Press release

Campaigners today welcomed further budget commitments agreed between the Scottish government and Scottish Greens. The deal, announced today Monday 8th March, includes two further £100 payments for children in receipt of free school meals, following on from winter and spring payments this year, as well as a new Pandemic Support Payment of £130 to households receiving Council Tax Reduction. Resources are also committed to rolling out free school meals to all primary school pupils.

Chief Executive of Child Poverty Action Group Alison Garnham said: “Child poverty levels were already too high pre-pandemic yet children and parents were noticeable by their absence from this budget. Extending the £20 uplift is vital because struggling families cannot keep afloat without it, but that will be as true in six months as it is now. This decision only postpones the pain. The chancellor promised certainty to business – children and their families deserve no less.”

Child Poverty Action Group and Children North East have partnered with the National Education Union (NEU) to publish a new toolkit to help teachers and school staff tackle poverty.

One year on from landmark High Court ruling, Government still has not acted. Parents who lived with, but were not married to, their partner are still ineligible for bereavement benefits to help adapt to life with just one parent. This injustice has remained in place throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than one million households forced to claim universal credit (UC) when coronavirus struck are entering the New Year having debt deductions taken from their UC, and almost all include repayments of an advance taken out to get them through the five-week wait for a first UC payment, new analysis for the Covid Realities research project shows.

An estimated 35,000 households on universal credit (UC) - mostly families (77%) - will have their benefits capped in the New Year because they lost jobs or earnings to Covid-19 in March and their grace period has now expired, new analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) finds.

Two EU nationals, a severely disabled man and his carer, have won a landmark Court of Appeal case against the DWP which establishes their right to support from universal credit. The judgment means that EU nationals with pre-settled status cannot be treated differently to UK citizens in relation to access to means-tested benefits. 

Low-income families with children are even worse off now than they were in the summer, the latest Poverty in the Pandemic report from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and the Church of England shows. Nearly 9 in 10 families report a significant deterioration in their living standards because of the pandemic – up from 8 in 10 families who responded to an earlier survey between May and July 2020.

Prior to the pandemic, at least two in five school-age children - 1.3million - who lived below the UK’s poverty line were not entitled to free school meals, new analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) shows. All of these children are in families in low paid work but do not qualify because of stringent eligibility criteria, the analysis finds.

Official figures out today show the number of households subject to the benefit cap has reached 170,000, an increase of 8% since May 2020. Most of the increase is in London. The cap limits the total amount of benefits low-earning or non-working households can receive.