The safety net is now foodbanks, not state
IT is now time to abandon the national roll out of the disastrous benefit-cutting universal credit.
Call a halt to this experiment – cruel and vindictive far beyond austerity – that is pushing child poverty among millions of hardworking families to record levels.
From next July, when three million more families begin to be herded on to universal credit, our country will face the kind of chaos we have not seen since the days of the hated poll tax.
With the convulsions of Brexit in March and universal credit four months later, we face a summer of division and despair.
From July each family on tax credits today will have to submit a new form for universal credit – a policy ministers have been warned will risk a system breakdown. Instead the Government should order a review into what is going wrong – and give emergency help to families now in despair because of benefit cuts.
With child poverty rising from three million in 2015 to four million now and to more than five million by 2022, October 29 should bring a Budget for children. And to halt the rising epidemic, child benefit should be raised and child tax credit should be improved.
The reality explodes the myth children are in poverty because their parents are work-shy.
Two thirds of the children in poverty have a parent in work but earning too little to lift them out of poverty. In fact, 42% of households are in poverty where there is one breadwinner and no other adult working.
The majority of the rest have disability in the family. Savage cuts are pushing them on to the breadline. And after freezing child benefit and child tax credit for years, universal credit is taking £3billion out of the social security budget. Almost 3.2 million working families will, according to the Resolution Foundation, stand to lose an average of £48 a week.
For poor people the safety net is becoming not the welfare state, but foodbanks and charities.
We have seen what happened in the Highlands where universal credit was first introduced. The UK Government has been asked to reimburse the local authority for the rise in council rent arrears.
In my own home area foodbanks are running out as requests for help double as a result of universal credit. Having served 50 years in public life I am now seeing poverty and hardship I never thought I would witness.
Recently I visited families that don’t have a cooker. I have seen over the summer, when schools were out, girls and boys going for a whole day without a square meal – with charities struggling to improvise breakfast clubs and lunch clubs.
I have met parents who, no matter how many hours they work, cannot put enough food on the table after rent, heating and other essentials.
There is now more child poverty than under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
Theresa May says her mission is to address burning injustice. Well the greatest burning injustice is children going to school ill-clad and hungry. As one of the architects of tax credits I remind people it was difficult enough to introduce even when we were spending billions more.
But to impose universal credit and to force three million to reapply for their benefits next year when the Government is spending £3billion less is chaotic, cruel and vindictive.
So I am calling today for the Government to abandon the 2019 national roll-out of universal credit and end this harsh, harmful and hated experiment.
I’m calling for an end to this harsh, harmful and hated experiment