Worrying increases in child poverty in Ayrshire will only get worse because of the pandemic, health bosses have warned.
Lynne McNiven, director of public health at NHS Ayrshire and Arran, provided a ‘sobering’ report into the rising cases of child poverty in the area to Ayrshire and Arran Health Board on Monday.
All three Ayrshire local authority areas are higher than the national average — with North Ayrshire second only to Glasgow — with 27.9 percent of children in relative poverty in 2019/20.
That is a rise of 3.2 percent in five years.
East Ayrshire sits fourth in the table at 27.3 percent — an increase of 2.9 percent since 2014/15. South Ayrshire is in 11th position 24.8 percent a rise of 2.2 percent.
Ms McNiven said that its work to tackle child poverty had been stymied by the pandemic and will make the situation worse both in the short and long term.
She added that the pandemic had also given the authorities an unexpected but valuable insight into cases of poverty that may have otherwise been missed previously.
“Every local authority has seen child poverty increase since 2015. It is worrying that the pandemic will also make a huge dent in that and potentially accelerate that increase," Ms McNiven said.
Both the NHS and councils were working closely to address the problem, she told the health board.
“We must remember this is about families not just children," Ms McNiven added.
Board chair Lesley Bowie, pointed to a national statistic that 75 percent of children lived in households with marginal, low or very low food security.
“Of all the numbers, and I know we are doing lots of good work, that is the one that struck me,” she said. “That 75 percent don’t have security of having food on the table.”
The figure wasn’t surprising, the public health director said, because they had seen it when dealing with families on other matters during the pandemic.
She said: “We have been taking a lot of opportunities to work with families [during the pandemic] who have been highlighted through exclusion, self isolation from school etc.
“The problem has became more apparent through contact tracing. We are dealing with an awful lot of families, so it is not surprising, as we see it on a day-to-day basis.
“Families are genuinely having issues with keeping food in house.”
NHS Ayrshire and Arran Interim chief executive Hazel Borland said that the report was ‘important’ and should be a foundation to efforts to tackle the issue.
“It is a very sobering report," Ms Borland said. "But it gives us a focus to take a population health approach toward making this situation better. This has to be the foundation for that.”
Ms Borland also highlighted another statistic that show that two-thirds of children living in poverty were from families with one or more parents in work.”
“I think we make a lot of assumptions that when one or more parents are in work, that things are tickety-boo. We have to recognise that this is not the case.
“The impact of the pandemic has been huge and it is going to take a significant length of time for our families and our communities to really recover from that.”
Ms McNiven added: “It simply means that where you have children in a family, you much more likely to suffer poverty. It can make it more difficult to work, has more impact on household income, food, heating etc.”
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