While Scottish Child Payment (SCP) reaches almost every child in poverty, there are even more children above the poverty line who also receive this benefit.
Scottish Child Payment is generally presented as an anti-poverty policy. In reality, it would be more accurate to think of it as a payment to families below median income rather than being targeted only on families in poverty.
Almost all children getting SCP are in families with below median income, but only around 41% of them are in families in poverty. (Here, we use a standard definition of relative poverty, which is having a household income after housing costs below 60% of the UK median).
SCP is available to children aged under 16 in Scotland whose parents receive Universal Credit or equivalent benefits. In this blog, we look at children who receive SCP and whether they are in poverty or not. When talking about children’s household income and poverty status we mean what they would be prior to receiving SCP (incomes are net of SCP).
Note that any binary poverty measure draws a somewhat arbitrary line between those in poverty and those out of poverty, but financial circumstances are almost the same just below and just above the poverty line. Similarly, individual circumstances differ and cannot be captured entirely by a measure that only considers income. As such, the analysis below should be seen as giving a perspective on the targeting of SCP, rather than an overall assessment of its value as a measure for tackling child poverty.
Note also that SCP hasn’t kicked in yet in the latest poverty statistics and that we should see its impact properly for the first time in the 2023/24 statistics, which come out in March 2025.
