Politics: Tories Push 400,000 Kids Into Poverty

Tory benefit changes will leave 400,000 more children in poverty by 2021 according to the respected think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

A report by the market-oriented economic research institute warns that childhood deprivation will sharply increase in the next four years if the Government carries out its proposed benefit reforms.

A Sobering State

Child poverty figures in the UK are already shameful.

There are 3.9m children currently classified as living in deprivation, with London having the highest instances in the country.

That amounts to 27% of British children. IFS researchers combined this data with official economic forecasts and planned benefit and tax reforms to predict the UK poverty rates for 2021-22.

They found that child poverty will likely rise to 31% or just under one in three children. Worse yet, “around three-quarters (of the rise), equivalent to 400,000 children, is attributable to benefit changes”. In short, Government actions will be directly responsible for increasing child poverty.

Tory welfare policies include introducing the universal credit system, freezing benefits and restricting tax credits. Universal credit is intended to simplify the benefits system by merging six benefits into one single payment.

The Government also hopes it will reduce the barriers to getting a job by giving greater incentives to work. Universal credit tapers benefits off gradually as a claimant’s own pay increases, rather than suddenly stopping them altogether when a threshold is reached as before.

One of the problems with universal credit is that claimants collect money for the month gone rather than the month coming.

Errors in the system have increased this delay from four weeks to six, leaving many unable to feed families and pay rent. Universal credit is also an entirely computerised system – easier for some but inaccessible to those who don’t own a computer.

Without one-to-one meetings with trained staff, claimants with poor English, literacy or technology skills struggle to complete their claims correctly, creating more confusion rather than less. Other reforms and caps to working age benefits, housing benefits, employment allowances and tax credits are hitting poor families hard.

The Kids Are Not Alright

Children are the worst-affected group. While Conservative policies are expected to increase absolute poverty by around 1%, for children it’s 3%.

On average poorer families with children get just 42% of their income from earnings so they are more reliant on benefits.

That makes them less sensitive to earning increases and more sensitive to cuts such as limiting child tax credits to two children as the Government has done.

Children in larger families are already statistically more at risk of poverty, and limiting child tax credits will lead to a “significant income loss” for those with three or more children, the IFS found.

Importantly, child poverty hasn’t always been rising. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, a UK charity working to alleviate the problem, child poverty was slashed  from 1998-2010, with 800,000 children lifted out of poverty. In 2010 “the figures began to flatline” and the numbers have risen ever since.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the social change organisation that funded the IFS research, said the projected figures were shameful. “These shocking figures show the UK’s proud record of reducing child poverty is at risk of unravelling – it could mean an additional 1.2m children in poverty by the end of the Parliament”.

It’s impossible to ignore the political correlation.

The reduction in child poverty began when Labour gained power then stalled in the very year the Conservatives and Lib Dems took over.

The rise in poverty has matched the rise in Tory power and austerity. The bitter irony is that cutting benefits doesn’t save the UK money in the long run. Child poverty is not just devastating, it also has long-lasting economic costs.

It increases health risks, anti-social behaviour, abuse, isolation and the need for local authority care while lowering life expectancy, education, skills, family formation and employability.

In that terms the austerity-fuelled Government can understand, the economic cost of not ending child poverty in the UK was calculated at £40bn a year a decade ago. As child deprivation continues to rise so will the social and economic costs of doing nothing.

by Jo Davey

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