Rashford's voucher victory only a 'sticking plaster' for the poor
The successful school meal voucher campaign waged by the footballer Marcus Rashford provides only a “sticking plaster” for households living well below the poverty line as a result of Covid-19 job losses, a left-of-centre thinktank has said.
The Fabian Society said its research had found a huge gap between benefit payments and the amount needed to escape from poverty despite the increases in universal credit announced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, in March.
It said the government’s U-turn as a result of Rashford’s lobbying would mean a happier summer for children in households with low incomes but added that its analysis revealed why the £15-a-week vouchers were both necessary and only a partial answer.
The research showed that a lone parent without work with one child was left £68 below the £237-a-week poverty line for that family type, while a single parent with three children was having to get by on £142 less than the £393-aweek poverty benchmark.
Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, said: “Families with children where either parent loses their job during the Covid-19 crisis are finding to their horror that universal credit does not provide enough to meet even basic needs.”
He said the government should reverse deep welfare cuts made in the 2015 summer budget, which scrapped the higher allowance for the first child in every family and imposed a twochild limit that meant the only financial assistance for a third and subsequent children came from universal child benefit.
“We’re calling on the government to reverse the cut to first-child payments made in 2015, and to scrap the twochild limit within universal credit.”
He said increasing the universal credit payment by £10 a week – the amount by which it was cut in 2015 – and scrapping the two-child limit – would normally cost the treasury about £2bn a year, but the figure would be higher given the job losses caused by Covid-19.
When the lockdown began in March, Sunak announced that for the following 12 months there would be a £1,000-a-year increase in the UC standard allowance, but Harrop said more state money was needed.
“During the Covid-19 crisis there can be no possible excuse for punishing families with three children who have just lost their jobs and have no wish to be out of work. There is a safety net required to protect individual households and overall consumer spending during an unprecedented global crisis – our figures reveal its inadequacy.”
The thinktank said its povertyline figures were a best-case scenario because they assumed that families’ housing and council tax costs were fully covered by other benefit payments, which was almost never the case.