Welfare cuts will push thousands more kids into poverty, new analysis shows
2 min read
Hundreds of thousands more children will be pushed below the poverty line in the coming years by the Government’s freeze to benefits, a respected thinktank has said.
Campaigners warned that “twenty years of progress” on child poverty is “at stake” if the Government fails to take action in the upcoming November Budget.
According to the Office for National Statistics there were 2.7 million kids living in relative low income in 2016/17 - up 200,000 since 2014/15 and 400,000 since 2010/11.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said child poverty will rise by 4 percentage points (about 530,000 kids) between 2015/16 and 2021/22 if official economic forecasts are taken into account.
It said 400,000 of those will be pushed below the poverty line by the end of the current parliament because of changes in welfare.
Those policies include the freeze to working age benefits, which will leave 7.5m low-income households £500 a year worse off in real terms, the thinktank said.
And they includes the limiting of tax credits and Universal Credit to two children, which will mean some low-income families will be getting more than £2,500 less than they would have been.
Tom Waters, an author of the new IFS report on living standards, said the Government should “not be surprised” if child poverty rises as a result of its planned benefit cuts.
He noted that the largest increases will be in the North East, East Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland, with the smallest increases in London, the South East and South West.
“The larger projected rises occur in areas where families with children are more reliant on benefits than earnings for their income, and where more families are likely to be adversely affected by the new two-child limit on means-tested benefits,” he explained.
Campaigning charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warned that the UK’s “proud record of reducing child poverty is at risk of unravelling”.
“Twenty years of progress is at stake unless the Government takes urgent action at next month’s Budget,” JRF boss Campbell Robb added, urging ministers to lift the benefit freeze.
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