The most recently published child poverty statistics should make uncomfortable reading for politicians in Holyrood and Westminster.

Since there is nothing inevitable about child poverty, all available levers should be pulled and pushed to improve the circumstances in which poor children are brought up. When it is not happening, and it is not, it is quite legitimate to ask why not.

Perhaps the Smith Commission, charged with deciding a future devolution settlement for Holyrood, should be asking what further powers, if any, the Scottish Parliament needs to eradicate child poverty in Scotland.

That must be as good as any other starting point. Meanwhile Holyrood should get on with using the powers it has to improve the lot of Scotland's beleaguered families.

The Campaign to End Child Poverty has revealed one in five children in Scotland, and one in three in Glasgow, are amongst the poorest children in the UK. Child poverty blights many cities in the UK, and London scores particularly badly containing 10 of the top 20 constituencies with the highest child poverty rate.

Glasgow Central, the only Scottish constituency to feature in the hardest-hit constituencies, is 13th.

Margaret Curran, the shadow Scottish Secretary, during Scottish Questions in the House of Commons yesterday, challenged the Government to give the fight against poverty in Scotland greater priority.

She, supported by her Scottish colleagues, should maintain the pressure, week in, week out. The 220,000 children and their parents coping with social deprivation in Scotland depend on them and hunger and cramped housing and unemployment will be more likely to keep them awake at night than the finer points of the Smith commission.

Study after study on child poverty points to the same solutions: employment opportunities, higher pay, better housing and lower childcare costs, all of which can be tackled in Edinburgh as well as Whitehall. Or course, the UK Government's policies will have an impact but before a blame game starts the Scottish Government should put its own house in order.

Earlier this year, while queues were growing at food banks, millions of pounds in the Scottish Welfare Fund set up to help those most in need remained unspent; likewise the fuel poverty budget. It is to be hoped minds can refocus on the issues most relevant to people's lives and that money will be distributed to those who need it most.

The Working for Families fund, available in Scotland between 2004-08 and designed to improve the employability of disadvantaged parents facing barriers, particularly relating to childcare, was deemed a success. Jackie Baillie, Labour's spokeswoman on social justice, still questions why it was scrapped.

The fall in yesterday's unemployment figures is welcome but employment alone is not enough to eradicate poverty. Unless employees are paid a decent living wage they are consigned to in-work poverty.

In Scotland, the lowest child poverty figures arise in Aberdeenshire, Shetland and Orkney. It is no coincidence that these areas have high quality, well paid jobs, good housing and childcare.

According to research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, every effort must be made to tackle the bottom end of the labour market since more than half of families in poverty are not lifted out of it by working.

And though it is important to improve the welfare system reform of the labour market, establishing better paid, higher skilled, more secure jobs is the best way out of poverty.

It is also to be hoped that Nicola Sturgeon will revisit the Scottish Government's reluctance to demand contractors pay the living wage on government projects.

James Kelly, a Labour MSP, unsuccessfully tried to make the hourly £7.65 living wage part of all public sector contracts during the passage of the Procurement Reform Bill. This would have significantly helped the 400,000 in Scotland, 64 per cent of whom are women, who are not paid the living wage at present.

The next General Election is less than eight months away. As well as pressing social reasons there is a sound economic case to eradicate poverty since it costs the country £29 billion. It is in all our interests to make child poverty a political priority; most of all for the impoverished children on our doorsteps.