes, expanded childcare, free school meals – all of these will have to be boosted further but even then it's very hard to see a route to success without a higher child payment.
Here is the danger: the target disappears down the plughole and the collective failure to tackle child poverty turns into a mutual blame game between SNP and Labour. What a sickening thought that is.
If Mr Swinney isn't going to raise this benefit any further, then he needs to explain how he is going to reach the 2030 target by alternative means. Otherwise people might suspect him of relying on optimism and crossed fingers.
Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on X at @BecMcQ and on Bluesky at @becmcq.bsky.social