Balloonslayer, I don't think that people would assume that just because your children have been slow to speak, you didn't chat to them as children. 3 out of my 5 didn't utter a word until well past 2 and only one of them was saying anything intelligible before that and I talked/read nonstop, a continual, boring account of everything that I was doing, seeing, hearing or whatever. in fact people used to tell me that I was "off your head" because of it. 2 is very young and there is plenty time for children to learn to talk.
The problem lies, not with kids who are a bit later with developing speech, but with families where conversing with kids is not the norm and, judgmental as it may seem to some, there are a lot of them in areas like this. Parents often lack the basic skills to be able to engage with their children in this way and, often, don't realise the importance of talking to/reading with children. Partly because their own parents didn't do it and partly because education is bad in places like this, lots of people just don't see it as a priority. When my DS1 was at school, one of his jobs was to help younger kids with their reading. He had a group of children whose parents had, for one reason or another, opted out of helping their children with reading. Most of these kids really struggled and it was because they didn't get the support at home; the problems with their reading impacted on the rest of their education and many of them have gone through the rest of their school careers struggling to keep up. The problem is so bad in our local secondary, now, that they have set up a sort of sub department aimed at teaching 1st and 2nd years basic literacy. There are also adult basic literacy classes available for any parents who want to help their children with reading.
In areas of long standing deprivation like this one, situations like that are more common than anyone likes to acknowledge. Many of my children's friends live in homes where there are no books at all, where parents don't help with school reading or else really struggle to do so, where the tv or games machine is on all the time and where conversation is minimal. Often the kids are seen as a kind of interruption or inconvenience. Swearing at your kids is a bit of a national pastime, here, as well. I think that if you don't actually live somewhere with these problems, then you can't really imagine that it happens, and that's why some people feel that these messages are patronising and pointless. Personally, I think that they are a bit of a waste of time because they will be ignored by their target audience, a bit like the healthy eating one.
To give you an idea of what the Scottish parliament is up against in that regard, I recently had a mum of one of my daughter's friends tell me that she didn't think that it could be good for them to eat oven chips every night, so from now on, she was going to buy wedges once a week. Another mum, sick of nuggets, burgers and meatballs every night, had bought some crispy pancakes as a change of scene. Tinned spaghetti counts as a vegetable and it's tantamount to child abuse to give children cabbage or brocolli. The reading/speaking thing is just the same. I'm not making a value judgement, just stating the facts of life in the kind of area at which these kind of public health messages are aimed.