Poverty in Scotland is a continuing crisis in our communities. It affects people where you live – whether that’s your village, town or city, your neighbourhood, your street, or your own house.

Figures from our new Poverty in Scotland 2026 report show that just under one million people in Scotland are in poverty, including around one in five children. Three quarters of children are in a working household. These figures are far too high, and political efforts to tackle this need radical change.

In 2017, the Scottish Parliament passed legally binding targets to cut child poverty to below 10 per cent by 2030/31. Scotland is on course to miss this by miles, and the Scottish Government’s plan to review the targets risks reversing what progress there has been.

To make a real difference to the lives of people in Scotland, and to be in with a chance of meeting any meaningful new child poverty reduction targets, significant action that goes well beyond the limited measures included in the recent Programme for Government is needed. Our houses, the economy we work in, and our social security system must change for the better.

This further action cannot wait for the outcome of the review of the targets. Families and children are in urgent need today, and any attempt to kick the can down the road is unfair to them and politically dangerous. Governments at all levels must work together and step up to this challenge, or people will continue to feel disaffected and let down by politicians.

As part of our report, we commissioned the Diffley Partnership to survey more than 3,300 adults in Scotland about their use and experience of local services, as well as their opinions on local government and how it is funded.

This found broad agreement that councils are underfunded, with two thirds of people agreeing their local authority receives too little funding to provide the services needed in their area, with little variation by household income.

In its planned public service reforms, the Scottish Government and councils have the chance to work hand in hand with local communities to radically redesign how public services are delivered, placing poverty reduction and people at the centre.

Public service reforms cannot be dictated from far away and focused solely on savings and bureaucracy, or they will fail. The Scottish Government has called eradicating child poverty its defining purpose, and if it is, it should be at the heart of public service reform.

Focusing on incremental savings from merging administrative functions will not provide the radical improvement needed. Organisations will simply become defensive and look inward at structure and headcount, rather than outward at the people they exist to serve. If poverty reduction becomes the guiding mission for reform, this will free up councils to deliver for their communities.

There also needs to be a resetting of the dysfunctional relationship between local and national government – one of the key factors behind Scotland missing its interim targets on child poverty – along with reform of council funding.

Local delivery has been hampered by budgets stretched to breaking point, rigid ringfencing, and a slew of small-scale, short-term pilots instead of a coherent, long-term national programme.

These conditions mean that in too many places, council services and functions are not having an impact at the scale needed to reduce poverty, and action plans are divorced from the reality of the experiences of people in poverty. In some places, the fire has gone out of efforts to prevent poverty, with the tough fiscal position used as a rationale.

This disconnect is not simply due to underperformance in Scotland’s town halls. Years of austerity, shifting goalposts from the Scottish Government, single-year budgets, and an ever-blooming number of strategies mean councils are often acting with one hand tied behind their back.

Equally, this is not malignance on the part of the Scottish Government. Like councils, they are striving to undo the damage that austerity has done, but too often identify short-term solutions to longer-term issues.

Councils’ core responsibilities – including childcare, social care, social work, public transport, employability support, and economic development – are essential for poverty prevention. Too often, gaps in these services are the structural barriers that keep people out of good jobs and stand in the way of a better life.

However councils might be reformulated, they need to be empowered to transform local economies, keeping wealth in them and focusing on those who need things to change the most – not least families where someone is disabled, or single parent households.

For the required radical reshaping of public services to be effective, we can’t have our heads in the sand about funding. Inadequate levels of funding are at the core of declining faith in councils, and need to be a central part of any reforms.

Clearly, doing the work needed to reshape Scotland’s public services to lift tens of thousands of children out of poverty won’t be easy, but that can’t be an excuse not to try.

Our work shows that there are possible seeds of recovery and inspiration for better ways of working. There are opportunities to use data, adopt new delivery models, and improve communication to make services work better for people in poverty. There are people working for and with councils in our communities that people trust.

These include teachers, school or nursery staff, and local charity workers, who people said they could rely on to help them or a family member if they were struggling to get by.

If public service reform is to be the engine of the Scottish Government’s national mission to eradicate child poverty, it must put people in these roles and the people they work with at its heart.

Chris Birt is associate director for Scotland at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation