Child poverty has reached a new record high with 4.5 million children falling below the poverty line in the year to April 2024, today’s DWP statistics show. This is an increase of 100,000 from the previous year.
44% of all children living in poverty are living in a household where someone is disabled. 72% of poor children live in working families. Poor families have fallen deeper into poverty.
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.
Today’s official poverty statistics show child poverty has reached a record high with an estimated 100,000 more children pulled into poverty last year.
Rising child poverty across rest of UK suggests Scottish policies are helping families but campaigners say new data must act as a “stark reminder” more is needed to meet legally binding child poverty targets.
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.
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.
Campaigners at the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in Scotland are calling for tax and spending decisions to do more to prioritise hard up families ahead of tomorrow’s Scottish budget.
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.
