Isabella Williams, Child Poverty Project Officer, asks the question: is the national conversation overlooking local progress in tackling child poverty?
If you’ve been following the latest news on tackling child poverty in Scotland, you could be forgiven for assuming that progress has stalled.
While national debate rightly focuses on concerns around meeting child poverty targets, there’s a risk that the local reality may be obscured, or even overlooked. In fact, despite an increasingly challenging context, local authorities and health boards have continued to strengthen their strategic approaches to tackling child poverty.
Our latest report, Local Action on Child Poverty: Insights from Year 7 LCPARs, spotlights this progress as a positive news story within the current public conversation.
The report provides a timely insight as we continue to digest the 2026-2031 Programme for Government in which the First Minister reaffirmed commitment to eradicating child poverty - the “defining mission” of his government. The announcement of a review of the child poverty targets has intensified debate about Scotland’s progress towards 2030 and what further action may be required. Equally, it creates an opportunity for renewed momentum and urgency around the actions needed to reduce child poverty.
That momentum and urgency is very apparent at local government level, despite stalled progress towards national targets.
There is widespread understanding that while local actions can be transformative for individual families or communities, any singular successful intervention in one or two local authority areas will not, by itself, translate into measurable reductions in national child poverty rates. It takes sustained local action across a broad range of policy areas, supported by strong national infrastructure, to effectively reduce child poverty in a truly preventative way.
Achieving lasting change is about working across the whole system, identifying what works, embedding preventative practice in systems, recognising that it takes time to shift the dial, and sharing learning around successful approaches more widely.
This is where Local Child Poverty Action Reports come in.
As statutory annual reports that local authorities and health boards jointly produce to showcase the actions they have taken and plan to take to reduce child poverty, when used to their full capacity, they are essentially tools to help drive coordinated local change. When the learning around good practice across the 32 reports is shared more widely, they can help scale good practice, support local areas to learn from one another, and ultimately help drive a reduction in child poverty.
Local Action on Child Poverty: Insights from Year 7 LCPARs presents key findings from the review of all 32 Local Child Poverty Action Reports 2024/25, alongside insights gathered through feedback discussions with local child poverty leads in 28 Local Authorities and 14 territorial Health Boards. It highlights emerging trends, examples of local practice, areas of progress and opportunities for improvement in local approaches to tackling child poverty.
The analysis carried out by National Partners (Improvement Service, Public Health Scotland, Scottish Government and the Poverty Alliance amongst others) finds that the overall direction of travel in reporting local action on child poverty remains positive, with an increasing number of reports becoming more strategic in their approach.
We can see clear evidence of this progress across three thematic areas.
First, local areas are increasingly making more innovative use of data and intelligence to understand local need and target support more effectively.
Second, wider policy levers (notably the affordability and accessibility of housing) are increasingly embedded in child poverty plans, showing strategic consideration of child poverty as a cross-cutting system challenge rather than a collection of individual interventions. This is particularly significant, as five years ago, we would not have been discussing the widespread recognition of housing as an integral lever in reducing child poverty.
Third, the voices of lived experience, particularly those within priority groups, are increasingly shaping local decision-making. By Year 7, more than two-fifths of reports demonstrated clear evidence that lived experience was influencing decisions, compared with around one-quarter in Year 6.
At the same time, challenges remain. Progress is uneven across local areas, and there is variation in the extent to which local areas are able to articulate the impact of their activities, particularly longer-term impact on families.
But what’s important to note here, is that the findings point to something that cannot be directly captured in child poverty statistics: the extent to which local systems and approaches are becoming more strategic and more preventative. Child poverty rates show us whether progress is working, but they don’t show us if the systems needed to achieve that change are getting stronger. The Year 7 reports encouragingly indicate that they are.
These findings reinforce the importance of continued improvement support and opportunities for shared learning.
The National Partners continue to offer improvement support at the hinge point between national and local need by supporting local authorities and health boards to learn from one another and scale good practice.
At a time when Scotland is reflecting on how it can accelerate progress towards its child poverty ambitions, understanding and reflecting on the local reality has never been more important. The Year 7 reports tell us that local systems are becoming more strategic and preventative. Now, the challenge is to build on that progress and clearly evidence the impact it is having on children and families.
Access the report: Local Action on Child Poverty: Insights from Year 7 LCPARs.