A single mother will be £2,236 worse off under the government’s Universal Credit benefit than they would have been if Labour’s tax credit system had been left in place, according to the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). It said that the government’s benefits reform is a “colossal failure” that will leave a generation of children “scarred” by austerity.
One million more children are likely to be in poverty in 2020 as a result of cuts to the new benefit programme. Critics and others have warned a six-week wait for payments is leaving people unable to eat or pay their bills or their rent.
The freezes and cuts to Universal Credit work allowances will leave lone parents worse off by, on average, £710 a year, couples £250 a year. And a single parent already working full time on the national living wage would have to work an extra 41 days a year to make up for the losses suffered as a result of the cuts.
Alison Garnham, the chief executive, of CPAG said that “rather than investing in our children, government policy has been creating an Austerity Generation whose childhoods and life chances will be scarred by a decade of political decisions to stop protecting their living standards”.
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