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

Assessing impact

As part of the revised evaluation strategy we strive to better understand the cumulative impact of policies and how we are supporting families in Scotland across the wide range of actions planned.

When assessing impact, we are looking at a package of policies that support an overarching area of focus. In some cases, these policies cut across different policy areas, but together support coherent policy delivery. The aim of this approach is to ensure that we can start to better understand and assess the cross-cutting impact of the policy package within particular areas of focus.

Overall, the Plan sets out 15 interconnected areas where further action is needed. For the purposes of this annex we have merged actions focused on advice and public debt, given connections to advice services, therefore this document has 14 areas of focus in total (as opposed to the 15 that can be found in the Plan).

This annex outlines how each area links to the targets, via the drivers of child poverty. We describe the type of impact anticipated, and the number of people, households or children affected, to the extent that can be known at this stage. We also indicate where these are linked to particular outcomes for a priority group. Early thinking on how areas of focus will be monitored or assessed is also provided – though in some cases policies are still in development and evaluation strategies are still to be agreed.

Some areas of focus have a direct link to poverty drivers – for example, employability or social security support. Other areas have an indirect link but are required to support long lasting poverty reduction, such as driving positive change in the labour market. There are other areas of focus that provide a foundational underpinning to ways of working or approaches to policy implementation – for example, in the area of making best use of data. In this instance, the link to poverty reduction is less direct, but still relevant in the context of ensuring we maximise the impacts of policies in the Plan.

Each area of focus has a distinct way of supporting continued progress on child poverty, and it is the combination of all these approaches that will ensure poverty reduction.