This is how we fix Universal Credit
The basic rate of benefit support falls woefully short – Iain Porter, senior policy advisor at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, explains what needs to happen now.
This week, MPs debated the annual benefits ‘Uprating Order’ on how much benefits will rise by this year. But without an evidence-based foundation, this annual process always proves arbitrary and unfit for purpose, as the updated Universal Credit rates never reflect the real cost of essentials.
Instead, we need an independent process that draws on research, including from people with direct experience of living on a low income, to advise politicians on how much the minimum amount of Universal Credit needs to be to afford essentials.
Being unable to afford essentials like food, heating or toiletries is a grinding experience.
Desperate families tell of the relentless struggle to make ends meet; how precarious life feels as they focus on just surviving; about “impossible trade-offs, not genuine choices”; and how they “can only take so much”. Poverty also damages people’s health, relationships, opportunities and children’s education, with a knock-on effect that can last years.
Underlying deepening poverty, rising destitution and food bank need is a basic rate of benefit support that falls woefully short of the cost of essentials. Losing your job, needing to care for a sick family member or breaking up with your partner can happen to any of us. Universal Credit should offer support to anyone who falls on hard times, but the basic rate will be just £98 a week from April. This is well below the £120 a week that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation [JRF] estimates people need, at a minimum, to afford essentials.
The basic rate of support has fallen by 9 per cent in real terms since 2010. But a key structural flaw is that benefit levels have never been set according to any logical calculation, such as the cost of food and bills. Today’s rates are simply the result of years of changes, shaped by the rate the year before, inflation, welfare cuts and political considerations. This has allowed the shortfall to persist, forcing people to skip meals and turn off heating to get by, with five in six low-income families on Universal Credit going without essentials.
The number of children in poverty in the UK rose to a record high just before the 2024 general election, reaching 4.5 million in the latest official statistics. That is the stark situation laid bare in the JRF’s recent UK Poverty report.
Poverty affects children disproportionately because families face extra costs and childcare responsibilities that limit good work opportunities. Children in single parent families are at particular risk, with 43 per cent below the poverty line, compared to 21 per cent of people on average. Younger children are harder hit too, with a child poverty rate of 36 per cent in families where the youngest child is under 5.
Poverty has also deepened over recent decades. In the latest data, almost half of people in poverty were in very deep poverty, having an income of less than 40 per cent of the UK median income, far below the poverty line which sits at 60 per cent. This compares to around a third in the mid-1990s.
This intensification of poverty is reflected in rising destitution – the most severe form of material hardship, where people cannot afford to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. Around 3.8 million people, including a million children, experienced destitution in 2022. This has more than doubled since 2017. Trussell provided 2.9 million emergency food parcels in the year ending March 2025, up by over 50 per cent from five years earlier.
Universal Credit should offer support to anyone who falls on hard times, we can’t allow the continued erosion of support. The urgency is clear. MPs must now advocate for change – benefits with minimum rates that reflect the true cost of essentials.■
About the author: Iain Porter is a senior policy advisor at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
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