Researchers call for urgent help for low-income families

A new report recommends urgent reforms to the UK’s social security system to protect low-income families from the cost of living crisis.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated problems with the UK’s welfare system and change is now required to help low-income families with children, says the authors behind the report.

Covid Realites, a study by the universities of York and Birmingham and Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), worked with over 150 low-income families with children, documenting their everyday experiences during the pandemic.

The study, which was funded by the Nuffield Foundation, recorded the multiple financial pressures parents and carers on low incomes faced and how these were often made worse by the social security system itself, due to factors such as the five-week wait for the first payment of Universal Credit.

The authors of the report worked in partnership with parents and carers to produce detailed recommendations for change, which include a focus on the need to improve interactions between frontline staff and claimants, as well as increasing financial support. These recommendations are informed by participant’s everyday experience of living on a low-income.

Lead author of the study, Dr Ruth Patrick from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of York, said: ‘Our social security system is currently ill-suited to protect people from poverty, and to provide individuals with some level of security as they navigate what are often temporary challenges in their lives – for example, the loss of a job, relationship breakdown, parenting and care work or ill health. This was clear before the pandemic, but Covid-19 further exposed and highlighted just what it means when your social security system is simply unfit for purpose.

‘For example, when schools closed, low-income families not only had to worry about having their children at home, but how they might feed them and keep them warm, such is the extent of the poverty they face.

‘The income insecurity families are struggling with is a result of political choices, choices which can be just as easily undone. Our report sets out a detailed set of recommendations for making social security fit for purpose. These recommendations have been developed by parents and carers living in poverty, who are themselves at the sharp end of the current cost of living crisis.’

The report’s recommendations include:

• Providing a single point of contact/caseworker and giving caseworkers reasonable caseloads
• Training staff to take a person-centred view and understand the impact of disabilities, domestic abuse, and racism
• Removing the five-week wait for Universal Credit and reducing the maximum debt deduction to 20 per cent
• Supporting claimants to pursue a wider range of opportunities including training and education
• Recognising the value and demands of unpaid care work
• Making benefit sanctions a last resort

Victoria, a Covid Realities participant, commented: ‘Maybe one day my children or grandchildren might read this study, might see these articles. Maybe someone will read about the woman who cries over bread… Perhaps people can learn from our voices… I’d be happy to be a whisper in history if in the future no one is left fearing homelessness or starvation. We have the resources. I hope the future will be more empathetic.’

Photo by Nick Fewings