A POVERTY EMERGENCY

Swinney urged to increase Child Payment and Starmer to end two-child benefit cap | Children's charity vows to give every pound donated to its Urgent Assistance Fund

- PAUL HUTCHEON

SCOTLAND'S child poverty crisis should be given the same emergency response as Covid, a leading campaigner has demanded.

It comes as figures show about 240,000 children in Scotland - around 24 per cent in relative poverty.

The number has barely changed since the SNP swept to power in 2007, despite policies like the Scottish Child Payment.

The welfare policies of the last Tory government have been widely blamed for the stubbornly high figures.

Children's charity Aberlour chief executive SallyAnn Kelly said the billions spent during the pandemic should also be shelled out for lowincome families.

She said: "No one could ever underestimate the suffering and loss inflicted by Covid but the lives and life chances of thousands of children are being as badly impacted by poverty as the pandemic.

"We need the same ambition, determination and urgency around poverty as we had during lockdown in terms of supporting families and protecting the lives of children.

"The swift and effective action taken then is needed now and our governments need to step up."

Kelly said the difference in response is because politicians were directly affected by Covid but not by poverty.

She said: "The emergency support for families during Covid would have been thought impossible just a few weeks earlier.

"The reason that assistance was put in place with such speed was because politicians and policy-makers were just as affected as everyone else.

"There was no sense that Covid was something happening to other people and that is why the response to poverty is so different.

"The experience of living in poverty is so far from decision-makers' lives that they can struggle to understand it.

"They seem to believe poverty is something that happens to other people, to poor people.

She also said the "distance" between politicians and poverty had "sabotaged" effective action.