A Real Difference on Poverty

by David Hilferty, CAS Director of Impact.

This article was first published in The Herald on 18 April 2026.

The events unfolding in the Middle East mark the latest escalation in a seemingly never-ending cost-of-living emergency. 

Trying to keep up is dizzying and frantic. Media attention spans are shorter than ever before. Headlines shift. Markets react. Prices  - inevitably it seems – increase.  

The news cycle moves relentlessly from moment to moment. But the people who are supported every day by the Citizens Advice network don’t. They can’t. Instead, they get trapped in moments it can feel impossible to get out of. 

In recent weeks, there has been a noticeable uptick in commentary – podcasts, opinion pieces, social media threads – focused on what individuals can do in response to the cost-of-living emergency. How they should save more. Cut further. Plan more. Cope better. 

This narrative transfers blame from failing systems onto individuals, asking them to compensate for structural problems through personal resilience. It suggests that with just enough effort, households can simply adapt their way out of crisis.  

But this overlooks a fundamental truth: the cost-of-living crisis does not affect everyone equally. 

For people on low incomes, the essentials we all need like food and energy take up a far greater share of the household budget than it does for those better off. 

So for some this latest cost-of-living ‘moment’ might mean the stress of queuing up for petrol. For others it means going to bed hungry so that your kids can eat dinner.  

A few weeks back, the Scottish Government published figures on the number of people in persistent poverty in Scotland – that’s people who were in poverty for at least three of the four years from 2020-24. 

It didn’t dominate the news – it was overshadowed by more immediate headlines and moments. 

But the information was devastating. Over that period, 17% of children in Scotland were in persistent poverty. 

And this resonates with our experience in the front-line of advice services, where we see many people come back year after year needing help.  

That’s not about individual isolated moments, but repeating cycles of poverty, stress, despair.  

With the election campaign now in full swing, one phrase we hear a lot is the need to face up to ‘difficult choices’. 

Yet be in no doubt – the people facing the hardest of choices are those walking through the doors of the Citizens Advice network every day. 

Because after more than a decade of austerity and perma-crisis, we are the last refuge for people who are out of options after rebounding around broken public services and closed doors.  

Their experiences must be heard - especially at election time - to help close that proximity between the people experiencing harm and the people who can end it. 

So a question that must be posed to anyone seeking office across these next weeks is what can be done differently in the next Parliament, to move beyond mitigation into lasting systems change that genuinely lifts living standards? 

For us, a crucial part of that is moving away from this constant fixation on ‘moments’ – and instead reaching for lasting and long-term solutions. 

The opportunity before us is to stop getting stuck in moments of crisis, and instead to get stuck into building systems that work for everyone, all of the time.