Universal Credit (Yui Mok/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)A Conservative peer who helped set up universal credit has urged the government to increase benefits in a bid to ease the cost-of-living crisis for the hardest hit families.
Baroness Philippa Stroud has also called for the £20 uplift to be restored having previously warned that its removal would plunge thousands into poverty.
The increase in the UK’s main welfare benefit was removed last October, leaving 4.4 million households facing a £1,000 fall in their annual income.
Despite a sharp rise in the cost of energy bills and food prices, ministers have rejected repeated calls to make the uplift – introduced at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic – permanent.
“We’re sitting on a cost-of-living crisis, we have the opportunity to intervene, we have done so in the past under difficult situations when it affected everybody,” Lady Stroud told the Independent.
“But if governments have a responsibility to do anything it is to act on behalf of vulnerable people. This is a moment to do that”.
Lady Stroud, who is the CEO of the Legatum Institute think-tank, added: “I just genuinely think the benefits should be uprated in line with the current inflation — they should be brought forward.
“That would be entirely possibly to do. The defence has been made that it can’t be done immediately. I have spoken with DWP officials, who’ve said universal credit can be done immediately.
“I know the legacy benefits are much harder to do,” she added. “You could do a one-off payment for the equivalent value for those on legacy”.
She warned that the poorest households will have to start making “difficult choices” if immediate action is not taken.
Research by the think-tank the Legatum Institute found that removal of the uplift will push 840,000 people into poverty, 290,000 of which are children.
It comes after inflation climbed to its highest rate in 40-years amid surging energy bills.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show inflation hit 9 per cent in April, the highest level since 1982.
Inflation accelerated from March’s figure of 7%, driven by last month’s rise in the energy price cap. The cap on maximum bills jumped by £693 to £1,971 in April.
The ONS said the biggest factor driving up inflation last month was the cost of heating homes, followed by the rising cost of petrol and second hand cars.
Heating bills have surged due to the war in Ukraine, which has disrupted oil and gas supplies from Russia and prompted an international embargo on fuels exported from Russia.
