Understanding Child Poverty in Glasgow annual report published

Glasgow City Council’s Centre for Civic Innovation (CCI) has produced their sixth annual publication providing a detailed overview of child poverty in the city and using lived experiences of families to illustrate what is being done to help reduce child poverty.
This year, the report examines four key themes—employability, language and literacy, disability, and the complexity of people’s lives—through data analysis and in-depth interviews with service providers and community experts.
The data in the report will help inform and influence council decisions alongside key partners and provide policy makers and service designers with the insight to drive systemic change across the city.
Helping to eradicate child poverty in Glasgow is not a task for one department, organisation, or sector - it requires collaboration across the council, health services, the third sector and Glasgow’s citizens.
Councillor Ricky Bell, depute leader and city treasurer, said: “The sixth Child Poverty in Glasgow report brings into focus the lived experiences of families who are struggling to provide the basics for their children—food, warmth, security, and opportunity.
“These are not just statistics; they are real stories from our communities, and they demand our attention, compassion, and action.
“Let this report be a call to action - by listening and working in partnership, we can all make a difference - delivering in the present means hope for the future.”
This year’s report is the most accurate to date - by taking the average number of children in poverty over a 12-month period to see how it is trending.
The headline in 2025 shows that for families claiming council tax reduction, poverty has been on a small but steady upward trend.
In the sixth year of producing this report, it is evident that the challenges associated with poverty are often intertwined and make tackling them more difficult. To learn more about this, the team has highlighted employability, language and literacy, disability, and the complexity of people’s lives as areas to further explore to better understand and tackle child poverty in Glasgow.
CCI spoke to service providers and community experts across the city to understand the barriers people confront daily as well as the impact systems can have on people’s lives.
Building on the focus of themes that are connected to child poverty, the report highlights some of the work being done to understand the challenges, collaborate with citizens and local organisations to create solutions that can alleviate poverty by fostering collaboration and embedding lived experiences into policy and services.
The report can be found on the Centre for Civic Innovation’s website with the previous five reports.
You can also view the child poverty dashboard that sits alongside the report and shows live insight at a geographical level.