It isn't often that the foreword to a report from a commission, any commission, pulls you up short.

Renfrewshire Councillor Mike Holmes manages it in his second paragraph: "There are local shops here that sell single eggs because families cannot afford to buy half a dozen."

The councillor has just said that his is a great area, full of wonderful people, thriving businesses and close-knit communities. That's not in doubt. But in Renfrewshire, writes the chair of the Tackling Poverty Commission, more than one child in five grows up in poverty.

As the report explains, that's over 7,000 in households existing on less than 60 per cent of national median income. That's an estimated 21 per cent of the children in Renfrewshire. This is not abstract, and nor is "relative poverty" a term that can be pulled apart easily by those with a need to deny reality. A boy born in the village of Bishopton will on average live 16.4 years longer than a boy born in Ferguslie Park.

The commission, like its report, is a novelty in Scotland. Most poverty studies involve generalities, as often as not applied nationally. The fact doesn't make them worthles, but a society that embeds economic apartheid builds walls, big ones, between the prosperous and the needy. When poverty goes unseen, too many want to believe it doesn't truly exist.

The Renfrewshire project is wholly local: its findings are hard to deny, its recommendations harder to rebut. For 174,000 people in the council's area, this isn't news from elsewhere, a tale told from a distance by TV or newspapers, a welter of statistics in which the particular is lost amid the general. This portrait of poverty is close to home. There are universal truths here, but also a call for local answers.

The universal truths are becoming familiar. Poverty in Scotland and in Britain, increasingly, is a problem for which work is no solution. Historically, this is new. But, as the commission reports of Renfrewshire: "There are now more households in poverty who are working than not. Low pay, inadequate working hours and insecure employment are now key causes of poverty."

In some quarters, those last items still qualify as market solutions. Instead, rationally, they look like candidates for legislation should any government summon the will. In the meantime, the commission wants to see the number of Renfrewshire workers paid less than the Living Wage cut by half. Why stop there? The politicians who promise to do no more than tinker with zero hours contracts deserve the same question.

They are busy instead "bringing down the welfare bill" when they are not "incentivising" work. Last March, the Commons voted by 520 to 22 votes to cap benefits spending - pensions and the Jobseekers allowance excepted - at £119.5 billion from this year. Only 13 Labour MPs, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Caroline Lucas of the Greens voted against. You can repeat ad nauseam that the poor did no cause the deficit the measure was supposed to address, but the price they are paying for welfare "changes" is huge. In Renfrewshire, £58 million will be lost this year.

The benefits regime introduced by the Coalition is as vindictive as it is frugal. The commission is blunt about that. The system no longer provides an adequate safety net. Instead, it is "causing hardship for those it is designed to support, particularly due to delays and errors in benefit payments and tougher benefits sanctions". As Mike Holmes observes, the Paisley Job Centre has the third highest number of benefit sanctions in Scotland. A system that is meant to help those in poverty "is actually pushing them into crisis".

The job won't support you; the benefits system victimises you; and then those sanctions bite. Work "incentives" have stripped you of your income. So how do you feed a family if not thanks to the food bank? According to Councillor Holmes, Renfrewshire has one that is the third busiest in the country. It's no claim to fame.

Yet, if you believe Michael Gove, Tory Chief Whip and self-styled "warrior for the dispossessed", these places exist because users "cannot manage their finances". David Cameron prefers to think of them as "part of what I call the Big Society". When the Trussell Trust first began to call attention to the demand for its food banks, Iain Duncan Smith's response was to accuse the charity of "scaremongering".

The Renfrewshire commission, established in April last year, makes fully 24 recommendations. Poverty bleeds into every corner of a life, present and future. So children's "developmental outcomes are affected from before they are born, and throughout their childhood". Their chances of attainment in education are blighted: by age five, the children of the poor are already 10 to 13 months behind children from prosperous households.

Their parents, their glimpses of the future, are often in no shape to help. "Austerity policies," as the commission observes, "are having a detrimental impact on mental and physical health ... deteriorating mental health is becoming a central public health concern". In other words, Renfrewshire has seen an increase in suicide rates, anxiety, depression and psychiatric hospitalisations. These are not the work incentives the NHS needs.

In the commission's opinion, low-income families need good, low-cost nurseries. They need protection from the price inflation that has outstripped the value of benefits and wages. They need help with transport costs in getting to work. Educational opportunity - not to mention the multiple costs of the school day - have to be rethought. There's plenty more.

At the heart of it all is a challenge to the sanctions regime. The big sticks and tiny carrots might gladden the Tory heart of Mr Duncan Smith, but where poverty is concerned the dire results are in. The commission calls for Renfrewshire to be used for a new work incentives trial. Its own legacy is intended to be local partnerships against deprivation, but a huge task only grows bigger when the benefits system itself is culpable.

As Jim McCormick, Scotland Adviser to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and a member of the commission, puts it: "Poverty is costly, wasteful and risky, and Renfrewshire cannot afford poverty." You could elaborate. Where are we when a government determined to cut the bill for poverty is helping to create more poverty? All that remains - and the evidence is piling up - is a compulsion to victimise, demonise, or ignore those who need help most.

Renfrewshire's commission has any number of experts to its name: Sir Harry Burns, Professor Sue Ellis, Dave Moxham of the STUC, Dr Linda de Caestecker, director of public health for Greater Glasgow and Clyde. There are headteachers, academics, food bank managers, Shelter, the Child Poverty Action Group and more. You could also call them the sort of people the Coalition Government ignores routinely.

But our economic apartheid is failing in its efforts to keep the poor hidden. It is certainly failing in its pretence that inequality is diminishing, or that child poverty will have been eradicated by 2020. Modern politicians are great ones for paying lip service to "what works". Renfrewshire brings the truth: what's being done isn't working. Criminally, it is making things worse.