A change is coming to child benefit. This Saturday, more families will become eligible as the earnings threshold at which you start losing child benefit increases. The government has finally recognised that ‘the way we treat child benefit in the tax system is confusing and unfair’ and proposed two changes to try to simplify it. It’s ironic that this confusion and unfairness was introduced by the government in the first place.
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.
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.
A year like no other charts the ups and downs of family life on a low income during the unprecedented times of Covid 19. We (participants and researchers from the Covid Realities research project) wrote the book to show how hard life was and the change we need to see.