CHARITIES have cast doubt on whether the Scottish government has done enough to tackle child poverty.

The independent Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said in its report published today that an average of 230,000 children – around a quarter of all Scottish youngsters – have been living in poverty between 2014 to last year.

Of this number, 90,000 were in a family where someone – usually an adult – is disabled or has a debilitating condition.

Meanwhile 30,000 youngsters were living in a family where one adult – usually the mother – was not economically active, with a further 30,000 children in single-parent households also affected.

Over 15,000 children of lone parents who worked part-time were in poverty, as were almost 15,000 children of couples where one worked full time and the other worked part-time, the report added.

The SNP-led government has not taken the “decisive steps” needed to vastly reduce these numbers through “transformational change,” the charity said in publishing its Poverty in Scotland 2018 report.

Laws passed unanimously by Holyrood last year set a number of targets, including reducing numbers of children in relative poverty to just one in 10 and absolute poverty to 5 per cent by 2030.

JRF said there needed to be more link-up between poverty strategies and labour market strategies to include provision of flexible work and childcare, and its report demanded changes to the British government’s Universal Credit (UC) benefit system.

It warned that the UC system to be rolled out across Britain would result in “more families, especially lone parents, [to be] likely to face higher rates of poverty in and out of work.”

Child poverty across Scotland fell in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the report added that since 2010 that trend had been reversed “mainly due to UK government-imposed social security cuts.”

SNP ministers have already pledged to increase free childcare to 1,140 hours a year for all three- and four-year-olds, and some two-year-olds, by the end of this Parliament.

But the report said: “It is yet to be seen whether the Scottish government’s expanded offer of free childcare to parents of three- and four-year-olds will help to transform women’s labour market participation in ways needed to reduce child poverty and close the gender pay gap.”