SCOTTISH families are being forced to choose whether to “heat or eat,” the Poverty Truth Commission said yesterday.

Its new report Turning Up the Volume On Poverty concludes that welfare cuts are “breaking people’s spirits” and said the scale of the problem in Scotland, one of the richest countries in the world, is “a scandal.”

The commission — made up of people struggling against poverty in their daily lives, along with religious, political and community leaders — will meet in Glasgow today to reveal the human stories on which it is based.