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.
More than 8,500 individuals and organisations gave evidence to the latest Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into benefit assessments. Carri Swann considers the government’s response.
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.
We welcome the commitment from the Scottish government that tackling child poverty is a top priority. Scottish government policies are working. However, soaring inflation and real terms UK benefit cuts in 2022 mean the gap between family incomes and the minimum cost of raising a child is widening horribly. It is more important than ever that all budget decisions are developed through a child poverty lens to understand the direct and indirect impacts on low-income families.
Frances Ryan, Welfare Rights Worker at CPAG in Scotland, takes a look at ‘adult disability payment’ (ADP), a new disability benefit for working-age people who live in Scotland.
An estimated 1.8 million households on universal credit (UC) are having to live on significantly less than they are entitled to because the DWP is deducting debt repayments from their benefits at an unaffordable rate, according to new CPAG estimates. There are an estimated 2 million children in these households.
New data released today shows that 4.1 million households were claiming universal credit (UC) in February 2022. Benefits were recently increased by less than half the rate of inflation, meaning these families saw the real value of their UC fall by £660 a year on average. And while benefit levels sit at historic lows, an estimated 1.8 million households are receiving an average of £61 less each month than they are entitled to because of automatic deductions from their UC payment.
An update to the report we published at the beginning of 2021 highlighting that delays carrying out assessments for disability benefits meant that many disabled people were not receiving or were losing support intended to help them meet the additional costs of their disability.