By Neil Cowan
DURING the course of the Covid-19 crisis so far, perhaps the most commonly-used word has been “unprecedented”. And it is true; the last six weeks have brought social and economic upheaval the like of which our society has perhaps never before seen; upheaval that we know threatens to make life even more difficult for people already struggling to get by, while pulling many more people into poverty.
The news last week that 130,000 people have applied for Universal Credit in Scotland in the last month – compared with 15,500 in the same period last year – therefore comes as no surprise.
But while the crisis itself – and the numbers of people applying for Universal Credit – may be unprecedented, the income crises that the five-week wait for first Universal Credit payments pulls people into, is not. Since Universal Credit’s rollout, the in-built delay in providing people with the support they need has driven food insecurity and reliance on food banks, debt and severe distress. It is a policy that simply is not right or just.
Before the crisis hit, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that two in five families on Universal Credit cannot meet their basic living costs during the five-week wait, while research by the Trussell Trust has shown that in areas where Universal Credit has been rolled out for at least a year, food banks have seen a 30 per cent increase in demand.
The introduction of advance payments was a recognition by the UK Government of the harm that the wait inflicts, but they do not represent a solution. While we know that many people accept these loans to avoid hunger and rent arrears, we also know that they feel deep anxiety in doing so. When combined with other debts, repaying advance payments can pull people even deeper into poverty.
Quite simply, the five-week wait and advance payment system are tightening the grip of poverty on people’s lives. We have an urgent moral responsibility to fix this.
In the short term, payments must be made non-repayable, and in the longer-term the wait should be removed entirely. As outlined in our response to the UK Parliament Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into the five-week wait, to end the wait would not only ease the pressure on new Universal Credit claimants, but would also be a recognition of the very real risk that we are going to witness an overwhelming increase in the already rising tide of poverty across the UK.
If the Covid-19 crisis has shown us one thing, it has been how deeply we all care for and rely on each other. But it has also shown us how the decisions we have made in the design of our economy and society have sometimes failed to live up to our values of justice and compassion. We put our social security system in place so we could make sure we are all supported in our times of need, but more and more people are seeing how far we are falling short of that ambition.
At this moment of acute crisis, every policy decision must lead us towards the future we want. If we want to emerge from this crisis as a more just society, we will need to build a more just social security system, and ending the five-week wait must be where we begin.
Neil Cowan is Policy and Parliamentary Officer at the Poverty Alliance
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