Over 120 charities, faith groups, trade unions and civic organisations sign open letter urging First Minister to plug “gap in cash support.” “Parents going without food to feed their children, feeling ashamed at the basics their children are going without, and dreading the coming winter bills.”
This briefing summaries the findings of two papers from the Benefit Changes and Larger Families research study which explore whether the two-child limit has affected families’ decisions about how many children to have.
1 in 3 school-age children in England living in poverty (800,000) miss out on free school meals despite cost of living struggles of families. The main causes are restrictive eligibility criteria and lack of universal provision.
At the start of the pandemic, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) relaxed some evidence checks for people making a universal credit (UC) claim to provide quicker access to benefits. In January 2021, the DWP began reverifying the details of claims made while evidence checks were eased. This has resulted in some claimants being asked to pay back the entirety of their UC award. More than a year after the exercise started, we continue to hear from people who have had their UC payments stopped, who have received demands to repay all the UC they received, and who are unable to understand or challenge the DWPs decision.
The Queen’s Speech was a missed opportunity for the government to introduce legislation that would support people in the short term and improve living standards in the longer term.
The Independent Review of Administrative Law (IRAL) panel recently invited the submission of evidence on how well or effectively judicial review balances the legitimate interest in citizens being able to challenge the lawfulness of executive action with the role of the executive in carrying on the business of government, both locally and centrally. Our response emphasises the important role of judicial review in ensuring good governance and that decisions which affect some of the most vulnerable members of society are made in compliance with basic standards of good administrative decision making.
Lots of attention is given to the number of children in poverty but as a society we do not only care about the rate of poverty but also the depth of poverty. If everyone in poverty is very close to the poverty line we should perhaps worry less than when millions of people are substantially below the poverty line. A good way to measure the depth of poverty is the median poverty gap, which indicates how far below the poverty line the average family in poverty is.