With child poverty at a record high, the prime minister has now clearly decided that making kids poor is his political priority. After covid and the cost of living crisis, struggling families need a helping hand not another kick in the teeth.
CPAG in Scotland’s Early Warning System has been operating for ten years! Over Challenge Poverty Week we are looking back at some of the social security events in this period, key findings from the Early Warning System and how they have influenced policy and practise.
The harms of the cost of living crisis are multiplied by the benefit cap and two-child limit, flagship policies of the welfare reform agenda which sharply sever the relationship between need and support provided by our social security system.
The benefit cap and the two-child limit has caused hardship to tens of thousands of families, with both policies failing to meet their original aims, according to the findings of a new study.
On the sixth anniversary of the two-child limit, a Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) survey finds widespread suffering and hardship among families affected by the policy with parents across the UK struggling to meet children’s basic needs as living costs soar.
A family’s ability to get universal credit is often based not on their actual circumstances, but on a fictional version of their circumstances. Welfare rights worker Carri Swann explains.
New DWP figures out today show 107,000 families are facing escalating costs as winter bites with their benefits capped. 56,000 have kids aged under five. And more than 32,000 of these capped families (over 110,000 children) are also subject to the two-child limit policy.
New research shows affected families can’t afford what they need for their kids. 59% (210,000) families caught by the limit are working. Today’s first instalment of cost-of-living emergency payment won’t do enough.
Last month, chancellor Rishi Sunak stood before the dispatch box and delivered his third and most significant budgetary response to the current cost of living crisis. As he announced the measures, he pledged: 'We need to make sure that for those whom the struggle is too hard…and for whom the risks are too great…they are supported… We will make sure the most vulnerable and the least well off get the support they need at this time of difficulty.'