Alastair Cameron on poverty

I was in Elgin yesterday, helping launch a new project - Moray Fresh Start. This is the first event in a week-long series to raise awareness of poverty and homelessness in the UK. Moray Fresh Start is one of 17 similar projects across Scotland my organisation has helped establish. These volunteer-run schemes are simple: they collect donations of good quality household essentials, like pots and pans, bed linen and cleaning materials, and get them to people moving out of homelessness. But, I asked myself on the train north, why are we having to do this? In a wealthy country, do people really need to rely on charity to have the basics of a home for themselves and their kids?

As things stand, they do - many people take a tenancy but do not even have a kettle, never mind a cooker, to help turn it into a home. They end up feeding themselves on Scotland's expensive and famously unhealthy take-away cuisine. If it wasn't for support from the Fresh Starts, they would soon end up jacking it in. That means a return to the hostel or the street that they had hoped to escape.

As recession looms, we are told there is a two-tier Britain - one inside the wealthy ring of the M25, the rest of the country on the outside, gazing with envy at the luxury housing and limousines.

But the reality is more complex. Some of the worst poverty in Britain is in the southeast of England. And Scotland has its millionaires as well as those struggling on the inner-city schemes. The two Britains are cheek-by-jowl, not separate states.

Government figures show that about one million people in Scotland (20% of the total) live below the low income threshold. There were 60,000 applications to local councils as homeless in Scotland last year - almost 95,000 people, one-third of them children. More than 128,000 families are on local authority housing waiting lists, with only 30,000 homes available for let each year.

Poverty & Homelessness Action Week is the product of organisations belonging to the churches - Scottish Churches Housing Action, Church Action on Poverty, Housing Justice, and the Church Urban Fund. We set a target that at least 100 events across the UK would highlight the problems of those on the margins.

The Scottish events demonstrate creativity often hidden amongst the traumas of poverty and homelessness.

On Tuesday, I shall be at the Scottish parliament with the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, meeting Duncan McNeill MSP and his colleagues from the parliament's communities committee.

We'll be raising some of the key questions asked by people in poverty in Scotland today. Rather than the minimum wage, shouldn't we be looking at a fair wage that allows full participation in the benefits of society? When we're building more houses, can't we make sure that enough are affordable to people on low incomes, and available on rent to those who cannot buy?

Later this year, a coalition of organisations will launch a campaign with clear and simple aims - that no-one in Britain should be cut out of a fair share of the national wealth, with a decent income and housing standards for all.

In Elgin, before the project has even launched, the new volunteers have had their first request for help - from a mum who's been supported by the local Women's Aid group. Let's see if we can't secure a better future for her kids. The next generation shouldn't be looking for help from the Fresh Starts of their day.

Alastair Cameron is chief executive of Scottish Churches Housing Action