Child poverty, NHS waiting lists and government spending: BBC Scottish leaders’ debate fact checked

The leaders of five of Scotland’s political parties went head-to-head on Tuesday 11 June in a BBC Debate Night special. 

The Full Fact team, some of whom are based in Glasgow, ‘live fact checked’ the debate. Here’s a round-up of some of the claims we looked at. 

Child poverty 

Scottish First Minister and SNP leader John Swinney claimed the Scottish Child Payment—a weekly payment of £26.70 issued to eligible low income families for each child under 16—is “keeping 100,000 children out of poverty”. The co-leader of the Scottish Green party, Lorna Slater, also seemed to refer to this figure. 

It appears to come from modelling which estimates that 100,000 children will be kept out of relative poverty in 2024/25 due to Scottish government policies. The modelling suggests 60,000 of those children will be kept out of relative poverty specifically because of the Scottish Child Payment. 

There are different ways to measure poverty, which we’ve written about before.

NHS waiting lists

The number of people in Scotland on NHS waiting lists was also discussed at several points in the debate. 

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said 840,000 Scots are on an NHS waiting list, and also claimed that amounts to one in six Scots, while Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Alex Cole-Hamilton referred to one in seven Scots being on waiting lists. However it’s unclear what any of those claims are based on, because Public Health Scotland (PHS) doesn’t publish data on the number of unique patients waiting for treatment. 

Scottish Labour has previously told us that Mr Sarwar’s estimate adds together PHS figures on the number of waits for outpatient appointments, inpatient admissions and eight key diagnostic tests, which is then divided by Scotland’s population.

But PHS has warned these figures “should not be added together to determine the proportion of the total population waiting for these types of care”, because individual patients may be counted more than once if they’re waiting for multiple appointments or admissions. 

£18 billion ‘public spending cuts’ 

Finally, Mr Swinney referred several times to “£18 billion of public spending cuts” coming after the election, whichever party forms the next government at Westminster. 

This figure seems to be based on an Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimate in February, in advance of the Spring Budget, of the real-terms reductions in spending unprotected government departments could face by 2028/29. 

In May, however, the IFS said there’s uncertainty around this figure, because there are no published plans beyond this year. It said: “Precisely how big those cuts are depends on what happens to the ‘protected’ areas (such as health and defence), among other things. 

“The whole point is, there are no published plans beyond this year, meaning that we do not know. A reasonable estimate is that unprotected budgets face cuts of between 1.9% and 3.5% per year (or between £10 and £20 billion by 2028–29).”

Image courtesy of the BBC.