Progress to eradicate child poverty
Thousands of families will be helped as part of the Scottish Government’s plans to remove the two child benefit cap, First Minister John Swinney has said as he repeated calls for the UK Government to end the policy immediately.
The First Minister made clear that if the UK Government was to scrap the policy, the investment the Scottish Government intends to allocate to its mitigation would be used on other measures to tackle eradicate child poverty.
At an event in Stirling hosted by The Robertson Trust, Mr Swinney addressed representatives from community and third sector organisations across Scotland and set out his vision for a country in which no child lives in poverty.
The First Minister said: “The eradication of child poverty is my government’s number one priority, and I want it also to become our nation’s number one goal.
“The cornerstone of our approach is investment in more dignified and generous social security support.
“It includes the resources we need to build the systems that will allow us to effectively remove the two child cap for families in Scotland.
“I can offer two guarantees today. Firstly, if we are able to safely get the systems up and running in this coming year, the first payments will be made in this coming year – helping to lift thousands more children out of poverty.
“And secondly, if the UK government does the right thing and abolishes the two-child cap across the UK, the resources we have committed to this policy will continue to be used on measures to eradicate child poverty in Scotland.”
CPAG, the Child Poverty Action Group, estimates that mitigating the two-child limit in Scotland could lift around 15,000 children out of poverty:
https://cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-12/Cost_of_a_Child_Scotland_2024.pdf
The Scottish Fiscal Commission has also published estimates of the number of children in Scotland impacted by the two-child limit this year, and who would benefit from mitigation were it to commence in 2026-27 (39,000 in 2025-26, rising to 42,000 in 2026-27.
Mitigating the two-child limit and the Scottish Budget | Scottish Fiscal Commission.
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