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

Ensuring public transport is available, affordable and accessible and connects parents and young people to work

Ensuring public transport is available, affordable and accessible will help to reduce the transport costs to families who use it. It will also help to address barriers to employment such as availability and affordability of public transport. Those from lower income households, and therefore in poverty, are more likely to be reliant on public transport.

Actions included

• Concessionary travel (Continuation) - £465.8m (overall investment, including for people aged 60+ and disabled people)
• Transport to Employment offer (New) - £19m

Total investment in 2026/27 - £484.8m

Impact of actions committed

Type of impact

These measures will result in directly lowering costs of living and have the potential to indirectly improve income by providing greater access to employment opportunities.

Potential size

Concessionary travel schemes are available to over two million people in Scotland, including 45,000 people in the Northern Isles who could benefit from the removal of peak ferry fares.

Until details of initiatives have been outlined as to how transport and employability projects will be implemented either through the People and Place Programme funding mechanism or the No One Left Behind funding mechanism, it is not possible to say what the scale of impact may be. However, we know that around a quarter of parents in the No One Left Behind cohort reported transport as a barrier to employment.

Certainty

The current policy on concessionary travel combined with the Transport to Employment offer will have a high certainty of impact on ensuring transport remains accessible and affordable, contributing to the child poverty reduction target. This is based on current measures which show that a large proportion of people in Scotland say they find their transport costs easy to afford (69%) and a similar proportion (70%) of users of public transport are satisfied with public transport.

Priority families targeted by the actions

Multiple family types supported: those under 22 years of age; disabled people and people aged 60+; asylum seekers; Island residents who use Northern Isles Ferry Services. Transport to Employment targets support for low-income parents engaged in No One Left Behind employability projects with a focus on priority families.

Tracking progress

A revised monitoring and evaluation framework will be put in place around transport and employability initiatives, to report on the number of people that benefit from projects and outcomes achieved. Modal share of public transport, affordability of transport costs, weekly spend on transport and satisfaction with public transport will be monitored annually with disaggregated analysis conducted by household income and whether households have children. This monitoring and evaluation will contribute to a better understanding of the indirect impacts of transport policy on child poverty targets.