A think-tank has warned many people on benefits will be financially worse off until 2025 due to a failure in payments keeping up with inflation. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the annual uprating of benefits in April will “merely take them back to around the real level they were at a year earlier”.
The organisation said hundreds of thousands of people could be better off if they earned less due to the way the UK Government’s cost of living payments will work, adding that more money is being spent overall than if benefits had been raised in line with inflation.
The IFS said real benefit rates were 7.6% lower in 2022 compared with their pre-pandemic levels in 2019, and will be 6.2% lower in 2023 and 2.0% lower in 2024.
