Tackling poverty

Redesigning the system to reduce child poverty

The stats

Children in low income families – 2025 local area statistics | KnowFife

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Current Fife Activity

Tackling poverty and preventing crisis is the focus of one of our existing partnership delivery boards. Take a look at:

• Regular updates from the Board
• Cost of Living Support website which pulls together information about national and local support from a wide range of partners to make it easier for people to access what's relevant to them - including Fife benefits calculator
• Fife’s Dignity Charter - created in collaboration with the Poverty Alliance, using the voices and experience of people who live and work in Fife, including those affected by poverty
• With support from Public Health Scotland, we are taking a data and systems approach to develop our next child poverty strategy for Fife.
  

And our local Fife Child Poverty Action Report.

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National Direction

Independent national assessments include:

• Poverty in Scotland 2025 | Joseph Rowntree Foundation
• Advice on the Scottish Government’s Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2026-2031 - Poverty & Inequality Commission

The Scottish Government recently published its third Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan - Bringing Hope, Building Futures 2026-31. This plan focuses more on system transformation and service integration - particularly whole family, whole system change - than previous iterations. It recognises the need to accelerate progress to meet statutory 2030 targets and reflects concerns that without deeper structural change, then it may miss these targets. As well as the full plan, these annexes provide useful information:

• Bringing Hope, Building Futures – annex 3: Evaluation strategy (2026 update)
• Bringing Hope, Building Futures – annex 4: Child Poverty Measurement Framework (2026 update)
• Bringing Hope, Building Futures – annex 6: Impact of policies on child poverty

In response to the Scottish Government's plan, leading economic research institute, the Fraser of Allander Institute published a short analysis piece: Does the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan deliver?

COSLA's White Paper on Strengthening Scotland's Approach to Tackling Poverty sets out the biggest challenges we're facing, now and in the future. It reinforces the point that we must broaden the focus, looking beyond child poverty to family and community power. It highlights the need to:

• shift investment towards prevention and proportionate universalism
• put place and community at the centre of solutions – specifically by enabling community planning partners to share, pool and jointly deploy budgets to support integrated solutions
• streamline planning and reporting across major policy areas - reducing duplication and contradiction; driving alignment and joined up approaches
• provide certainty around multi-year funding as an essential component of sustained poverty reduction
• recognise the needs of single adults, not only families with children
• support young people into high quality education and training
• deliver on community wealth building principles and flexible green jobs

Statutory Duty 

Policy Theme	Legislation	Legislative Requirements
Child Poverty	Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017	Local authorities and health boards must jointly prepare and publish an annual Local Child Poverty Action Report. Local Child Poverty Action Reports must include: Measures taken during the reporting year Proposed measures Income maximisation measures taken to support pregnant women and families with children with financial information, advice and support Measures taken to support households with children that have one or more protected characteristics
Children’s Services	Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 PART 3	Local authorities and the relevant health board must in respect of each 3-year period prepare a children’s services plan for the area of the local authority. Local authorities and relevant health boards must ensure that their Plan is comprehensive in its scope. They are free to use whatever methods they wish to identify the relevant “children’s” and “related” services provided in the local authority area. The statutory guidance sets out a number of opportunities for local authorities and health boards to plan and report jointly, as well as to combine and integrate plans, where this makes sense for local partners