Struggling families were failed during pandemic, inquiry finds

Families already struggling to make ends meet were hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic due to poor government support, the Covid-19 inquiry has found.

Families in poverty bore the brunt

According to the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), many children and families entered the pandemic already facing poverty  were failed by the inadequate response.

These families lacked the resources to meet the demands of the pandemic and bore the economic brunt of the crisis.

In the years before the pandemic, the social security system had been slashed by around £45bn per year. The Child Poverty Act was scrapped in 2016, leaving millions of families with children already struggling to get by.

Benefit limits

The inquiry has so far found measures like the temporary flat-rate £20-uplift in universal credit didn’t account for any children in a household. For example, a single adult and a lone parent home-schooling two children were given the same amount.

And because the benefit cap stayed in place during the pandemic, some families never benefitted from the £20 uplift.

That’s either because their benefits were already capped or because they went down when their benefits were limited after losing work.

Administrative issues

After the pandemic, the Department for Work and Pensions  started reviewing some universal credit payments to look for mistakes and fraud.

But some people were asked to repay all the universal credit they had received, because of administrative problems. This happened because they had missed online notifications in their UC accounts requesting identity documents.

These were often sent months after their payments stopped because their earnings had gone up. 

What’s next?

In its next steps, the inquiry will examine whether previous poverty were properly taken into account when economic interventions, like benefits, were designed and rolled out.