Scottish Churches Parliamentary Office, Edinburgh - Briefing Document Twelve

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Parliamentary Officer:Rev Graham Blount
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Briefing Document No 12 - Page 1 of 6

Good News for the Poor? The Scottish Executive's First Social Justice Annual Report

The media hardly noticed the publication of the Scottish Executive's first annual report on social justice or its debate in Parliament - partly, no doubt, because poverty is only news when it can be packaged in blatantly shocking or sentimental ways, but mainly because there was nothing very new, surprising or even controversial about it. In one sense, that represents a considerable achievement, of bringing social justice back to the centre of political debate (a commitment seen as representing Donald Dewar's legacy), building an element of consensus about it (with all the parties at least talking its language), and making the commitment to targets and milestones with an annual report on progress towards these.

(During the Parliamentary debate, a "distinguished academic" was quoted as saying "These are impressive documents not least because nothing like this has ever been attempted nor have policy makers been so explicit about such a varied range of objectives against which they can be judged. It takes courage to do this. The reports show great determination over a wide range of areas of government activity and also show other agencies what they need to be concentrating on".)

When that commitment was made last year, we were promised (for spring 2000) an Action Plan which would set out the programme towards achieving the targets. What appeared were two brief "action notes" (in June and August), listing the range of policies relevant to the targets and emphasising the commitment to "empowering communities".

Now we have the first annual report, published with a substantial supplement on how the indicators of progress are being measured. Efforts are being made to provide much deeper and more detailed data on poverty in Scotland; but there remain large gaps, and many of the available measurements have not been in place long enough to provide evidence of trends.

Executive Strategy

In the Parliamentary debate on the annual report, the Executive claimed to be "passionate for change", and headlined new jobs and the fall in unemployment:
· their main measure for poverty is 60% of median income;
· it was claimed there are 20 measures of poverty, of which 19 are "moving in the right direction";
· child poverty down by 40,000 in one year;
· a new stress on rural poverty, evidenced by a working group set up by Ross Finnie;
· recognition of the need to build community empowerment into strategy - "Building strong thriving communities is central to our social justice approach. The Executive will support communities to take ownership of their own futures. We want people to speak for themselves and to devolve decision-making on services down to the people who need them."