News & Views

Scotland has made a bold and moral commitment: to end child poverty by 2030. This mission, backed by progressive social support, reflects the values of a nation striving for fairness and dignity. But if we are serious about delivering on this promise, we must confront a deeper truth: poverty is not just a social issue – it is an economic one. And to eradicate it, we must transform the structures of our economy.

Behind the statistics lie real lives shaped by exclusion and powerlessness. Poverty is not only about income. It’s about lacking assets, savings, and a meaningful stake in an economy that often feels rigged against those with the least. It is embedded in how our economy functions, and only through systemic reform can it be effectively addressed.

Scotland’s Child Poverty Act enshrines statutory targets to reduce both relative and absolute child poverty. First Minister John Swinney has made this his government’s number one mission, pledging to use every policy lever available. Yet despite these vital supports, the economic tide continues to flow away from workers, families, and communities.

Over decades, the share of national income going to labour has steadily declined, while profits and capital gains have surged. This is not just inequality. It is economic injustice rooted in ownership and extraction. Poverty persists not simply because welfare is underfunded, but because the economy is structured to concentrate wealth and power in too few hands.

If we want to end child poverty, we must change how wealth is created and distributed in the first place. That means embracing Community Wealth Building (CWB) – a practical and transformative approach to economic development that ensures wealth is generated, retained, and circulated locally.

CWB is built on five pillars: plural ownership of the economy, local and social procurement, fair employment, shared ownership of land and property, and locally rooted finance. It’s about giving communities real power over the wealth they help create. It aligns naturally with anti-poverty policy by ensuring that prosperity flows to workers, families, and neighbourhoods, not away from them.

But CWB is not just about redistribution, it’s about growing prosperity from the ground up. By retaining and circulating wealth within communities, CWB helps to make the economic pie bigger, ensuring that more people benefit from economic activity and that local and national economies become more resilient and dynamic. It’s a strategy for investment in innovation and dynamism, not just fairness.

Scotland’s history is marked by economic extraction. From the Highland Clearances to the North Sea oil boom, wealth has too often flowed out of communities rather than being reinvested in them. Today, we see the same pattern in our renewable energy sector. Scotland’s winds, tides, and sun could power a just transition, but much of the profit still flows offshore. By deepening economic democracy – through municipal and community ownership of wind farms, solar co-ops, and community hydro schemes – we can keep revenues local and reinvest in early-years services, youth programmes, and fuel-poverty relief.

This is not just about fairness, it’s about economic sovereignty. Who owns Scotland’s wealth? Who decides how it is used? These are fundamental questions of power and accountability. If we are to build a more resilient and inclusive economy, we must ensure that wealth is rooted in local ownership, community control, and democratic governance, not concentrated in distant boardrooms or shaped by decisions made far from the communities they affect.

The proposed Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill, introduced earlier this year, marks a historic opportunity. If passed, it will place a statutory duty on local authorities to produce place-based CWB action plans, aligning economic development, investment, land use, workforce strategy, and finance with community needs. Crucially, the Bill also places new obligations on public bodies to actively support and deliver these plans. The Scottish Government itself will be required to publish a national strategy, signalling a whole-of-government commitment to embedding community-rooted wealth creation into the heart of Scotland’s economic development agenda.

This legislation could bind child-poverty ambitions to community-rooted economic reform. Scotland would move from treating symptoms to transforming the economy itself.

To ensure every child in Scotland has the essentials to thrive, we must unite rights-based social policy with the structural force of economic democracy. Community Wealth Building is our roadmap. It guarantees that every family, worker, child, and community not only receives a fair share of resources but also holds genuine ownership in the wealth we create together.

This is not just about ending poverty, it is about building a democratic economy where prosperity is shared, power is distributed, and every child grows up in a Scotland that truly belongs to them.  This is the kind of economy we must choose, not one that replicates the inequalities of the past, but one that gives every citizen a stake in our shared future.

Neil McInroy is chair of the Economic Development Association Scotland (EDAS) and global lead for community wealth building at The Democracy Collaborative