The Tory cap on benefits, limiting the amount mostly large families can receive in support, always had more than an echo of the Victorian workhouse. The limit, introduced under the cover of austerity cuts by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, is meant to be an incentive to get people into work by making them poorer.
In one way it has been effective – people certainly get poorer when you cut their benefits. But it doesn’t mean that they are any more able to get work. A study of more than 10,000 benefit -capped households four years ago found that for every child whose parents move back into work as a result of the cap, eight more will grow up in families whose financial circumstances have been worsened by the policy.
The Commons Work and Pensions committee said then that people were being “pushed to the brink of destitution” by a policy that was not working. There is nothing, apart from below-inflation benefit rises, to suggest that anything has changed since.
