Poverty journal

Welfare reforms underway since 2010 will reduce social security spending by £27 billion a year by 2021, and reach into most aspects of financial support for working-age adults and children.

The appointment of the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Esther McVey, has caused a stir, especially coming shortly after her predecessor had shown some willingness to address universal credit design problems.

It is an all too familiar fact that children from low-income households tend to do less well than children whose parents are better off. They have worse health, do less well at school, and are more likely to have behavioural problems.

The implementation of universal credit has been beset with problems. Here, Ros White considers the effect on claimants of the delays to the universal credit roll-out and the government’s failure to fully address the complexities involved.

The Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC) is an independent, non-partisan, statutory body of experts, set up in 1980 to advise the Secretary of State on secondary legislation and to scrutinise how social security policy will be implemented.

CPAG’s new report, The Austerity Generation, sets out the effect of a decade of cuts to social security on family incomes and child poverty, based on modelling by the Institute for Public Policy Research.

‘A welfare system that recognises work is the best route out of poverty.’ ‘The best route out of poverty is through work.’ Almost 20 years separate these statements from two prime ministers from Labour (Tony Blair in 1997) and Conservative (Theresa May in 2017) governments.

As this editorial is being written, Theresa May has just given her closing speech to the Conservative Party conference. Pressure has been building on the government to dial back austerity, improve the affordability of housing, do more to create financial security for young people, and fix its flagship welfare reform programme.

In 2016/17, Trussell Trust food banks provided 436,938 food parcels to children. The increasing use of food projects by children, together with evidence on the rising levels of food insecurity, has drawn attention to the level of hunger experienced by families with children across the UK.

For the last 20 years there has been a mantra among the UK political classes that work is the best solution to poverty. It was the background to the welfare-to-work New Deal programmes in the 2000s.