2024 Inequality Landscape

Key Findings

Core outcomes related to inequalities and health are not improving significantly and some are getting worse. We have not found evidence that policy is driving improvements in socioeconomic or health inequalities.

Despite the Scottish Government putting in place a range of strategies and policies to tackle inequalities, public sector leaders are not doing enough to understand impact to drive improvement. A lack of publicly available data of sufficient quality makes it very difficult for us to assess whether policies are working or not. However, the overall lack of progress in tackling socioeconomic and health inequalities indicates that policies are not working in the right way or at the scale required to improve outcomes.

Key population-level indicators of health and living standards are showing concerning trends:

• Life expectancy is no longer rising. While deaths relating to COVID-19 play a part in explaining recent falls, the deviation from the long-run trend dates back to the early 2010s.
• Average living standards, measured by household incomes, have never returned to pre-2010 levels of growth and have fallen since 2019.

Underneath the headline population averages, inequalities between different parts of the population remain wide. We see some marginal changes, both good and bad, but no systematic closing of gaps.

Our analysis shows:

• More people in Scotland are in relative poverty now than they were in the pre-pandemic period. 24% of children and 39% of households headed by an adult under 25 are in relative poverty compared to a population average of 21%.
• The proportion of young adults not participating in work, education or training, is now higher than pre-pandemic. People in Scotland are now more likely to be inactive due to long-term illnesses.
• Food insecurity, homelessness, and fuel poverty are all higher than they were pre-pandemic. People experiencing homelessness are more likely to cite unsafe situations and mental health conditions in their applications, and the number of deaths among people experiencing homelessness has increased.
• Gaps in education between students in deprived and non-deprived areas remain high. The pandemic led to changes in some measures of attainment inequality (both positive and negative), but the gap has now broadly returned to pre-pandemic levels.
• A higher number of children are born in deprived areas compared to non-deprived ones. Gaps in early health outcomes, such as low birthweight and developmental concerns, are wider than they were pre-pandemic.
• Men are also of particular concern, with higher mortality rates from alcohol, drug misuse, and suicide compared to the general population. Drug-related mortality has fallen from its pandemic peak, but increased in 2023, while alcohol mortality also increased in 2023.

This report looks at several areas of Scottish Government policy focus but finds that the data is either unavailable or unreliable enough to measure impacts. One example is the Scottish Child Payment. While models suggest it should significantly reduce child poverty, we currently have no evidence of this impact reflected in the official data. We have also examined private sector rents and the disability employment gap. There have been improvements in both, but these are not attributable to the policy intervention.

We have identified two areas related to these findings where improvements could be made to enhance governance and accountability:

1. Measuring direct impacts: We need to understand how well policies are achieving their primary aims. For example, we should know how housing policies affect housing conditions or how child poverty policies impact child poverty rates.
2. Evaluating broader impacts: Many socioeconomic factors are interconnected, so it is crucial to assess how key policies influence broader goals like reducing poverty or improving health inequalities.

At present, the Scottish Government is not investing the necessary skills and resources to fully assess the effectiveness and value for money of public spending—a concern that becomes even more pressing in times of budgetary pressure. If the government wishes to reduce inequalities during a period when savings are being made to public service spending, a strong understanding of programme impacts is essential.

In response to these challenges, organisations like SHERU have a role to play in policy monitoring, evaluation, and data improvement. However, the ultimate responsibility for delivering change, including the robust use of data to deliver policy, lies with public sector leaders.

View the 2024 report background data here

Download a replication file to reproduce the analysis of data obtained from the UK Data Service using Stata here

Data at a glance – charts from report with most recent (updated monthly) data (available for download) can be accessed here