Why not everyone will benefit from benefit uprating

In line with inflation, today benefits are being uprated by 6.7 per cent. For the first time in four years, local housing allowance has gone up, improving housing support for many private renters. 

But one group will not see any improvement in support at all: around 77,000 families are affected by the ‘benefit cap’, which limits the total amount paid in benefits to working-age households with no or very low earnings (with exemptions for those receiving disability benefits). The cap is not changing, so these families will not see a penny more – the cap cuts off any increase they would otherwise get. In fact, the benefit uprating will actually result in some families being newly subject to the cap, meaning they will not see the full uplift in benefits.

A briefing published today by the Benefit Changes and Larger Families project shows the extreme hardship families affected by the cap are facing. It also explains why families are not able to escape the cap by entering paid work or moving to cheaper accommodation, the two main options put forward by the government. 

In theory, if you increase your earnings from work you can escape the benefit cap, but interviews with parents affected by the cap show that households are unable to escape the cap by entering paid work as they face considerable - and often insurmountable - barriers to entering employment. Childcare and health conditions (their own or their child’s) were two primary reasons parents found it difficult to get a job. Some of the interviewees were in paid work and wanted to work more hours but were unable to negotiate this. Faduma worked for an agency as a paid carer and needed just one more hour of work a week to escape the cap. She kept asking the agency for more work, but was not given it:

It’s not on your hand, it’s with them, because you’re, you’re waiting, yeah, you’re waiting. She said: “A lot of people working, we’ve got a limit”... these people they don’t care, you know, these people they don’t care, yeah, they don’t care about you, they do only what they have to do, yeah.

Moving to cheaper accommodation was not realistic either. The families we spoke to were already in the cheapest accommodation available to them in their area. These properties were usually overcrowded and poor quality and so there was little scope to move to cheaper housing. Amanda told us:

I am in the cheaper accommodation... I’ve moved to this house because I couldn’t afford the rent of the last house... and I still can’t afford the rent on this house. So to say to move to cheaper accommodation, I’ve done that and we’re squished and squeezed in this house, there’s five of us in a three bedroom with two box rooms and a slightly big double room... and there’s nowhere to put our clothes and the house is riddled with damp.

In the absence of genuine alternatives, capped households are left without the benefit of the social security and local housing allowance upratings. Parents remain affected by the benefit cap, struggling to give safety and security to their children. There is an easy way to remove the challenges facing these families: abolishing the benefit cap.