Holyrood 2026: Addressing poverty and inequality must be at the top of the agenda

25 September 2025: After joining our 2025 Festival of Politics panel in August, Dr Hayley Bennett shares insights into anti-poverty policymaking ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliamentary elections. She highlights the need for less party-political policymaking, more radical labour market policies, and the impact of the rise of the right in this area.

Blog by Dr Hayley Bennett, University of Edinburgh

For this year’s Scottish Parliament Festival of Politics, I was invited to join the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Public Policy panel exploring the big issues for Holyrood 2026 to discuss poverty and inequality, an issue that needs to remain high on the policy agenda after the next Holyrood elections.

Spatial, race, disability, gender and class-based inequalities persist. The fortune of where you are born and to whom still matters in terms of your life-course, experience of poverty, and labour market opportunities. There are 240,000 children in poverty in Scotland, and relative child poverty in some areas (e.g., Glasgow) sits at 39%. Over the past two decades there’s been consensus in Scotland’s very active and collaborative anti-poverty community that this is a shocking and problematic situation.

Policymakers have been encouraged to develop centre-left or progressive social policy ideas. In practice, this has meant the Scottish Government attempting to soften UK government welfare reform policies, for example via topping up Discretionary Housing Payments and providing guidance to Local Authorities to mitigate the ‘bedroom tax’ and household benefit cap. Furthermore, the Scottish Government’s commitment to address Child Poverty via legislated Child Poverty Reduction Targets and introducing a Scottish Child Payment (an extra £27 a week for some children in some low-income families) goes beyond UK government’s social policy initiatives.

But what Scottish anti-poverty policies will look like and seek to do post 2026, might start to differ from what we’ve seen over the last 10 years. This is for various reasons, but I outline 3 points here:

1. There’s a need for more critical but less party-political policy making

Post 2016 there has been an increase in some devolved powers, so the welfare state in Scotland is now a complex combination of UK and Scottish government policies and services. Over the last ten years the approach in Scotland has arguably been too reactive to Westminster decisions and appear centred on a need to demonstrate ‘Scotland does things differently to England’. Some claims of Scottish difference or generosity have been used strategically in political arguments and at times opportunities for collaboration are stifled by a need to demonstrate difference. For example, DWP and UK government previously raised concerns about political announcements of new Scottish policies preceding practical implementation and data accessibility discussions. This situation creates complexities for people navigating benefits systems and can limit policy imagination. In the Safety Nets project we are examining differences in social security across the UK nations and encouraging policy learning across localities

2. We need more ‘radical’ labour market policies

More focus on labour market issues and working poverty is needed. Workers have experienced a series of crises since 2008 affecting labour markets, incomes, job quality, and job security. Wages in some sectors are not keeping up with inflation or rises in housing, food, and fuel prices. Employment protections are comparatively weak and poorly enforced. Joseph Rowntree Foundation research suggests 60% of working age adults experience poverty and 75% of children in poverty lived in a household where someone was in paid work in Scotland. There is an increase in precarious work, persistent low pay, deep poverty, and high levels of personal debt. More cooperation and learning across the UK nations and localities is required as labour market pressures stretch beyond Scotland’s border and solutions require comprehensive and complementary labour market policies (especially for workforce planning and skills development to enable the UK to transition towards a green economy).

3. The rise of the far right could disrupt anti-poverty policies

Improved multi-level collaboration and more radical anti-poverty policies are needed for Scotland to properly address poverty. However, this might be ‘tricky’ if there is a continued rise of the far right. Right-wing parties have alternative views of social security and employment policies than the Scottish anti-poverty policy community. They often advocate for reduced social spending, and/or more chauvinistic welfare models that focus on providing social security for only certain workers and family units. Research shows that supporters of right-wing parties hold the least accurate knowledge on the economy and welfare state, while at the same time hold strong anti-welfare views and support privatisation. Furthermore, 60% of people attracted to voting for the Reform Party believe that welfare benefits are already too generous. The multi-level nature of our welfare state means that Scottish policymakers need to pay attention to the rise of right-wing parties both here and across the UK.

There is not only a moral imperative, but there are also vital economic and democratic reasons to halt the rise of poverty and inequality. The strength of the anti-poverty community in Scotland, who are collaborating to organise the upcoming Scotland Demands Better March and Rally on 25 October, offers some hope that the tranche of MSPs elected to Holyrood in 2026 will focus on bold and radical approaches to achieve this, which might require new approaches for intergovernmental working and difficult discussions to address political polarisation.

Author

Dr Hayley Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh. She is also Co-I and Scotland lead of the Safety Nets project, and incoming Co-director of the Centre for Constitutional Change.

^{Image of Scottish Parliament by Liz Leyden from Getty Images Signature via Canva Pro}