There has been radio silence from all the Conservative leadership candidates who cannot tell us what they would do to tackle the most urgent and immediate challenge facing our country this winter: the cost-of-living crisis faced by vulnerable families.
Millions now dread the coming months, unable to afford their heating and food bills as they fall deeper into poverty. The Government has offered eight million low income households £1200 in total, including £325 paid this month.
It may sound a lot but this sum will not even cover the rise in food and fuel bills, let alone rises in the other weekly bills. For the typical family, food and energy bills alone will rise from £6000 to £8500 in the course of the year – and the Government’s cash is covering only half of this increase in fuel and food.
There is nothing more to cover rents, council tax, telecom charges, clothes, toiletries, nor bus and rail fares. And millions are even worse off than that.
The Government’s flat rate payments take no account of family size, nor any special needs. For a typical family with two children, £325 means just £1.50 a week per family member – a mere fraction of the 14 per cent rise in living costs predicted for worst-off families.
We’ve already had three budgets this year. But we now need a fourth – and before October – to halt a catastrophic acceleration of child poverty which is now heading towards an unprecedented five million.
This is a crisis that Britain hasn’t seen in living memory. We have been talking to dozens of charities and faith groups who are equally alarmed and agree on the urgency of more decisive support.
Foodbanks have become an all too familiar feature of the past decade of austerity. They were set up to deal with occasional emergencies.
But today, for all too many families, visiting your foodbank has become a regular occurrence near the end of the month, when the money from Universal Credit has run out. And foodbanks are now being set up in hospitals to help nurses.
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We now see families with no cookers – unable even to give their children a hot meal. And it’s a poverty problem hitting hard people who are in work but on low pay, for wages can’t keep pace with inflation and, because of benefit cuts, the real value of child benefit has fallen by 20 per cent.
Many families with more than two children now get no Universal Credit for their third or fourth.
- Gordon Brown was Prime Minister from 2007-2010; Professor Donald Hirsch is director of Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University.
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