Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said at PMQs this week that since the SNP came to power in Holyrood, the number of children in poverty has increased in Scotland.
“Since the SNP came to power, there are 30,000 more children in poverty in Scotland,” Starmer told the House on July 24.
Evaluation
By one measure of child poverty Starmer is correct, but by other commonly used measures he is wrong.
The facts
There are different ways of measuring poverty. The Scottish Government tracks both absolute and relative poverty, and it records these figures both before and after housing costs are taken into account.
A household is counted as being in absolute poverty if it makes less than 60% of the median income in the country as measured in the year ending March 2011 and adjusted for inflation. Relative poverty is less than 60% of the contemporary median income in any year considered.
The SNP have been in power in Holyrood since May 2007.
In the year ending March 2023, the latest for which data is available, the number of children in relative poverty before housing costs was 240,000.
That is an increase of 30,000 from the year ending March 2007, the year before the SNP took charge.
However, by other measures the level of change in child poverty has been different.
The number of children in relative poverty after housing costs increased by a smaller amount than Starmer claimed – by 10,000 to 260,000 between March 2007 and March 2023.
The levels according to the absolute poverty measure are down 20,000 both before and after housing costs to 190,000 and 230,000 respectively.
Starmer also did not mention the Scottish Child Payment, a weekly payment of £26.70 introduced by the SNP, provided to lower income families for each child in their care.
Professor Danny Dorling of Oxford University has said that the payment may have caused the largest fall in child poverty anywhere in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
