Child Poverty Bill passes stage 1
The Scottish Government's bill setting targets to tackle child poverty has been unanimously approved at its first stage by the Scottish Parliament.
MSPs agreed without a division to the general principles of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Bill, which contains targets to reduce the number of children experiencing the effects of poverty by 2030.
It requires the Government to publish a three-year child poverty delivery plan by April 2018, which will be updated every five years, and annual reports to measure progress.
In its stage 1 report on the bill, Holyrood's Social Security Committee criticised the targets as too long range, and also called for interim targets to be set in order to create the necessary sense of urgency and focus.
Taking up this point in the debate, Equalities Secretary Angela Constance, agreed that interim targets would be useful, but argued: "My concern about setting out the specific interim targets in the bill is that that would come prior to eminently sensible and crucial work being completed.
"As I will outline, I will bring forward measures to ensure parliamentary scrutiny of interim targets but, given that we know that child poverty in Scotland and in the UK is projected to rise, we need to do work now on the implications of the child poverty level rising to 5 million children in the UK. What will the impact of that be in Scotland and what increases will we expect to see? An important piece of work has to be done and we must be led by evidence in that and in all such work."