Gordon Brown has told how poverty-stricken parents in his home town need donations of school uniforms and food this Christmas instead of presents.
Volunteers at the Cottage Family Centre in Kirkcaldy have seen the number of children in the town needing their support over the festive period rise from 100 in 2011 to 1600 this year.
Traditionally, poor families in the area have been given donations of presents in December.
But writing an article for the Sunday Mail, former prime minister Brown, 70, said parents are now asking for help to ensure their children are properly kitted out for school, as well as food and help with energy bills.
Brown, PM from 2007 to 2010, chancellor from 1997 to 2007 and former MP for Dunfermline East and later Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, said the gap between rich and poor has never been greater.
More than 20 school uniform banks – similar to food banks – have been set up in Scotland in recent years, including in Glasgow, Paisley, Livingston and Edinburgh.
The Back to School Bank in Thornliebank, near Glasgow, gave 209 outfits to local children in 2019 free of charge, with demand increasing last year as the coronavirus pandemic struck.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote:
"This Thursday, scores of volunteers will take time off work, fill up their cars with hampers and between them undertake a day of deliveries of Christmas gifts to the homes of 1600 of Kirkcaldy’s poorest children.
A remarkable annual effort sponsored by local businesses and generous individuals that the dedicated staff of the town’s Cottage Family Centre are mounting is designed to make sure that every child in the town has a Christmas present
All over the country, volunteers with big hearts are giving their time to make Christmas come alive for children in families struggling to make ends meet.
And like the Kirkcaldy volunteers they are attempting to buck the bleak national picture under which an estimated one child in every five will receive no Christmas presents, and another one in five families will plunge themselves into unpayable debt that will haunt them for years to get the gifts to bring their kids some cheer on Christmas day.
This is Christmas 2022 in Covid-stricken Scotland, where the divide between rich and poor has grown so wide that for many, Christmas is not to be looked forward to because of what you can give and receive but to be dreaded because there is nothing to give or get.
For its not just the Omicron variant that is cancelling Christmas for many people - it’s poverty.
Ten years ago, I was one of many volunteers who helped Kirkcaldy’s Family Centre deliver Christmas toys to 100 children who were the towns most in need
But by 2018 that number had risen dramatically - over 1000 - as wave after wave of social security cuts hit families hard.
But in the last three years, there’s been an even bigger step change in the incidence of family poverty and now there are 1600 local children referred to the family centre as in need of help.
What’s changed ever more is what families need to get them through.
While ten years ago it was the extras - toys, games and sports kits - that were the focus of the Christmas drop, now it is more basic needs that have to be met: food to get families through Christmas time, clothes for children who have been going to school ill-clad as well as hungry, and help with heating and keeping the lights and electricity on.
Steak pies are a favourite festive meal but many families the Cottage helps do not have cookers.
Once there were grants when domestic violence made mothers homeless and they needed cookers and fridges after they and their children had to flee the family home.
Now for many families without cookers, the only hot meal their children get is fish and chips - and the Christmas meal has to be cold meats that don’t need heated up.
And for many its getting worse. Last week I saw Fife charity workers round up supplies to furnish a home which had nothing - no bedding, no chairs, no kitchen utensils.
Often Cottage family centre staff are called out because of emergencies where power has been cut off to the family home.
But this year, thanks to the kindness of local people and locally based firms, from the biggest like Amazon and the Co-Op and Scotmid to the smallest corner shop, the Cottage Family Centre and other great local charities are not only helping more families than ever before but providing hampers big enough to feed people through the ten days of Christmas.
Realistically local charity, no matter how generous, will not enough to make up for the £1,000 a year most families on Universal Credit are losing after a £6billion overall cut in family spending power that has taken £30million out of Fife’s local economy and leaves Kirkcaldy’s poorest areas rivalling Glasgow as among the areas in Britain with the worst pockets of urban deprivation.
Many families have been hard hit by the UK Government’s two-child rule which means that a third child receives nothing if you apply Universal Credit.
They’ve been hurt by the ceiling on housing benefit payments that no longer cover the rent and most have lost money when they move over to Universal Credit.
The £20 a week child payment proposed by the Scottish Government cannot compensate for the cuts that people have faced -and still one in every three children will be in poverty, hence the increasing demand on Kirkcaldy Food Bank and other local charities.
The vast majority - more than two out of three - of the children in poverty are in families with their breadwinner in work.
In the homes I visit, the mothers I meet are studying at college or doing part-time work, sometimes juggling two or three jobs, and even then struggling to make ends meet.
For with the coal industry gone and our historic linoleum industry now employing only 100 workers, Kirkcaldy does not have the higher paying jobs that are more available in the cities and the commuter suburbs and dormitory towns for Edinburgh and Dundee.
Every dimension of Scotland’s poverty divide is now widening as a result.
Only this week, Scottish Government figures showed that the gap in literacy and numeracy skills between the poorest and the richest in society has shot up.
Of course the pandemic has had a major impact but we are not powerless to act.
If we set our minds to it and made the eradication of child poverty our national priority, we could right now slash the poverty gap and help thousands of children enjoy the start in life to which they should be entitled.
We cannot have another Christmas like this. Covid can, we hope, be gone by next Christmas but if nothing is done dire poverty will remain. 2022 must be the year when we act , for the sake of all our children."
