Bringing Hope, Building Futures: Tackling child poverty delivery plan 2026-2031 – annex 6: Impact of policies on child poverty

Strengthening support through social security

Through Scotland’s devolved social security system, we will continue and strengthen support directly to families who are most in need – putting money into the pockets of parents and carers contributing to higher household incomes and reduced child poverty.

Actions included

• Five Family Payments (Continuation) - £524m
• Scottish Welfare Fund (Continuation) - £41m
• Scottish Child Payment Premium (New) - £N/A in 2026/27
• Care Leaver Payment (New) - £3.8m

Total investment in 2026/27 - £568.8m.

Impact of actions committed

Type of impact

All five family payments contribute directly to increasing incomes for families. The Scottish Child Payment Premium for children under one and the one-off payment to care leavers will have a direct impact on people’s and families’ income that are likely to live in poverty, deep poverty or be at risk of moving into poverty. The Scottish Welfare Fund supports households in the event of an emergency, or to help them to live independently.

Uprating Scottish benefits in line with inflation maintains the true value of benefit payments. The direct positive impacts of Scottish benefits on household income would decline in the absence of uprating.

Potential size

Scottish Child Payment is forecast to benefit around 330,000 children in low-income families, with Best Start Foods and the Best Start Grants forecast to benefit over 50,000 children in low-income families. Investment in Scottish Child Payment alone is estimated to keep 50,000 children out of poverty in 2026/27, across Scotland.

Scottish Child Payment Premium to children under one and the £2,000 one-off payment to care leavers will have a positive impact on poverty reduction (<1 percentage point). In 2027/28 the Premium will increase the Scottish Child Payment payments for around 12,000 children while the one-off payment to care leavers is estimated to benefit around 1,300 care leavers each year.

Scottish Welfare Fund awards tend to go to applicants living in more deprived areas of Scotland, with a third directed to households with children, primarily lone parents.

Certainty

Scottish Government analysts produce estimates of child poverty impacts to the nearest 1%/10,000 children, due to sample size limitations in modelling. An estimated impact below 1% does not imply no impact, or that the impact on the households who are affected is negligible. These estimates contain a degree of uncertainty due to underlying survey uncertainty and are subject to change in future modelling rounds.

Estimates of the number of children expected to benefit from payments are based on official Scottish Fiscal Commission forecasts with a generally low forecast error.

Priority families targeted by the actions

Previous internal analysis by the Scottish Government estimated at least 85% of Five Family Payments’ recipients, including Scottish Child Payment, would be expected to be from at least one of the six priority family groups above. The Scottish Child Payment Premium is targeted to families with a child under the age of one.

Tracking progress

Data published by Social Security Scotland each quarter reports on the number of children in receipt of Scottish Child Payment and by age of the child. This enables monitoring of the extent the expected number of children impacted by the new under-one Premium has been realised. Data is also published routinely on the number of children in receipt of Best Start Foods and Best Start Grant. We are currently developing future monitoring and evaluation plans for the Five Family Payments, that will involve primary data collection from clients.