Improving our understanding of child poverty in rural and island Scotland: research

5 Suggested actions to tackle child poverty in rural and island locations

1. Structural changes to the rural labour market and increasing employment opportunities

One of the main structural causes of poverty in rural and island locations is the nature of much rural employment with low-paid, seasonal jobs offering few if any training/advancement opportunities all too common. Tackling these challenges requires fundamental changes to the rural labour market, including attracting investment and providing support to diversify the employment base and increase the number of skilled and well-paid jobs, with associated skills training for local people.

Scottish Government policy interventions such as the recently launched National Strategy for Economic Transformation, which sets a vision to build a wellbeing economy by 2032, associated commitments around Fair Work and a Minimum Income Guarantee, and the planned Rural Entrepreneur Fund may help to drive some of these changes, provided that they are appropriately resourced. The new Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2022-26 also includes significant commitments around increasing fair work opportunities to overcome barriers to parental employment, including through the new No One Left Behind approach, the Parental Transition Fund, the Challenge Fund and work on community wealth building as part of the wellbeing economy agenda. Appropriate monitoring and evaluation work to explore the nature and extent of the outcomes and impacts of these policies in rural and island communities as well as to illuminate where different delivery mechanisms may be required will be important.

2. Ensuring the welfare system is appropriate for rural and island families

This is a second area in which structural change is required. The Rural Lives project presented evidence demonstrating that the UK benefits system is complex and hard to navigate (especially for those facing additional challenges such as mental health issues) and it is not ‘fit-for-purpose’ for rural and island households. In particular, the system needs to be more flexible to take account of the volatility of rural incomes and how this leads to payment delays and overpayments that are then clawed back. Work is also needed to ensure full benefit entitlements are being claimed and to provide budgeting and debt advice which is appropriate to rural circumstances (such as a lack of or distance to travel to local bank branches (where these exist) so a need to improve access to other forms of affordable credit, which in turn will bring improved mental health and wellbeing). Joint service and advice provision to tackle issues of stigma and to reflect the inter-related nature of the poverty challenges facing families in rural and island locations, may also be appropriate. There is potential to learn from ongoing research supported by Scottish Government into the Shetland Anchor project, which is a multi-agency child poverty project. The work wraps support from existing frontline services around the needs of families to directly tackle poverty and inequality, while also avoiding the stigma associated with support provided by other services. This model (or elements of it) could be replicated in other rural and island communities.

The increases in the Child Payment announced by the Scottish Government recently are welcome, but it will be important to review how far these increases impact on families in rural and island communities where the cost of living can be significantly higher. A number of specific interventions announced in the new Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan aim to tackle some of the challenges that evidence suggests are particularly pertinent in rural and island communities, such as a commitment to reduce the complexity of navigating the benefits system, working to address the non-take up of benefits, and expanding access to holistic advice services by enhancing advice provision in places that people already visit (e.g. GP surgeries).

Large-scale investment is also set out in the new Delivery Plan in terms of the Social Innovation Partnerships focused around enhancing wellbeing in holistic ways through Whole Family Wellbeing Funding, including through providing support with childcare, employment and relational support. Ensuring that some of this Partnership work is in rural and island locations will be important to explore how this should be designed and delivered differently in these locations, such as through more digital provision and building on the ‘offer’ of rural and island locations in terms of wellbeing.

3. Providing affordable and flexible childcare in rural locations

This is critical in rural locations to enable parents to return to work and/or to attend vital welfare or mental health appointments, especially when crucial and valued informal childcare from friends and family is not available. It is possible that formal childcare provision in these locations will not be profit-making due to the need to be flexible, provide out of normal hours care, and to perhaps cater for small and variable numbers of children. Support will therefore need to be provided to the private, public or (perhaps more likely) voluntary organisations that run these services. The childcare ‘offering’ might include provision of a package or menu of different childcare services from which families can choose depending on their circumstances. In short, the primary aim of such a service/s would not be financial, but would rather be related to harder to measure but vitally important outcomes such as reversing population decline/maintaining local population levels, supporting the attainment of young children, reducing child poverty, etc.

Important lessons can be learned from the Mull and Iona Community Trust Childcare Pilot to inform future place-based interventions in this space, including in terms of the hours required for parents (taking into account travel time from work to the childcare location), the challenges around recruiting appropriate staff already with qualifications or who are prepared to work to get these, the need to ensure affordable housing is available for staff locally, the potential to offer wraparound provision including breakfast and after school clubs, the potential for differential charging levels depending on household income, etc.. As set out in the Scottish Government’s Covid Recovery Strategy published in 2021, work will get underway in 2022-23 to begin the early phasing-in of community level systems of school age childcare, targeted to support the Government’s designated six priority groups. Key here is building a system of school age childcare to support a community and developing the role that organised children’s activities can play in a school age childcare system alongside the regulated childcare sector to support families, provide choice and improve access to these activities for children from low income households. Again, it is important that at least some of this community-based work takes place in rural and/or island locations to explore how provision might differ depending on the characteristics of these locations (e.g. sparsity of population, the importance of seasonal and variable hours work which is low paid and outwith normal 9-5 working hours, etc.). The Scottish Government is presently engaged in a separate piece of research to inform policy development processes across rural and island Scotland for future school age childcare provision – which has the potential to unlock a broad range of benefits.

The new Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan also includes a number of actions relating to increased investment in childcare, including a commitment to publish a strategic plan for all childcare commitments in summer 2022. It is critical that this planning includes and is informed by commitments in rural and island locations. Pilot projects to provide integrated wraparound childcare in different rural and island locations could be included to see what works best in different communities. The role of the community and voluntary sector will be critical here, and a commitment to long-term funding, staff training, etc is vital for these projects to work effectively. It is positive to see the new Delivery Plan include a commitment to provide multi-year funding for the third sector where possible.

4. Addressing the cost of living crisis

Price rises, in particular for food and fuel, are deeply worrying, particularly for those families in rural and island locations who already have to rely on more expensive private transport, have higher heating bills, and have difficulty accessing cheaper healthy food. It would be worth the Scottish Government proactively monitoring the impacts of these price rises on rural and island children, particularly those at risk of or already experiencing poverty, to ascertain what, if anything, families and children are having to forego in order to afford to run their households (even with the commitments to increase the Scottish Child Payment) and how they could be best supported. Support could be in the form of public welfare payments, and the newly published Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2022-2026 sets out the Government’s plans in this regard, and/or in the form of community and voluntary sector led initiatives such as food banks, community-led food projects, etc. Ongoing communication between Scottish Government, community partners and the voluntary sector will continue to be vital for the views of people with direct experience of food insecurity to be heard, to inform the approach to reduce the need to access food banks or food aid providers.

It may be worth considering the value of setting up a focused Rural and Island Child Poverty Task Group to gather evidence and information from rural and island families about the impacts of the current circumstances, how they are responding and how they could be best supported. This Group could be convened by Scottish Government but include all relevant stakeholders operating across all the breadth of service delivery, including transport, housing, welfare, economic development and business support, etc. and researchers too, in order to ensure that responses are as holistic as possible. The National Rural Mental Health Forum may be a good ‘model’ here as this brings together rural and mental health stakeholders on a regular basis.

An alternative/additional option might be to include child poverty, given its importance as the Scottish Government’s national mission, as a regular standing item on the agenda for the Rural Economy and Communities Stakeholder Group which meets quarterly. Attendees could then share their knowledge of both experiences and responses ‘on-the-ground’ and of gaps in knowledge and alternative interventions that are required.

5. Tackling housing and transport challenges

A lack of affordable housing and poor public transport provision leading to a need to run a private car are key drivers of poverty in rural and island locations. And often families are facing these challenges at the same time as a higher and rising cost of living as food and fuel prices go up.

Further investment in affordable social housing provision in rural and island locations is vital and the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2022-2026 sets out plans for investment in the Affordable Housing Supply Programme. The Plan also includes a commitment to a community bus fund and a review of how Demand Responsive Transport can best support low income families. Both actions include rural and island locations, which will be helpful to explore the specificities of running such interventions in these locations.

It may be appropriate to explore how some of these structural drivers of poverty can be further addressed through community-based projects funded through future Community Led Local Development funding (such as for local community and Demand Responsive Transport schemes, community buses, local food and growing projects, etc.). Application forms for the funding round in 2021-22 asked applicants to demonstrate how their proposed activities targeted Scottish Government policy priorities and target groups and future applications could be more closely tied to child poverty as a priority area. The same focus could be introduced to other Scottish Government funding streams such as the Islands Programme and Regeneration funding.

6. Ensuring rural and island locations can access ‘mainstream’ place-based funding

While rural- or island-only funding streams such as those mentioned here are welcome, it is important that rural and island locations are able to bid for funding from mainstream place-based funding sources, including those mentioned in the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, such as the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund, the pathfinders exploring whole system change, local community wealth building action plans, the Place Based Investment Programme, and investment in local play parks and childcare.

Appropriate mechanisms are required to ensure that all places are eligible to apply for funding from these programmes. It would not be appropriate, for example, for places to be eligible on the basis of their SIMD ranking as this is known to hide rural and island poverty. Moreover, even if rural or island based projects are projected to reach fewer people in terms of their targets, the impacts of such investment in terms of reducing depopulation/ encouraging repopulation, improving physical and mental health and wellbeing, etc. should be the outcomes against which such projects are measured.

7. Recognising the higher cost of service delivery in rural and island locations

Services such as health visiting, one-to-one debt advice, keyworker support to families on welfare payments and/or employability, etc. cost more to deliver in locations where the population is more dispersed and individuals have to travel longer distances (with associated higher fuel costs) to reach clients. Provider organisations need to recognise this for their individual staff (e.g. who may need higher mileage allowances to cover rising fuel costs) and funders need to recognise this in their funding to provider organisations (e.g. by providing more substantial funding packages and/or more flexible targets).

8. Strengthening mechanisms for hearing the voices of rural and island children and young people

As described earlier, a number of rural and island specific and general mechanisms exist to gather the voices of young people from across Scotland. It is important to ensure that these voices are heard by a range of stakeholders, including Scottish Government and non-rural organisations who may benefit from hearing more about the lived experiences of children and young people in rural and island locations. Ongoing review of these mechanisms is important to ensure that they are incorporating the voices of all children and young people including those who are experiencing poverty and are excluded or hidden for other reasons.