What is outturn expenditure on measures in the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery plans?
ome of actions in the delivery plans are not only targeted at child poverty. For example, early learning and childcare is a universal service so whilst it will help reduce the cost of living for parents in poverty and for some help maximise earnings from paid work, it would be wrong to attribute the whole cost of the public service towards tackling poverty. Similarly, increases to the carer’s allowance in the first delivery plan will benefit households with children in poverty where there is a carer, but not all households with a carer will have children, nor be in poverty.
The Scottish Government, in their analysis of policies directed at children in poverty, exclude some policies, including early learning and childcare from their totals, as well as a number of other policies. Excluding these entirely feels like it will underestimate the government’s spend.
However, they include others such as the uplift to Carer’s Allowance which although it will help reduce poverty for some children, it is not targeted directly at doing so. Including these types of policies, where reducing child poverty is a secondary consideration of the policy, will overestimate the amount of spend the government has put towards tackling child poverty. Where possible, the Scottish Government have used data available on service use to determine how many children in, or at risk of, poverty are beneficiaries of the spend. In the absence of this information, they use poverty statistics to provide an estimate of the amount targeted at children. For example, for Carer’s Allowance, the total spend in 2023/24 is reported as £359.10. The statistic of children in poverty was 22% for 2020-23, and this proportion is used to produce an estimate of the spend on children in low income families (£79m). Whilst this estimate is perhaps more realistic (in that it doesn’t assume that all households who claim carer’s allowance have children) we can’t be confident that this is close to the correct amount.