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Our Commitment to Tackling Poverty
23. As indicated above, we believe that tackling poverty, inequality and deprivation is vital if we are to achieve the Government's Purpose. The evidence is clear that the continued existence of poverty acts as a drag on economic growth and both contributes to, and derives from, a range of other social problems.
24. Scotland is too small a country to waste some of its most precious economic resource - its people - by not realising their full potential. We will not be able to achieve our ambitions for sustainable economic growth while too many fail to realise their potential. In an increasingly competitive global marketplace this failure diminishes our attractiveness as a place to do business with and invest in - and reduces our supply of skilled labour.
25. We need all who are able to contribute to a thriving Scottish economy to do so. Scotland has among the best employment rates in the EU27 1 but there are still too many people out of work, unable to provide for themselves and their families, and therefore stifling our economic potential. There are also a significant number of people who are in work, but who are low-skilled or unskilled and earning insufficient income to lift themselves out of poverty - 50% of all children in poverty live in a household where at least one adult works. By equipping Scotland's citizens with the skills and attributes they need to become economically active we can ensure that they are able to secure a decent income and quality of life for their family, while contributing to the Scottish economy.
26. It is also clear that dealing with the consequences of poverty has a considerable impact on the public purse in terms of additional costs in providing education, children's social services, free school meals, primary and acute healthcare, and housing.
27. Added to this are the knock-on effects in later life of child poverty: less likelihood of employment and therefore higher expenditure on benefits and less tax receipts, greater likelihood of: crime; being a lone parent; having poorer health; being a substance abuser; and becoming homeless. It is clear that if we can shift the bulk of resources and efforts from crisis managing the consequences of poverty to preventing it and tackling its root causes then the gains, both economic and societal, will be massive. The challenge is to identify how we effect this transformation.
28. Continued poverty not only affects the adults involved by condemning them to a life of financial struggle, reduced life chances, and a greater risk of suffering poor physical and mental wellbeing. Poverty among families also affects everyone in the household. We know that children who grow up in poor households are more likely to grow up to be poor adults themselves, and that they are more likely to achieve fewer qualifications and be less likely to enter Higher Education, to be more likely to have poor physical and mental health, and to suffer from worklessness in adult life.
29. Concentrations of poverty also damage the communities affected. The evidence on the gap between Scotland's most deprived communities and the rest of Scotland presented in the 2005 report Social Focus on Deprived Areas2 is stark. Deprived communities suffer considerable disadvantage across the full spectrum of indicators - from education and health to crime and housing - when compared to their more affluent neighbours. Poverty therefore drags down communities by affecting the people living there and can lead to the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
30. We have made clear our commitment to tackling these issues throughout our national outcomes framework:
- The overarching Purpose of the Scottish Government is to create a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increasing sustainable economic growth.
- We are clear that the Solidarity Golden Rule, as set out in the GES, is central to the delivery of the Purpose.
- We have developed a national Performance Framework incorporating the following:
Outcome 7: We have tackled the significant inequalities in Scottish Society
Indicator 10: To decrease the proportion of individuals living in poverty
- And beyond these priorities we have also focused across the range of national outcomes and indicators on making progress in areas which will directly contribute to tackling poverty by getting at the root causes which lie in areas such as health, education and employment.
31. At the same time we have made clear our commitment to the UK Government child poverty targets. We are committed to doing all within the powers available to us to help achieve the milestone to halve child poverty (from a 1998/99 baseline) by 2010, and the goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020.
32. The poverty indicator will be reported annually through the Households Below Average Income statistics derived from the Family Resources Survey and will be disaggregated to show progress for children, working age adults, and pensioners. We will also disaggregate the statistics, as far as we are able, to show how the incidence of poverty breaks down within and across Scotland (for example, for key equality groups, for urban and rural Scotland, and for the most deprived communities.) This will help to determine whether, and where, efforts need to be targeted at a sub-Scotland level. The latest annual poverty statistics (for the year 2006-07) will be published in March 2008.
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