‘Child Poverty and the Housing Emergency‘ highlights that delivering social homes as a key intervention to ending child poverty in Scotland.
Key summary
- This report sets out clear evidence that Scotland’s housing emergency and child poverty are linked. The First Minister has made a commitment to eradicate child poverty in Scotland. This cannot be done without addressing the housing emergency and improving access to safe, secure and affordable housing.
- Social housing supply is a key structural solution in addressing child poverty. If the Scottish Government are serious about their plans to eradicate child poverty, they must make social housing delivery a bigger priority.
- 19% of children are living in poverty pre-housing costs but compared to 24% after housing costs. Meaning 50,000 children are driven into poverty by high housing costs.
- The private rented sector is an expensive and often inappropriate option for low-income households, including those with children. More social homes need
to be supplied to allow households trapped in poverty in this sector to move into a more affordable home.
- Households with children are often trapped in Temporary Accommodation (TA) for years at a time, due to the lack of larger social homes for them to move into. TA is extremely expensive for families with members who are in employment and can result in necessary benefits (such as the Scottish Child Payment) being lost. Therefore, TA can act as a poverty trap as a result.
- The Scottish Government’s Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan recognises the importance of housing as an intervention to reduce child poverty, however the housing measures in the plan simply aren’t ambitious enough to meet ever higher levels of need and the targets for social house building are not being met.
- The Housing Bill does not address the need to increase the supply of much needed social homes across Scotland and ignores the 10,000 children trapped in temporary homeless accommodation.
- Although the Scottish Child Payment (SCP) is a welcome intervention, one policy alone cannot create the significant structural change to address the scale of the child poverty in Scotland and evidence suggests that public debt reform is vital in eradicating the issue.
- Priority family types, such as children in minority ethic families, or lone parent families, are identified by the Scottish Government as being most vulnerable to child poverty. However, there is limited analysis of how child poverty levers (for 4 example social housing) differ for each priority family type and there is no evidence of an intersectional analysis.
