Six years ago, I published a memoir called Lowborn: Growing up, Getting away and Returning to Britain's Poorest Towns. To write this book, I returned to some of the poorest streets in the UK, where I had grown up, to discover if anything had changed for families in the intervening 30 years. In Scotland, this meant visiting my old estates in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Aberdeen. What I found in those places were good-hearted, hard-working, people doing their best to mend the holes and a welfare safety net that lets too many fall through.

Last month the Scottish Government announced that interim legal targets to reduce child poverty have not been met. In fact, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, one in four, that’s 80,000 children, are still growing up in ‘very deep poverty' in Scotland. In writing this, there is definitely a part of me that wants to request the headline "I can't believe I'm still having to protest this s**t". It’s heartbreaking that six years after I wrote a book which outlined how little had changed since the 1980s and 90s, there are now more children in poverty than during the mid-90s.

While I applaud the Scottish Government's good intentions and understand that policy implementation and better strategies to alleviate something so systemic will be gradual, I also know children living in poverty simply cannot wait.

Read more:

When I think about my own experience of child poverty I often recall my "homes’" I put homes in inverted commas because mine were often homeless hostels, flats........

© Herald Scotland