Speech to FM anti-poverty summit

I was asked to speak at the First Minister’s anti-poverty summit today to set the scene for poverty in Scotland today. Here’s roughly what I said:

“Firstly, thank you First Minister for convening this summit and it is truly encouraging to see each of the party leaders here today.

I’ve been asked to set the scene on the state of poverty in Scotland today.

The headline statistics are quite easy to remember. Just over a million people in Scotland live in poverty with around quarter of a million of them being children. They’re easy to remember because they’re quite round numbers but also because they haven’t changed that much recently.

We in JRF also just published a study into patterns of very deep poverty over the last 25 years or so. It showed that we’ve added the equivalent of the population of Dundee to the numbers of people in very deep poverty, bringing it close to half a million people. The majority of these uplifts coming from single people, disabled people and people from minority ethnic backgrounds.

And that explains much of the story we see today. Foodbanks, very rare 15 years ago, now an “industry”. Those foodbanks should not exist in our country.

The current cost of living crisis is not born of the current spike in inflation. It is born of this deepening poverty. It is born of government decisions. Decisions to wither social security support for single people and disabled people in particular and for the broader population since the financial crash and the period of austerity that followed. And the vice tightens in other ways, rents are creeping up, transport costs are creeping up, energy bills have exploded and now the price of food is shooting up.

That’s why in Scotland today about a third of low income families have skipped meals or cut down on meals. About 15% have visited a foodbank. Note the gap between those numbers roughly 33% vs 15% — you could call it significant, I’d call it hunger. On top of that 7 in 10 people who have visited a foodbank have seen a decline in their physical health.

And this is not just piling pressure on individuals but on our public services too. More visits to GPs, more visits to hospitals. 8 in 10 single parents now reporting that they have experienced a somewhat or very negative impact on their mental health due to rising costs. 50% of families where someone is disabled seeing a decline in their physical health. Avoidable harm made to people and avoidable demand on our NHS.

Avoidable, that word is key. Poverty is an injustice. Poverty is reversible. Poverty is something that we have built, and like many of the injustices of our past we can deconstruct.

To so that we have sitting in this room two powerful groups of people.

Our political leaders. Empowered to make significant decisions that change people’s lives. To represent, to listen, yes to argue but most importantly to improve the lives of people who live in Scotland.

In polling for Holyrood magazine at the end of last year, 40% of MSPs said that they felt somewhat helpless in the face of the cost of living crisis. If, as an MSP, you don’t think you can impact on the cost of living crisis, consider a career change. Listen to people experiencing poverty now, and stand in their shoes, if you don’t think you can or aren’t motivated to make change after that, pack in.

You have enormous power, and privilege, in your hands. Use it.

The second group are third sector. People striving every day to help their fellow citizens get by. Making tiny amounts of money go a million miles. For often very little pay, improving lives. In foodbanks, homelessness centres, debt advice, welfare advice, parental support, counselling — all forged in simple aims.

Love, care, compassion.

But imagine what these change makers could do if poverty was eradicated. The entrepreneurialism, the care, the passion, the will for change.

As it has been for quite some time, the biggest untapped resource in our country is our people. Our people, our public services and our businesses cannot flourish while we maintain such high levels of poverty.

That is the task in driving down poverty. Freeing people from the destitution that far too many face today. With that freedom improving our collective ability to learn, work, collaborate, build, love, care, enjoy our lives and let our children play and not have to worry about their parents.

That’s the prize, a better Scotland than the one we have today. But it won’t happen by accident it requires change. Shifts in income, wealth and power that can only happen through concerted action in our Parliament and in communities throughout our country. That power shift demands an end to stigmatising poverty as well.

Our polling from the weekend showed that one of the main things that people who had suffered a decline in their mental health was worried about was uncertainty about when things will get better, make today and this summit the day with things do start to get better.”