Struggling families would be substantially worse off than they were five years ago if benefits are not uprated with inflation, new analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) shows.
As more families migrate from older benefits to universal credit, new official figures show there are 2.3 million children in households on universal credit (UC) which are having debt deductions from their benefit, forcing them to live on significantly less than their entitlement.
New research from Child Poverty Action Group shows child poverty’s heavy toll on children’s physical and mental health, their education and how they feel about themselves and their futures.
Families in 2022 are facing the greatest threat to their living standards in living memory. Much has been written about these pressures, but to put them into context, we need to understand what has been happening to children’s and families’ costs in recent years. The Cost of a Child reports have been produced annually for a decade, and this 2022 edition presents the latest evidence of what families need as a minimum, and how this compares to the actual incomes of low-income families.
It is two and a half years since the first Covid lockdown, and while we are no longer living under emergency measures, the sense of emergency has not gone away. As the cost of living races ahead of stagnant benefit incomes, parents and carers on a low income are coming together to document their experiences and call for urgent change. What were families on a low income facing going into the pandemic? What was it like to take part in the Covid Realities research programme? And what do participants hope to achieve through the new project, Changing Realities?
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.
This briefing summaries the findings of two papers from the Benefit Changes and Larger Families research study which explore whether the two-child limit has affected families’ decisions about how many children to have.
At the start of the pandemic, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) relaxed some evidence checks for people making a universal credit (UC) claim to provide quicker access to benefits. In January 2021, the DWP began reverifying the details of claims made while evidence checks were eased. This has resulted in some claimants being asked to pay back the entirety of their UC award. More than a year after the exercise started, we continue to hear from people who have had their UC payments stopped, who have received demands to repay all the UC they received, and who are unable to understand or challenge the DWPs decision.
