A few weeks ago, hundreds of anxious Fife mothers queued outside their local Co-ops.
They’d received messages from staff of a Kirkcaldy Family Centre who had raised a special fund to help with heating bills.
Because of the donations, a £25 credit was added to each of their 400 gas and electricity
pre-payment cards.
Already, charity is having to step in to take the place of a diminished welfare state.
No longer is the safety net provided by the Government – the last resort is food banks, family centres and voluntary organisations doing what they can to counter rising hardship.
But even philanthropy is not enough to stem the poverty every family centre and every food bank across Scotland is now having to deal with.
I’ve heard stories I never thought I’d hear in 2022 – children obsessively checking the electricity meter and embarrassed mothers keeping their children off school because they can’t give their kids the money for the inevitable extras.
And then the families falling deeper into debt and in fear of ever more threatening loan sharks or homes with no cookers and parents unable to offer children even one hot meal a week.
This is Scotland 2022. And it’s getting worse. When I was growing up, unemployment was the greatest scourge.
Now, the tentacles of poverty extend wider, with the majority of poor children in families where someone is working, with low-paid and child poverty exceeding 40 per cent in some communities.
I’ve highlighted how mothers desperate to keep their children from the freezing cold but afraid to turn up the heating are trying to get hold of sheets, blankets, pillows, duvet covers – anything that will keep their children warm on a cold winter’s night.
As food bills rise and fuel bills go through the roof, we might have expected our two governments to respond speedily and with compassion.
As the Scottish Government admits, higher heating bills alone will soon condemn 874,000 poor households to fuel poverty – an increase of 43 per cent since 2019.
Even more alarming, the number of families descending into extreme fuel poverty is almost doubling from 360,000 to 593,000.
And yet even when facing shocking increases in suffering, neither the UK nor Scottish government is doing enough. The Tories are guilty of a quadruple hit on hard-pressed families – cuts in the value of benefits, combined with National Insurance and other tax rises, and only limited support as gas bills and food bills rocket upwards, forcing thousands more into poverty.
But the Scottish Government has also failed. By refusing to do enough to help those in greatest need, they are compounding, not correcting, the mistakes of the UK Government.
The Scottish Government is introducing a child poverty payment from April but the £20 a week is for children under six and not enough when the bills for food and heating alone are rising by more than that.
Ministers could have done so much more to stem the tide of rising poverty.
Thanks to the extra powers delivered to the parliament, Finance Secretary Kate Forbes could have designed her own plan for Scotland. Yet she repeated the inequitable UK measures almost word for word.
She offered a council tax reduction of £150 for households in Bands A, B, C, and D.
Households in those bands get the same deductions no matter how much they earn or how big their property.
It means someone on as much as £2000 a week in the higher band will get the same help as someone on £200 a week in the lowest.
This was almost a carbon copy of Tory plans from Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
For the poorest households, that £150 rebate – worth £3 a week – cannot make the difference between managing through this crisis and the desolation of not being able to turn up the heating.
If, as the Record’s Paul Hutcheon showed last month, resources had been directed to the half a million poorest families in Scotland, the SNP could have given them not £150 but £600 each, wiping out almost all the fuel bill increase.
So when it comes to failing on fairness, the Scottish Government can’t just blame Westminster.
For years, they have pleaded for the right to do things differently and then immediately upon having the chance they do the same as the Tories.
It’s clear what should be done.
Firstly, link up with the mayors in England, the first minister in Wales and all sections of decent opinion in Scotland and Britain to demand a UK-wide change of policy on tax, benefit levels and heating help.
One demand all could unite around is to restore the £20-a-week Universal Credit uplift taken from six million families a few months ago – worth £1000 a year.
But the Scottish Government must also fundamentally change their own plan that will leave already poor people even poorer.
They should at least double the money they have so far made available, directing the bulk of funds as the Record demands to the poorest and frailest who need it most.
And they should offer enhanced winter protection for the near one million families in Scotland falling into fuel poverty this winter.
I’d go further to guarantee a total payment of at least £1000 more this year.
One mother told the Poverty Alliance campaign that she was unable to buy her children winter clothes and shoes.
She went on: “My kids see me crying and it affects them.”
The tears across Scotland are already flowing – and that is even before the higher heating and food costs hit families across Scotland.
Nothing less than a U-turn from both the Scottish and British governments will prevent this winter of suffering from becoming the cruellest spring of all.
Time is running out for both governments to change course – and they should do so now.
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