Local elections: End Child Poverty Scotland manifesto and single parent families

• Local authorities must ensure that all their powers are used to their fullest to tackle child poverty.  We urge all council candidates to commit to ensuring their local authority:  
  • Establishes clear outcomes and indicators to measure progress for tackling child poverty at the local level.  
  • Commits to placing reducing child poverty at the heart of their investments in COVID-19 recovery and tackling the cost of living.  
  • Ensures responsibility for tackling child poverty is held at a senior management strategic level to ensure that all policy decisions are taken with a child poverty lens.  
  • Allocates sufficient resources to planning to tackle child poverty. This must ensure that there is an evidence base, that people with experience of poverty play a key role in the development of policy, and that monitoring and evaluation of the actions taken can be carried out.  
  • Commits to sharing best practice with other local authorities across Scotland in relation to both planning and reporting on action to tackle child poverty.  

Local authorities have a key role to play by ensuring provision of genuinely affordable, accessible family housing. Ahead of the election we urge candidates to commit to:  

• Ensuring an adequate supply of affordable, secure, good quality family housing.  
• Exploring and implementing initiatives to bring down rents to a genuinely affordable level in both the social and private rented sectors.  
• Expanding and improving early person-centred advice and advocacy services to prevent homelessness, including providing income maximisation work.  

While employment should be a route out of poverty, this is not always the case. 68% of children living in poverty in Scotland live in a household where someone is in paid employment. Women; Black and minority ethnic people; disabled people; and single parents – 90% of whom are women – are less likely to be in good quality employment, and they face a particularly high risk of poverty. 

Council candidates should support embedding fair employment practices within their own organisation and in the wider community by:  

• Driving improvements in the quality of work for local authority employees, including addressing low pay, particularly in female dominated sectors such as social care and childcare.  

• Introducing greater conditionality for companies from whom they procure services with requirements for them to increase the quality of work they offer, including improving the support they provide to those with caring responsibilities, enabling flexible working and addressing low pay  
• Better integrating gender equality and women’s experiences of employment into labour market and economic development policymaking, with action to address occupational segregation and the undervaluation of “women’s work”.  
• Ensuring that all economic development investment is assessed for its potential impact on child poverty. The jobs that are created should be high quality and paid at least the real Living Wage. Infrastructure spend should focus on removing the childcare, transport, education and employment barrier families on low incomes face.  
• Engaging with Close the Gap’s employer accreditation programme, Equally Safe at Work. 
• Working with Local Employability Partnerships to implement an improved employability offer to parents identified as a priority in the Child Poverty Delivery Plan – providing tailored provision through a dedicated keyworker and support to access childcare and transport as well as to training, education and sustainable well- paid jobs.  

We urge council candidates to commit to building on existing action to ensure a dignified cash-first approach to income crises replaces the distribution of emergency food as the prime response to income crisis. This should include:  

• Ensuring a same day decision and payment of Crisis Grants from the Scottish Welfare Fund, to ensure that people in crisis are not forced to use a food bank.  

• Ensuring information on the Scottish Welfare Fund on the local authority’s website is up-to-date, easy to find and understand and available in formats and languages that reflect the communities the local authority serves. Information on local authority websites is too often out of date, difficult to understand or incorrect.  
• Ensuring that all agencies that refer to food banks are supported to explore all other options, including the Scottish Welfare Fund, before resorting to a food bank referral. The expectation should be for agencies to make active referrals to advice and support services, rather than simply signpost people in crisis.  
• Considering ways of providing payments to migrant families whose status limits their rights to social security benefits and who are at risk of destitution, and ensure policies are in place to do so. 13  
• Prioritising embedding welfare rights and income maximisation work across public facing services. Local authorities have a key role to play in funding, delivering and partnering to provide welfare rights income maximisation services to ensure all families are getting the cash support they are entitled to.  
• Use discretionary housing payments (DHPs) to mitigate the benefit cap.  

To improve access to affordable, flexible and accessible childcare candidates should commit to:  

• Ensuring that the local delivery of the 1140 hours of funded childcare is sufficiently flexible to meet parents’ needs.  
• Ensuring that parents of disabled children have access to affordable and appropriate childcare.  
• Recognising childcare as vital infrastructure investment in local economic development strategies.  
• Supporting the development of wraparound childcare and expansion of early learning and childcare to one-and-two-year-olds as early priorities.  
• Ensuring that out of school and holiday care is affordable and available.  

Candidates should commit to:  

• Implementing automatic payment of school clothing grants and delivery of free school meal entitlement to remove barriers to application and boost uptake.  
• Investing in advice workers in schools to ensure families are accessing all the financial support they are entitled to. 
• Going further on roll out of free healthy school meals, beyond the statutory requirement and rolling out to P6s and P7s as soon as possible. Beyond this further action should be taken, in the first instance extending entitlement to all pupils in families in receipt of Universal Credit or equivalent legacy benefits.  
• Designating a senior leader within education services who will champion Cost of the School Day work and take strategic responsibility for it  
• Ensuring a regular review of action to tackle the cost of the school day is built into planning cycles and review or audit processes.  

• Ensuring local governance structures are in place to enable progress to be monitored and impact to be understood.  

Candidates should commit to:  

• Implementing automatic payment of school clothing grants and delivery of free school meal entitlement to remove barriers to application and boost uptake.  
• Investing in advice workers in schools to ensure families are accessing all the financial support they are entitled to. 
• Going further on roll out of free healthy school meals, beyond the statutory requirement and rolling out to P6s and P7s as soon as possible. Beyond this further action should be taken, in the first instance extending entitlement to all pupils in families in receipt of Universal Credit or equivalent legacy benefits.  
• Designating a senior leader within education services who will champion Cost of the School Day work and take strategic responsibility for it  
• Ensuring a regular review of action to tackle the cost of the school day is built into planning cycles and review or audit processes.  

• Ensuring local governance structures are in place to enable progress to be monitored and impact to be understood.  

Council candidates should:  

• Commit to supporting their local authority to analyse the data they hold in order to target information on benefits and other entitlements to households that are likely to be eligible for support, or face specific barriers to accessing support.