Children and young people from the Cost of the School Day Voice network call for Universal Free School Meals (USFM) at a Scottish Parliament roundtable.
The Prime Minister must know he can’t scare people into good health, but his words this morning will be chilling for low-income families up and down the country who rely on our social security system for help.
South Lanarkshire Council’s Cost of the School Day Conference took place this week, where the local authority further cemented its commitment to equity by launching its Cost of the School Day guidance, and ten proposals.
For almost fifteen years, the four million kids from poor families have been at the bottom of the pile and today is no different. This was a Budget all but blind to buckling family budgets and broken public services and will leave a legacy of crumbling classrooms, cold homes, and empty tummies.
It was great to gather so many Cost of the School Day Voice network members together at one time, with more than 500 young people from across Scotland joining the first Big Meet Up online sessions.
Universal credit (UC) claimants are not always getting extra amounts of UC they’re entitled to when they become eligible for some other benefits because of poor data-sharing within the DWP.
It’s right that benefits are uprated as usual but this should never have been in doubt and legislation mandating inflationary increases is needed as a basic protection for living standards. Struggling families have been worrying themselves sick for months about whether an unmanageable income cut was coming in order to provide the government with a rabbit-out-of-the-hat moment.
28% of tax credit claimants who are required to move to universal credit haven’t claimed and have had their benefits stopped and their cost-of-living payments also at stake.
Digital aspects of universal credit (UC) routinely lead to wrong amounts being awarded to claimants – often the most vulnerable - and to breaches of rule-of-law principles, new Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) research finds.