This study explores the reasons behind the low-pay/no-pay cycle and recurrent poverty among parents, drawing mainly on qualitative interviews with disadvantaged parents across Scotland and focus groups with practitioners, plus secondary data analysis. It also presents some potential solutions to the problems identified.

Falling into poverty

As poverty often results from a complex mixture of factors interacting over time, it is difficult to pinpoint specific factors that lead people into poverty, or into worse poverty. The study revealed that common events contributing to moving a household into financial poverty were the arrival of children or a relationship breakdown, coupled with unemployment, or with some other reduction in household income.

Limited finances restricted parents' emotional well-being and the day-to-day running of the household, as well as their and their children’s social opportunities and experiences.
You've always got to count up. When I am putting things in my basket I am always counting everything in my head so [as] to have enough and it is horrible having to do that. (Janet, lone parent with one child, unemployed)