The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act – time to go further?

The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 set clear rules for what the tackling child poverty delivery plans had to do, such as set out how the targets would be met. We argue that the latest plan fails to do so and is open to legal challenge. Ultimately the Act and the targets at its core were a means of ensuring political action to dramatically reduce child poverty. The Scottish Government must urgently publish a delivery plan that meets the Act’s rightly ambitious aims.

The demands of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017

The history of the Act

When Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, his Government passed the Child Poverty Act in Westminster shortly before losing office in 2010. As is well known, the targets at the core of that Act were then repealed by the Conservative Administration following the 2015 election.

In response to this, the Scottish Government presented a Bill to the Scottish Parliament in February 2017 to introduce targets in Scotland. It set 4 targets that had to be met by the end of the financial year 2030/31. The Child Poverty (Scotland) Bill’s Policy Memorandum stated:

...the Scottish Government will set a bold direction of travel, by setting targets that are stretching and ambitious, but realistic, to ensure that all parties can sign up to playing a part in achieving them.

Child Poverty (Scotland) Bill: Policy Memorandum

The latter point turned out to be the case, and politicians from all the political parties represented in the Parliament at the time worked together to take the Bill through Parliament. One of the most significant changes to the Bill during its passage was the introduction of interim targets on the face of the Bill during Stage 2.

As a result, when the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 received Royal Assent in late 2017, it included interim targets to be met by the end of financial year 2023/24. They were set at approximately halfway between the ultimate target figure (for example for relative poverty, below 10%) and the rate at the time (around 24% in 2017/18), making the target below 18%.

Ultimately the purpose of the Act is to force the Scottish Government’s hand to take action to radically reduce child poverty in Scotland. As the Cabinet Secretary who led the Bill through Parliament, Angela Constance, said at the time:

The 2030 targets are highly ambitious and challenging, but poverty is not inevitable... there is a genuine cross-party desire to place those targets in statute and then take action to meet them.

Stage 3 Opening Speech, Scottish Parliament, 8 November 2017

The last phrase is crucial "and then take action to meet them"; that is the core purpose and aim of the Act.

The accountability mechanisms in the Act

The Act also set various accountability mechanisms to compel Scottish Government action towards meeting those targets. That included the establishment of the Poverty and Inequality Commission, annual tackling child poverty local delivery plans and, crucially, obligations for the Scottish Government to publish their own delivery plans and updates on progress.

Section 9 of the Act sets out the requirements on the Scottish Government to bring forward delivery plans, each covering a 4-year period. The first 2 were published in 2018 (Every Child, Every Chance) and 2022 (Best Start, Bright Futures) with the last published just before the election (Bringing Hope, Building Futures). Section 9(2) of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 goes on to further prescribe what those delivery plans must do:

• (a) the measures that the Scottish Ministers propose to take during the period of the plan for the purpose of meeting the child poverty targets
• (b) an assessment of the contribution the proposed measures are expected to make to meeting the child poverty targets
• (c) an explanation of how that assessment has been arrived at, and
• (d) an assessment of the financial resources required to fund the proposed measures.

At the time of the publication of the 2022 delivery plan, Best Start, Bright Futures, we worked with Save the Children Scotland to set out the ways in which the plan was flawed, and how it failed to meet the scale of the challenge set by the Act. We concluded that while the diagnosis in the Plan was good, the remedy was not strong enough.

Ultimately, though, the response to that Plan’s failures from us and others was to provide detailed critiques of its measures, as well as suggestions for how they could and should be strengthened. The provisions of the Act were not relied upon particularly.

The Poverty and Inequality Commission have, as the Act requires of them, provided updates and advice to the Scottish Government on their actions towards the targets. Those have become increasingly urgent in tone with the Chair of the Commission concluding in November 2025:

"The Commission has made numerous recommendations over the years about the action needed to meet the targets, but there remains a chasm between the Scottish Government’s stated intent and outcomes."

Where are we now?

The latest figures show that the Scottish Government is some way off meeting the 2030/31 targets; both the annual, and the more reliable multi-year, figures put relative child poverty in the low 20s in terms of percentage points. Even with the recent improvements to the figures across the UK, and to some extent in Scotland, and the expected downward revision in the numbers, the latest Scottish relative child poverty figure rests at 21% (2022-25). Later this year we should also have a revised figure for the relative child poverty rate at the time the targets came into force, giving us a better picture of the progress made since the Act was passed.

Of course, as we have shown in the past, it is not that the Scottish Government has taken no action towards the targets, not least in their investment in the Scottish Child Payment, which benefits hundreds of thousands of low-income households across Scotland. Wider action on investment in social housing is also likely to have contributed to housing costs continuing to underpin the differences in child poverty rates between Scotland, England and Wales.

Despite these welcome measures, however, the Scottish Government still faces a daunting task in meeting the targets that the Parliament set in 2017.

Does the latest delivery plan take us further?

The Scottish Government published the last in the series of delivery plans required by the 2017 Act in March. Bringing Hope, Building Futures was billed as the centrepiece of the Scottish Government’s top priority of eradicating child poverty. It is difficult to argue that the timing of the plan was ideal. It was close to May’s election and followed hot on the heels of the Scottish Government’s budget and spending review — both of which were delayed by the UK Government’s budget.

That being said, a lengthy process was undertaken within the Scottish Government including the involvement of many external stakeholders, including JRF, to bring forward ideas and priorities for the plan. In that broader context it is fair to say that the delivery plan itself was disappointing, to put it euphemistically.

Like the earlier plans Bringing Hope, Building Futures is a nuanced and well-framed diagnosis of the drivers of child poverty in Scotland. But it falls down in a number of important ways:

• the plan’s scope — it does not purport to cover the time-period demanded of it by the Act
• the extent of new funding — the only additional funding in the delivery plan was some more clarity on the money that was to be spent on mitigating the two-child limit
• the measures detailed in it — the plan lacks the necessary prioritisation of measures within it, and they do not meet the scale of the challenge that we, and many others, have set out to meet the targets.

The plan’s scope

The plan is framed as ‘an enduring framework to drive progress’ which will give the ‘next administration a strong foundation to build on, while allowing them to set their own policy priorities and decide how best to speed up progress’. Although this premise is framed as a necessity, it is really a choice. There is longstanding precedent, including other decisions taken by the Scottish Government in recent months, for making policy and funding decisions in an election year that will outlast the parliamentary term.

Of course, it is true that a different administration could come into government and make different decisions, but such is the nature of parliamentary terms, they don’t mean that reasonable political decision making needs to stop for a year in advance of an election. The delivery plan itself refers to the Scottish Government’s commitment to spend over £1 billion on the Affordable Housing Supply Programme in 2028/29. Breaking their own ‘constraint’ within the same document.

This is the questionable rationale for the plan explicitly only covering ‘actions we will take in 2026-27’. This 1-year scope does not capitalise on a rare multi-year Spending Review to deliver strategic change or provide clarity and certainty for delivery over a longer period. This is especially detrimental for national and local third-sector delivery partners, who consistently highlight the challenges of 1-year funding cycles for planning, implementation and sustainability. Indeed, it makes the Scottish Government’s life harder too, where a significant part of each year is taken up by comprehensive budget setting and completing the Parliamentary process.

As just 1 example, delivery of the £20 million Whole Family Support Third Sector Delivery Fund will be very challenging in this context. A ‘1-year’ plan also means that the level of ambition for measures set out in the plan is inherently limited. With no guarantee of funding in future years, the vast majority of the measures could have to be stopped after the 2026/27 financial year. This puts a range of potentially impactful policies (including in areas apparently core to the delivery plan’s approach like whole family support) either out of scope of the delivery plan or leaves them potentially hamstrung, and delays progress on key drivers of child poverty.

Linked to these constraints, the plan fails to adequately model meeting the 2030/31 targets. The modelling included in the cumulative impact assessment accompanying the plan clearly shows that the 2030/31 targets will be missed by a wide margin. However, the plan suggests that gaps in the modelling mean that it is not possible to draw firm conclusions on whether the targets will be met.

There is a prominent caveat that ‘modelling does not account for the future choices of an incoming Scottish Government, formed after the May 2026 Scottish Government election’ so ‘estimates of impact and poverty projections beyond 2026-27 should therefore be treated with caution’.

This argument is circular because robust modelling is not possible precisely because of the choices made to limit the scope and duration of the delivery plan. It is also concerning that there is insufficient impact evidence to underpin modelling for many of the funded measures in the delivery plan.

The impact assessment says that ‘the effects of a number of Scottish Government policies have not been included in this modelling due to a lack of data or evidence to support their inclusion’. This suggests that the measures either do not have a sufficient evidential backing to support them, or that they are not of such a scale as to impact on overall child poverty levels, or both.

The extent of new funding

In our Meeting the Moment analysis we set out the sort of scale of action necessary during the next parliamentary term to meet the child poverty targets. We intentionally did not specify the exact measures that needed to be taken to do so, as there are of course different ideological approaches that could be taken, as well as differing levels of prioritisation that could be given to different activities. We did make clear that, however the targets were met, it would require a level of investment and intervention that would stretch into hundreds of millions of pounds.

In that context, while the £120 million that was earmarked for mitigating the two-child limit could usefully contribute to other activity, it was never going to fundamentally shift the dial. In our view, the principal error in how this money has been reallocated is to repeat the mistakes of previous delivery plans — spreading already inadequate levels of funding too thinly.

While the headline spend for 2026/27 on child poverty cited in the plan is around £4 billion, the Scottish Government’s assessment is that the plan sets out £123.9 million in new funding in 2026/27. The newly funded measures in the plan broadly sum to envelopes set out in the Scottish Budget in January, which in turn reflect the funding originally intended to mitigate the two-child benefit limit. This planned spend was ‘freed up’ by the UK Government’s decision to scrap the two-child limit in December 2025. It is therefore possible to argue that no truly new funding has been committed to the delivery plan.

In aggregate, the scale of new funding is not adequate to meet the scale of the challenge to lift 100,000 more children out of poverty. For example, on employability, our estimate is that — to meet the 2030/31 targets — 50,000 parents would need to move into work at the real living wage, and 20,000 parents would need to increase their hours.

In contrast, the impact assessment for the plan estimates that that No One Left Behind could mean between 3,500 and 12,000 parents achieving sustained employment by 2030/31, with between 1,000 and 1,700 parents improving in-work outcomes. This has been supplemented by new measures on NHS employability and training support initiatives, but the former (while welcome) will only deliver 200 paid work placements for parents, and no information is available on the anticipated reach and impact of the latter.

The measures detailed in the plan

Much of the plan’s content restates existing Government commitments. This includes impactful previous policies and investment, including the Scottish Child Payment. In current fiscal context, protecting and rolling forward this funding is welcome. However, this policy package has delivered modest progress towards child poverty reduction targets and will be insufficient to drive poverty down by 2030/31.

As we set out above, this is not because the package has been less impactful than expected, it also lacked the ambition to make a big dent in the targets (although arguably more so than the current plan). The Scottish Government has confirmed explicitly that, of the 63 actions included in the delivery plan, 31 are continuing actions, and 6 strengthen existing actions.

While it is positive that the plan brings together relevant action from across government, several key policies referenced seek to deliver much broader objectives beyond tackling child poverty. For example, the £926 million allocated to the Affordable Housing Supply Programme will not be targeted at reducing child poverty alone (perfectly defensibly, but the Scottish Government include the full spend as spending on child poverty). Similarly, the around £1 billion per year for 1,140 hours of early learning and childcare (ELC) is not targeted in full on tackling child poverty, as the majority of beneficiaries will not be experiencing poverty (or indeed be close to it).

Again, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for universal spending on childcare (particularly given the high cost to parents) and arguably without the universal nature of the service it may be less likely that less well-off communities would be served by the childcare market. But it is quite a stretch to suggest that every penny spent on the expansion is targeted at child poverty reduction.

For the specific new measures funded through the delivery plan, there is limited evidence of impact on child poverty rates. It is concerning that the Scottish Government has not been able to model the impact on child poverty for the vast majority of new, funded policies in its plan. In some cases, this is due to gaps in evidence; in others, key delivery decisions have not been taken. For example:

• for the full package of measures on Whole Family Support, which totals £94.2 million in 2026/27 including existing spend, the impact assessment says that ‘it will not be possible to quantify the impact of these actions as a whole on the child poverty rate, due to the diverse nature of the activities and the wide-ranging and long-term outcomes for families’
• for £19 million on Transport to Employment, the plan states that ‘until details of initiatives have been outlined as to how transport and employability projects will be implemented either through the People and Place Programme funding mechanism or the No One Left Behind funding mechanism, it is not possible to say what the scale of impact may be’
• for the £10 million Flexible Workforce Development Fund, the impact assessment says: ‘Specific modelling for child poverty has not been undertaken…This is an innovative approach and will require evaluation to quantify and tailor the impact, with the understanding that realisation of outcomes is likely to extend into future years beyond initial implementation’.

The logic behind these commitments is clear, and they are clearly targeted at issues that are connected to the levels of child poverty, but the lack of clarity as to their possible impact, perhaps related to their relatively modest scale, is concerning. There are also things like the social security system, that we know have a direct and effective positive impact on child poverty levels, that are largely untouched by the delivery plan.

In conclusion, Bringing Hope, Building Futures needed to be a radical document that drove our public services, economy and society to a future where child poverty is very low. Unfortunately it did not do that, indeed it was well short of the lofty ambitions of the 2017 Act and rhetorical commitments to eradicating child poverty. The plan should have:

• covered the full period to 31 March 2031 with funded commitments, not just 2026–27
• modelled projections showing a credible pathway to meeting the targets (even if uncertain)
• quantitative impact assessment for the funded measures.

Is there any legal redress for the modest progress made so far?

To explore whether there were any legal routes under the Act to challenge the actions of the Scottish Government thus far, we engaged a King Council (KC) to help us understand the legal obligations under the Act.

The analysis in this section is underpinned by that advice. This is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of the legal position but a relatively high level, and hopefully accessible, summary of how we understand the position.

It is also worth noting a general legal principle in considering such challenges. Courts in Scotland, and across the UK (and other similar legal systems), will show deference to an elected Government where they have been given a clear discretion by the Parliament. This is of course a key plank of our democracy, if governments make decisions that the people they represent do not like, people will vote them out. Put simply, courts should not decide whether they like a decision or not, they decide if such decisions are within the law.

Parliaments do, however, put constraints on government and it is proper for the courts to hold governments to account, via legal analysis and determination, on those constraints. In general, the clearer and more prescriptive a parliament has been on those constraints, the more likely the courts will be to find the government has exceed them when challenged (if it has exceeded them). The opposite is also true, where the parliament has granted wide discretion, the courts will defer to that.

The scope of the plan and the legal requirements of the Act

The first issue that arises is the fact that the delivery plan only covers 1 year, from 2026/27 and not the full 5-year period up to the targets. The Act is clear on this; section 9(1) of the 2017 Act places a duty on the Scottish Government to prepare a delivery plan for the period 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2031. Section 9(2) provides that the delivery plan must set out ‘the measures that the Scottish Ministers¹ propose to take during the period of the plan for the purpose of meeting the child poverty targets’.

It therefore seems clear that a delivery plan that does not cover the period up to the 31 March 2031 is not in compliance with the Act. The ‘framework’ nature of the plan also clearly does not set out the measures the Scottish Government propose to take to meet the targets. The Scottish Government appear to take the view that the election means that they have a justification for not doing so, but the Act does not condition these requirements in any way.

Indeed, at Stage 2 of the Bill’s passage the Scottish Government brought forward amendments to the Bill which were said to be ‘a direct response to the committee’s stage 1 recommendation that delivery plans should coincide with the start of parliamentary sessions…’ and ‘move the end date of the first delivery plan and the start date of the second delivery plan to after the date of the next Scottish elections, which will allow a newly formed Administration to publish a delivery plan that reflects its priorities for the parliamentary session and will ensure that it is not bound by the plans of a previous Government’.

There was no amendment proposed to the end date of the second plan (31 March 2026) because that date ‘already falls after a Scottish election year’. That was true when the Bill was passed: there would have been a Scottish general election in 2025, but the Scottish Elections (Reform) Act 2020 extended the normal Scottish parliamentary term from 4 years to 5 years.

It appears therefore that the intention of the Government (and indeed the intention of the Scottish Parliament) was that the delivery plan would be after an election rather than before one, but no provision has been made for this. In addition, the Scottish Government has known about this timing issue for quite some time and if they had been concerned about it, they could have sought to amend the Act.

We think it is the case that the Scottish Government are in breach of the requirements of the Act as they have not provided a delivery plan that covers the full 5-year period. We also think, however, that the plan may be challengeable on further grounds.

Does the fact that the delivery plan clearly fails, indeed even on the Scottish Government’s own assessment, to commit to measures to meet the targets, breach the requirements of the Act?

Relevant case law

In that context, it is first worth reflecting on similar cases that have been brought elsewhere in the UK relating to targets set by parliaments.

For example, in 2012 the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) brought a challenge against the UK Government as a result of failures relating to the Child Poverty Act 2010 (R (Child Poverty Action Group) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2012] EWHC 2579 (Admin)). CPAG’s challenge failed as it related to the strategy the Secretary of State was required by the Act to lay in front of Parliament.

The High Court of England and Wales concluded that it had to judge the decision on the judicial review grounds of ‘irrationality’, a high bar that they found was not met, and that the UK Parliament’s language had intended ‘judgement and application’ to be available to the UK Government.

While in a different area of policy, it is also worth looking at echoes of the issues relating to child poverty reduction targets and those relating to carbon emission reduction. For example, in 2022 Friends of the Earth brought a judicial review of the UK Government’s ‘Net Zero Strategy’ which was required by the Climate Change Act 2008 (R (Friends of the Earth) v Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy [2023] 1 WLR 225). In that case Friends of the Earth, and others, challenged the UK Government for failure to comply with the demands of sections 13 and 14 of the 2008 Act.

Section 13 required the Secretary of State to bring forward ‘such proposals and policies as the Secretary of State considers will enable the carbon budgets that have been set under this Act to be met’. Linked to that section 14 imposes a duty on the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament a report setting out proposals and policies for meeting the carbon budgets for the current and future budgetary periods.

While again the High Court noted the significant deference that courts will show to Governments on matters of public policy, it did find in favour of the challengers. The court concluded that the Secretary of State had failed to comply with section 13 as they did not have regard to a number of material considerations. These included the risk to the delivery of individual proposals and policies, the relative contributions of individual proposals or policies to achieving carbon budgets, and how any shortfall might be met.

They also concluded that the strategy published under section 14 did not quantitatively explain how the policies and proposals included within it would meet the requirements of carbon reduction.

This can be contrasted with an early challenge by Friends of the Earth to actions of the UK Government to reduce fuel poverty (R (Friends of the Earth) v Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform [2010] HLR 18). In that case, Friends of the Earth’s case was rejected, in part, because of the wording of the relevant legislation (the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000) which said that the UK Government should set out a strategy to ensure ‘that as far as reasonably practicable persons do not live in fuel poverty’. The words in bold are key as they suggest that the parliament were intentionally giving government a broader discretion. They can also be contrasted with the language of the Climate Change Act that obliged ministers to bring forward measures that ‘will enable’ the carbon budgets to be met.

What does this mean in the context of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act?

Firstly, as we note above, we think it is clear (and indeed recognised by the Scottish Government) that the delivery plan does not propose measures that will ensure the targets will be met. Are there, then, possible grounds for judicial review (on top of the failure to comply with the requirements on the scope of the plan noted above)?

Firstly, the targets are unambiguous. By section 1(1) the Scottish Government ‘must ensure… that the targets are met’. There is no conditioning of the targets such as the Scottish Government must ‘make reasonable endeavours’ or be met ‘as far as reasonably practicable’ as in the fuel poverty example above. In short, the Scottish Government have a clear and unambiguous obligation to ensure that the targets are met.

As noted above, section 9(2) prescribes the requirements of the delivery plans and says the Scottish Government must ‘set out’ the measures they propose to take. As set out in the Friends of the Earth challenge relating to the climate targets, the High Court made clear this needs to go beyond simply setting out what the measures are – they must include how those measures contribute to meeting the targets, and quantify that.

The Scottish Government have done so in the past, for example in the Cumulative Impact Assessment for Best Start, Bright Futures, where they modelled falls in all the target measures, but these in fact stayed ‘broadly constant’ from the year 2025/26. They also, though, predicted that relative child poverty would be around 17% whereas it is currently in the low 20s. The Scottish Government also did so with the latest delivery plan but, as we note above, they do not show the targets being met as a result of the delivery plan.

This obligation is arguably more strongly underlined by the provisions of subsections 9(2) and (3) of the Act. Which detail what the delivery plans ‘must set out’ in terms of subsection (2) (quoted above) and then in subsection (3) provide a list of the measures they must set out (‘if any’) on a range of matters such as housing affordability, social security and families with 1 or more protected characteristics.

We take the view that the Act obliges the Scottish Government to set out a plan that contains a range of measures that will meet the 2030/31 targets, and that this should include a quantitative assessment of how they will do so. We also take the view that the delivery plan fails to meet this standard. Of course, the Scottish Government would likely argue that they weren’t obliged to do so as they ‘could not’ do a delivery plan for the 5-year period but for the reasons we set out above, we do not agree with this argument.

They may also argue that the nature of the 2017 Act is different to the earlier Climate Change Act, in that section 13 of that Act says the Secretary of State must have measures that ‘will enable’ the climate budgets to be met, whereas the 2017 Act talks of measures ‘for the purposes of’ ensuring the targets are met. We think this would be straining the natural meaning of these words, the Scottish Parliament we think clearly, as the High Court concluded the UK Parliament did in the climate change example, meant for the delivery plan to set out measures to meet the targets without any significant condition on that requirement.

Of course, as we note above, the courts are likely to defer to the Scottish Government in terms of their discretion on what actions to take and the extent to which those actions would meet the child poverty reduction targets. But we think the Scottish Government have made this argument harder for themselves given the obvious lack of ambition in the latest delivery plan.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Since the passing of the 2017 Act, the Scottish Parliament also passed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 (the UNCRC Act). This incorporates the provisions of the UNCRC so far as they relate to devolved matters into Scots law and imposes obligations on public bodies, including the Scottish Government, relating to the Convention.

The core obligation is framed as making it ‘unlawful…for a public authority to act, or fail to act, in connection with a relevant function in a way which is incompatible with the UNCRC requirements’. A ‘relevant function’ is, crudely, a function which is within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament and conferred by an Act of the Scottish Parliament (or by some Scottish Statutory Instruments). We believe the targets set by the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act and the obligations relating to them would clearly be relevant functions as far as the UNCRC Act is concerned.

There is also relatively little litigation on the UNCRC Act so any such claim would be relatively novel. It is possible, though, that particular Articles such as Articles 26 (on the right to social security) and 27 (on the right of a standard of living to support a child’s development) may be relevant. As well as the more general provisions of Article 3 (that the child’s best interests shall be a primary consideration) and Article 4 (relating to the maximum extent of the state’s resources).

We have not examined these requirements in great detail, as we think there are grounds under the 2017 Act already, but we are interested in exploring how the UNCRC and child poverty interact.

Remedies

If we are correct, what sort of remedies would be available for the Scottish Government’s breach(es) of the 2017 Act? The standard remedy for a judicial review of this nature would be a Declarator. If a court were to accept the grounds of a challenge to a delivery plan, for example, it would likely declare that the Scottish Government were acting unlawfully in failing to meet the obligations under section 9 of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017.

Most likely they would quash (essentially declare unlawful) the latest delivery plan, obliging the Scottish Government to publish a new one. Rightly, the court would not dictate what the delivery plan should say, just that it would have to comply with the requirements of the Act and likely provide useful boundaries for how they would do so.

Conclusion and next steps

The point of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 is ultimately to deliver a transformed Scotland. A place where child poverty is a lot rarer than it is today. That would be a Scotland where those children and their families who need support are more likely to get it. Where every child in our society has the chance to explore their potential and grow up in a society that allows them to learn, build relationships, contribute to their society and have fun.

While bureaucratic requirements of legislation may feel some distance from that vision, they have to become more important than the paper they are written on. They need to be embodied in a determined spirit of government to change the lives for the better of the people that they represent.

We have no great interest in challenging any government in court, we would much rather be arguing for greater improvements in budgets, or policy that is directly helping children and their families today. But this new Scottish Government needs to hold itself to the standards that, we should remember, they were key in setting for themselves.

People in Scotland are demanding better, and our children deserve better. We hope this analysis can spur the Scottish Government to start again and deliver a plan that will strive to meet those poverty reduction targets with every sinew. They may fail, but it is significantly more defensible to fail while trying than it is to throw in the towel.

As a result, we believe the next steps should be:

• that the Scottish Government immediately commit to and deliver a revised Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan that, crucially, commits to action that will meet the targets set by the Act
• if that Delivery Plan similarly fails to show action that would aspire to meeting those targets, in a measurable and credible way, we believe that Plan would also be potentially vulnerable to judicial review.

Note

1. In legislation the collective membership of the Scottish Government is referred to as ‘Scottish Ministers’, this includes the First Minister, the Ministers that they appoint and the Lord Advocate and Solicitor General. In the vast majority of cases in reality, this is just another way of referring to the Scottish Government which we do throughout this document.