You can tackle poverty until you take a systematic view and pursue a comprehensive action plan

The Scottish Government has missed legally-binding targets for reducing poverty in Scotland. This is not particularly surprising, partly given the state of the economy but also because the problem of poverty in Scotland is still taken to be 'an income problem'.

The two general approaches to this in Scotland are to put in place cash transfers which subsidise low incomes or to seek to move people out poverty through economic growth. Neither of these are sufficient.

While cash transfers (like the Scottish Child Payment) can have very important short-term effects, they do nothing to change the structural reasons underpinning poverty. Being narrowly above the poverty line does not mean you are not facing high levels of financial duress. It is also an insecure place where many factors can drag you back down into poverty.

Equally, it is the nature of our highly uneven current economic growth model which is causing this poverty in the first place. Doing more of what caused the problem is clearly not going to solve the problem.

It should be acknowledged that combatting poverty is not an easy goal and the Scottish Government does not have all the policy levers it would want to have if it wanted to make a serious attempt to end poverty. But it has not used the powers it has effectively yet and there is much that can be done within devolution.

Poverty is not a simple 'a deficit of income from work' problem; it is much more complicated than that. Those in and near poverty rely much more heavily on public services and so when they are withdrawn it hits that group most. A 'crisis in social care' often means 'a crisis in caring services for those suffering from poverty'.

A crucial aspect of the experience of poverty is housing and community development, but we are doing very little to improve the quality of existing housing while we continue to see the housing market in terms of 'affordable' and 'not affordable', with even 'affordable' housing often meaning 'a large mortgage'. The wellbeing of poorer communities is heavily reliant on the public provision of infrastructure to that community and since much of that is local authority, it is being rolled back.

A property-development-driven housing policy and cuts to local government funding hit the poorest hardest. Often, so does a struggling NHS with GP practices in poorer communities often overwhelmed and under-resourced, and dental care often hard to come by. It is early intervention community health initiatives which are needed to prevent the worse health problems before they escalate.

But fundamentally a GDP growth model which is agnostic about the nature of the growth is what has created the high levels of economic inequality which is behind poverty. If poverty is really a core issue, public policy must take a qualitative interest in the nature of growth and not just it's size – via an industrial strategy.

Scotland was never likely to hit poverty targets because poverty is a complex issue involving many services and much infrastructure. If serious coordinated action is not taken across all of these areas, progress will not be made, and whatever progress is made will always be vulnerable to backsliding.

If 'eradicating child poverty' really is this government's primary goal, it needs to start acting like it and producing the kind of major policy programme that would have a chance of really tackling the causes and not just the symptoms.

You can find out more about Common Weal's approach to poverty in our book Sorted.