Child poverty is "the worst it's been for a long time", with debts owed to the public purse for things like school meals and council tax pushing families further into destitution a leading charity has warned.

Aberlour is a children's charity which works to help kids and their families overcome poverty, disadvantage and discrimination.

As The Herald launches a special investigation into child poverty, the group is calling for a radical rethink on how public debt is managed.

Aberlour chief executive SallyAnn Kelly told The Herald: "The situation is the worst it’s been for a long time and it’s getting even worse.

“We hear people speaking every day about the cost of living crisis, and one of the things I’d say is that many families have been held in a cost of living crisis for many, many years.

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“There are a number of families now experiencing debt at a level they’ve never experienced before, and often for the first time.

“What we see is the deeply-entrenched inequality getting worse, more families coming in and out of real hardship based on their financial and income circumstances.

“The majority of families we work with are in paid employment, and they find it very difficult to make ends meet. Generally they’re in precarious employment which means they don’t have a lot of certainty in their lives, so they sometimes drop in and out of severe hardship depending on how many hours a week they’re able to work and what their income level is as a consequence of that.

"There’s a fund we operate called the Urgent Assistance Fund and we’ve really tried to maximise the amount of money we can pay from that because the demand on that fund has risen exponentially since Covid.

“What we saw during Covid, and beyond actually, is families who come back on a repeat basis looking for support for very basic essentials: food, clothing, money for electricity and gas.

“We looked beyond what that was about and saw that a lot of the families are basically paying debt to public bodies: the DWP, local authorities.

“So before even start they’re already an average of £80 per month down.

"75% of debt was to public bodies, so we’re not talking about families running up debt with private companies or catalogues, in the main, it’s historic rent arrears, historic council tax arrears, school meal debt, loads to the DWP.

“If we, as a country, give a commitment to our people about a minimum baseline then we need to have some soul-searching questions of public bodies – how ethical, or moral, it is to take already impoverished families deeper into poverty and destitution?

“We have to ask whether or not we as a country, at a UK and a Scottish level, could do that differently and support those families more compassionately.

SallyAnn Kelly, Chief Executive of Aberlour TrustSallyAnn Kelly, Chief Executive of Aberlour Trust "On a very pragmatic level, we know that if families end up in poverty they’re much more likely to experience other difficulties and adversities – they cost the state more.

“So there’s no economic or moral sense in this model that we currently operate, it’s a very punitive approach to some of the poorest families and that’s a big issue for us at a UK and a Scottish level."

The figures are stark.

More than one in four children in Scotland are living in poverty, with the numbers are high as one in three in some of the nation's poorest communities.

Public debt is a key factor in entrenching and increasing child poverty, with 55% of families with children in receipt of Universal Credit having public debt, costing them an average of nearly £1,000 per year.

One in seven who have received support from Aberlour's Urgent Assistance fund have needed help with unsustainable public debt, with 30,000 families hold school meal debt.

Ms Kelly says: "People get locked into significant financial hardship and difficulties as a consequence of this, and there are many reasons people have accumulated this debt.

“I think there’s this notion that somehow it’s their own fault, ‘if they didn’t pay their rent what did they expect?’ but there are lots of complex processes at play here.

“For example, the way Universal Credit operates there’s a waiting period where people get a loan – but if you accept that Universal Credit is the absolute baseline of where you should be, you’re already running at a disadvantage by having to wait for the benefit AND having to take a loan which you then need to repay once you get the benefit through.

“In Scotland there’s a 20 year recovery period for debt in the public sector, it’s a much shorter period down south which is equivalent to private sector debt.

"It’s about transforming the political rhetoric that we hear at a national level which talks about compassion, eradication of poverty and supporting children into a practical reality.

“There are practical things that we, as a country, could be doing as a Scottish level and very significant things we could be doing at a UK level.”

Study after study has shown the link between poverty and negative social outcomes - 'poverty begets poverty' being a common refrain.

Ms Kelly says: "It’s not inevitable, that’s what I’d say to you. I’m one of six children, I was brought up by two parents and I don’t know if you’ve seen the Billy Connolly sketch but it’s like that – I didn’t know I was poor.

“Even in the late 1960s and the early 70s there was a social construct around things like free university education, there were opportunities I was able to take as a child and a young person that had never previously been open to people in my family and are now closing again.

“Albeit we’ve got free university tuition in Scotland, we don’t have grants, we have loans. So young people are going through university and coming out the end of it with significant debts.

“All of that impacts more unfairly on people who don’t have money at their disposal, so the notion of even accumulating student loan debt is a much bigger obstacle for poorer kids to overcome than it would be for families like mine.

“So it’s not inevitable, and the state can do things to support opportunities for children who come from the poorest communities and the poorest families.

"Previously you could have found that in your community centres or your local shopping centres, some of what we’ve done over the past 15 years is rip that out of communities because of funding issues and decisions that have been made that are financially driven but have had a really negative impact on communities.

“That sense of community has been eroded, and that never worked for everybody but I live in Ayrshire, and I look at mining villages across Ayrshire and the history of those mining communities – they’ve had the heart and soul ripped out of them.

"I think we need not to be afraid to say the old adage ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ – what does that look like for Scotland?

"We know the family is the unit that is most impactful in terms of the children’s behaviour, their readiness to learn, their engagement with education and all of that. Support is too often focused in school, in quite an isolated way, so what we need to understand is that if you give families enough in terms of money, which allows them to stop worrying about bills, stress and debts and eases some of the mental health issues that arise from that, it’s then much easier to focus on whether there are additional supports this family needs.

“Once you get that infrastructure right the number of families who need support from social work or specialist mental health services will reduce, and those services will be better because they’re not firefighting and they’ll be focused on what they need to be focused on.

“So it’s not just about money in people’s pockets, it’s about building a social state which is compassionate and mutually supportive of each other.

“Part of that needs a lot of work with communities, not TO communities."