Face up to poverty

Yet again we are faced with the reality of poverty in Scotland. New UK and Scottish figures published yesterday describe what can only be considered to be a poverty crisis. UK figures are described as not being “statistically significant” in a number of scenarios. That might be the case in research terms, but what we are talking about here are our fellow citizens, family members and friends. As the figures become the latest political/referendum football, it seems to me that ANY increase in material deprivation is simply unacceptable. I’m sure people will accuse me of being melodramatic and a bit of a “left wing radical”, but how do some of the latest findings stack up?

• 10.6 million people fall into the absolute low income measure – that’s 10 million people for whom living is likely to be a daily struggle
• There are 30,000 more children in poverty in Scotland; 110,000 more people faced poverty before factoring in housing costs
• In-work poverty is at eye wateringly high levels – with an increase of 70,000 people in 2011/12 alone
• The wealthiest 30% of households own 81% of financial wealth.

Some of these headline findings are pretty shocking in my book. The UK Government argues that the figures cover a period of low economic growth. There’s a ‘but’ here. Scottish figures show very little change to relative poverty between 2004 and 2010 – a period of (until 2008) relatively stable growth and higher employment levels. Clearly something is seriously wrong here and it comes back to an economic model which tolerates inequality and deprivation in the vain hope that growth will (eventually) lift those in poverty into a more secure position. What’s more, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation points out this is the calm before the storm. The scandal of poverty in Scotland is a public policy crisis of such magnitude that it cannot be seen in narrow political terms. In a supposedly caring nation, fellow Scots are going hungry. People are left between systems and organisations which are meant to help them, and the third sector is picking up the pieces of lives broken by financial struggle and the stigma associated with poverty. A while back, arguments were made for a Poverty Commissioner in Scotland – someone who might oversee policies and actions to tackle poverty in a holistic way. The appointment of a Cabinet Secretary for Pensioner Poverty kind of missed the point that poverty knows no bounds in terms of age as both sets of figures plainly illustrate. We know what poverty means and where it exists. We now need a concerted, collective action plan to tackle poverty in all its guises. The only way to secure real change is not a top down strategy but to take on learning from the experience of the Poverty Truth Commission and others. Those of us who have experienced poverty and are experiencing it right now, know best how to elicit real change. It’s time for the political bubble to really listen. Tackling poverty once and for all can be the lasting legacy of the debate about Scotland’s future.