From the bedroom tax to ESA reductions, a gulf between those who make policy and those affected by it has brought a decade of misery
Next month, universal credit will be cut back by £20 to its pre-pandemic level. A policy that will – by the admission of the government’s own internal analysis – likely cause “catastrophic” suffering, pushing 800,000 people into poverty.
The cut has been described as unprecedented, but this is one more contraction in the decade-long shrinking of the British welfare state. The bedroom tax penalised social housing tenants for supposed “under-occupancy”, in practice docking housing benefit for some for the crime of needing space for oxygen cylinders. Child tax credit changes pulled help from some of the poorest children, with women who had been raped told to prove their abuse to earn their benefits. The cut to employment and support allowance took £30 a week from people too ill to work, targeting the “bloated benefit bill” of an ex-nurse with Parkinson’s disease.
