The goverment’s erosion of financial support for low-paid parents consigns their children to a life of poverty
The government enacted the biggest ever overnight benefit cut last week. In one fell swoop, low-paid parents and unpaid carers of disabled people have lost more than £1,000 a year from their annual budgets, at a time when energy and food costs are steadily climbing and many are still feeling the impact of the pandemic. The result of these political choices is that more children will grow up without the fundamentals no child should ever be without: a warm and secure home; going to bed without feeling hungry at night. Not even Marcus Rashford, the footballer who speaks with such moral clarity about child poverty and who has forced the government to U-turn from enacting policies that cause harm to children, could extract a concession from the government this time.
It has justified this unconscionable policy on two grounds. First, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has argued this is not a benefit cut, but simply a removal of a temporary and pandemic-related uplift to low-income families with children. Second, Boris Johnson claimed in his speech to the Conservative conference last week that by dramatically reducing low-skill immigration in the wake of Brexit, he was setting the country on a path to productivity and wage growth that we are led to believe will more than compensate for his decision to slash financial support to parents and carers.