Child poverty has a “corrosive” impact on a child’s life chances, states Tam Baillie, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People.
“As long as we have children who are living in poverty, their life chances and their rights are significantly compromised,” he says.
Baillie and the UK Children’s Commissioners recently came together to produce a midterm report on the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in which they identified the high levels of persistent child poverty as an ongoing concern and called for an “urgent reassessment” of the impact of the Coalition Government’s Spending Review on the needs of vulnerable children. They noted that in their 2008 report, they had stated that it was “unacceptable” that a country as wealthy as the UK had 3.8 million children – one in three – living in relative poverty. That figure has not changed, they say, and in fact there is now a “very real danger” that it will increase.
Click here to read the full interview in Holyrood Magazine, published 20 December 2011