The impact of the Scottish Child Payment on the need for food banks

Description

Conference presentation in Poverty & Inequality I session.

The Scottish Child Payment (SCP) was introduced in February 2021 and plays a key role in the Scottish Government's strategies to reduce child poverty and food insecurity. Understanding the effects of SCP is important both for informing further Scottish social policy and to explore policy options for the rest of the UK.

In this paper, we use administrative data from the Trussell Trust's network of food banks from 2019-2023 to analyse the effects of SCP on food insecurity in Scotland. We use microeconometric methods of causal analysis, including difference-in-differences and event study models, and leverage the variation in the age range of children eligible for SCP and increases in the payment amount to evaluate how SCP affected food bank usage by selected types of households.

We find evidence that SCP decreased food bank usage across some, but not all, groups of households with children in the eligible age range. Household groups where we find a statistically significant decrease in food bank usage include single-adult households with children 0-4, as well as households with children aged 5-16 without younger children. The effects are largest in late 2022 and early 2023, after the SCP payment amount was raised to £25 per week, per child. There is some more limited evidence of a decrease in food bank usage for large households (those with 3+ children) with children aged 0-4 after the increase in the payment.

These results are based on a short time period following the introduction and full roll-out of SCP. We therefore encourage the interpretation of these results as preliminary evidence, where further research may show a larger or more widespread impact. Continued monitoring and evaluation of the effects of SCP is therefore warranted, alongside explorations of how households have used the SCP payments since the benefit was introduced.

Period	5 Jul 2024
Event title	Social Policy Association Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Glasgow, United KingdomShow on map