SCANDAL OF THE POVERTY GENERATION

Report warns Tory benefit changes could hit 400k kids

MORE than 400,000 children will be pushed into absolute poverty by Tory benefit changes, one of the country’s leading think tanks have warned.

The shocking figures predict the number of kids in the UK struggling to have their basic needs met will smash through the four million barrier.

And economic experts say Scotland is in danger of seeing the number of youngsters depending on food banks and emergency aid increase over the next few years to more than it was a decade ago.

Children’s charity campaigners yesterday said 20 years of progress in bringing children out of poverty was at risk of “unravelling” if the Government continued down the same path.

Absolute poverty is the official Government measure of what a family income needs to be to get by after housing costs and taxes have been deducted.

Politicians last night said the Institute for Fiscal Studies figures made a mockery of Government claims that the benefit changes would make people better off.

SNP Westminster leader Iain Blackford warned that Universal Credit was fast becoming “Theresa May’s Poll Tax”.

During an exchange at Prime Minister’s Questions, Blackford said: “With each day, more evidence mounts of the devastating impact Universal Credit is having – pushing people into poverty, debt and destitution, and forcing families to rely on food banks and emergency aid just to get by.

“It is a disgrace that millions of working households will be hundreds or thousands of pounds worse off under Universal Credit as a result of Tory cuts – making a complete mockery of the Tory pledge to make work pay.”

May said the Government would continue to roll out Universal Credit “in a careful way”, adding it was a simpler system that allowed people to keep more as they earned more.

She said: “I’ve underlined the principle that lies behind Universal Credit.

“It isn’t just about the support they receive in financial terms on Universal Credit, it’s also about the support they receive to help them to get into the workplace, to ensure they meet the requirements of getting into the workplace and that when they are in the workplace they can keep more of the money they earn.” The UK already has one of the the worst rates of poverty in the industrialised world.

According to the IFS, official figures show 3.7million kids in the UK live in absolute poverty now.

The IFS calucated that will increase to 31 per cent of children by 2021, or 4.4million.

The Insitute said the freezing of working-age benefits would see 7.5million low-income households lose more than £500 per year as they struggled to top up low wages.

However, May disputed the poverty figures and said that children in absolute poverty had come down.

But Campbell Robb, chief executive at the independent Joseph Rowntree Foundation who funded the IFS report, said: “These shocking figures show the UK’s proud record of reducing child poverty is at risk of unravelling – it could mean an additional 1.2million children in poverty by the end of the Parliament.”