By Mary Anne MacLeod, Research and Policy Officer, A Menu for Change

IT shouldn’t really need to be said, but it is an outrage that in 2017 there are people in Scotland who can’t afford sanitary products. Encouragingly, there has been growing media and political attention on this issue over the past year or so. We have heard shocking reports of people having their health and wellbeing compromised because they don’t have access to these essential items. They include a mum who did not have enough money to pay for maternity pads after she gave birth. It’s an issue that has become known as “period poverty”.

Labour MSP Monica Lennon has launched a consultation for a Member’s Bill at the Scottish Parliament which would see sanitary products provided free in Scotland. The proposal is heralded as an opportunity to “end period poverty”. It comes after the Scottish Government announced funding for a pilot initiative in Aberdeen to provide sanitary products to low-income women through a community initiative which also redistributes surplus food through local partner organisations.

In truth, a variety of community organisations and others have been providing free sanitary products and other basic essentials for some time, reflecting their incredible desire to step in and help people facing urgent, but un-met need. They deserve huge credit for doing so.

As health and women’s rights interventions, these steps are welcome and they should also help relieve some financial pressure for women in poverty. However, caution is needed when framing them as “anti-poverty”. If someone can’t afford to buy sanitary products then it is likely that they also don’t have money for other essentials.

There are parallels here to the response across the UK to the surge in the number of people unable to buy enough food because of low income – a situation driven by insecure, low-paid work and an inadequate benefits system.

In our effort to tackle this “food crisis”, we saw food banks emerge in communities across the country. While again this was a humanitarian response, we became overly distracted from addressing the systemic changes needed to increase people’s incomes.

Food is a basic human right and everyone should have enough money to be able to feed themselves and their families. That’s why our project – A Menu for Change – is seeking to re-focus the response to “food poverty” from emergency food to the prevention of acute income crises and increasing people’s access to the social protection they are entitled to.

This experience should be borne in mind as we grapple with the scandal of “period poverty”. Without a strong and sustained focus on the structural issues which lock people in poverty, targeted initiatives – like the provision of emergency food or sanitary products – will only ever serve as sticking plasters which deal with the symptoms, not the causes of people’s poverty. Women’s health is also a basic human right and so action is needed to address the structural barriers to achieving that right for all, which includes access to sanitary products.

While responding to immediate need is critical, we cannot lose sight of this wider context as to do so would be to forget that in order to end period poverty, just as food poverty, we must focus on ending poverty as a whole. We hope the newly established Poverty and Inequality Commission in Scotland can help lead the way.

Period poverty is one, appalling, indicator of the material deprivation facing the nearly one in five people in Scotland who live in poverty – but ending it demands a sharp focus on the underlying cause: a shortage of money.