Fewer children in homes where nobody works

THE number of children living in families mired in poverty and endless benefits dependency has dropped by more than half a million in only six years, an official report said yesterday.

It found that hundreds of thousands of parents who lived for years on state handouts have moved into jobs.

As a result, the chance of children living in such families has fallen by a third. For the first time on record, fewer than one in ten children are living in a home where no-one works or has done so for a year, the analysis from the Office for National Statistics found.

The historic drop in the chances of children being brought up in households regarded as ‘long-term workless’ – a key measure of the poverty and fecklessness that is most likely to blight young lives – appears a major success for the Tory-led benefits reforms that were introduced after the 2010 election.

According to the ONS figures, there were 505,000 fewer children in homes trapped in worklessness last year compared with 2010.

The share of all children under 16 living in homes where no- one has worked for long periods peaked in 2010, the year when the long New Labour term in power ended.

At the time there were a record 1,645,000 children in such households – 14 per cent of all under-16s.

By last year the number had dropped to 1,140,000 – only 9.3 per cent of all children. The fall comes at a time when key elements of the benefits reforms, and in particular Universal Credit, the new handout designed to make it easier for people to get off welfare and into jobs, has come under heavy and sustained attack.

Critics say Universal Credit, and the six-week delay before claimants are paid, has plunged large numbers of families into penury.

Other elements of the reforms, including the Benefit Cap which limits families to £20,000 a year in state payments outside London and

‘Lives are being transformed’

£23,000 within London, and the housing benefit curbs condemned by opponents as the ‘bedroom tax’, have also been savaged by critics.

But the introduction of reforms to the plans, drawn up by ex-Tory leader and former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, has coincided with record levels of employment.

The Department for Work and Pensions yesterday pointed to figures which showed that the number of children in long- term UK workless households was down 92,000 in a year. Mr Duncan Smith, who resigned from the Government last year, said: ‘ The figures show that the welfare reforms including Universal Credit are working.

‘When I took over at the DWP there were nearly two million children in all workless households, written off by the Labour government. Now their lives are being transformed.’

He added that ministers ‘ have not done enough to show how Universal Credit is really beginning to make a real difference.’