Austerity policies effectively pitched hundreds of thousands more children into sustained poverty. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
Researchers say hardship is a direct legacy of welfare benefit cuts imposed by Tory governments in recent years
More than a fifth of all “austerity generation” British children have been scarred by poverty for at least half their childhood, a direct legacy of the welfare benefit cuts imposed by Conservative governments in recent years, research reveals.
The proportion of children born after 2013 who spent at least six of their first 11 years of life in hardship surged after ministers froze working age benefits levels and imposed policies such as the two-child limit, it found.
Austerity policies, which drastically shrank annual welfare spending by tens of billions a year and took thousands of pounds a year out of low-income family budgets, effectively pitched hundreds of thousands more children into sustained poverty.
The University of Oxford study said the austerity-era growth in children exposed to poverty for most of their formative years was a “significant social problem” that would cause long-term harms to their health, education and life chances.
The study’s co-author, Selçuk Bedük, said the post-2013 austerity cuts to welfare increased both the numbers of children experiencing poverty and the time they spent in it. As a consequence, long-term poverty was now a defining factor in the childhood of about 23% of British youngsters.
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Austerity cuts masterminded by the former Tory chancellor George Osborne and the ex-welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith included the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, the two-child benefit limit, cuts to the generosity of universal credit, and years of benefit rate freezes. By 2021, they had stripped about £37bn a year from welfare spending.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.
STARK REALITIES: Crips Against Cuts Portsmouth protest, in April 2025, as benefits applications are bureaucratic and often unfairly denied / Pic: Tim Sheerman-Chase/CC
DYLAN MURPHY looks at how Labour is breaking its pledge to protect the disabled and vulnerable
… The latest quarterly statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) paint a grim picture. As of November 2025, the sanction rate for Universal Credit (UC) claimants had risen to 5.9 per cent, an increase over the past year.
With 2.1 million claimants in conditionality regimes where sanctions can be applied, this means approximately 123,900 people were undergoing a sanction in November 2025 alone. In October 2025, 63,000 sanction decisions were made, peaking at 65,000 in January 2025.
This is not just a continuation of previous policy; it is an escalation. Before Labour took office on July 5 2024, the previous high for monthly sanctions was 57,276 in January 2024 under the Conservative government. Labour has now well exceeded this figure, reaching 65,000 in January 2025.
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What makes this even more troubling is the severity and duration of these sanctions. According to the latest DWP statistics, there were 26,000 completed sanctions lasting between four and 13 weeks, and 2,800 sanctions lasting over 26 weeks — effectively six months or more.
A six-month sanction means six months without income, six months of choosing between heating and eating, six months of mounting debt and desperation.
This is not modern welfare policy; it is a Victorian attitude towards the “undeserving poor,” dressed up in 21st-century bureaucratic language. It reflects a punitive ideology that views poverty as a moral failing rather than a structural problem.
The human cost is catastrophic. The loss of income from a sanction can trigger a spiral into crisis. People are left unable to pay for rent, food, and heating. For those already struggling with a disability or illness, the stress and anxiety of a sanction can have a devastating impact on their mental and physical health.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the ranking member of the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, asks questions during a hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, on February 12, 2026. (Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Sen. Maggie Hassan said that while paying back businesses hit by Trump’s illegal tariffs, the administration “refuses to provide relief for families.”
American families could pay a combined $330 billion this year as a result of President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policy, according to a report released Friday by the Democratic minority on the Joint Economic Committee in Congress.
Although the Supreme Courtruled Trump’s use of emergency powers to pass sweeping tariffs illegal last month, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the government is expected to bring in “virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026” compared with the previous year, as Trump has continued to enact new tariffs using different legal authorities in hopes of getting around the high court’s ruling.
If Bessent’s projection holds true, the committee’s Democrats estimated that the average US household would pay more than $2,500 in tariff costs this year, a considerable increase from the more than $1,700 the committee found Americans paid in 2025.
The minority said it reached its findings based on official data on the amount of tariff revenue collected by the Treasury since 2025 combined with independent research from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found last month that only about 5% of tariff costs are borne by foreign entities. About 30% is taken on by domestic companies, and the remaining 65% is passed on to consumers.
There is already somewhat of an answer in the works for businesses to recoup the illegal duties they’ve had to pay. Earlier this month, the US Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that the Treasury Department and Customs and Border Protection must return $166 billion to around 330,000 importers hit by tariffs, including thousands of companies that have filed lawsuits seeking to recover their money.
However, the Trump administrationhas said it could take more than 4.4 million hours to process all refund requests for more than 53 million entries subject to the now-illegal tariffs.
On Thursday, Brandon Lord, an official with US Customs and Border Protection responsible for tariff collections, informed the court that CBP is about 40-80% done creating a system that will allow importers and brokers to submit refund requests. He said in a filing last week that it could be operational as soon as mid-April.
But Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the ranking member of the joint committee, lamented on Friday that while businesses are going to be reimbursed with interest, “the Trump administration refuses to provide relief for families” and is instead “choosing to institute new tariffs that will push prices even higher.”
On Thursday, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), another committee member, introduced a bill to create a new tax rebate for individuals and families hit by tariffs.
The so-called “Working Families Refund” would provide a $600 rebate to individuals earning $90,000 or less annually and to head-of-household filers earning $120,000 or less. Joint filers earning $180,000 or less per year would receive a $1,200 rebate. Each family would also receive an additional $600 for each dependent child.
“This is money that belongs to working families—not the CEOs of Walmart or Amazon or any other big corporation,” Heinrich said.
Trump has pressed ahead with his tariffs despite their rising unpopularity. In an NBC News poll last week, 55% of voters said the tariffs have hurt the economy, while just 33% said they have helped. And as his newly launched war with Iran has heightened economic instability, 62% of voters said they disapproved of his handling of inflation and the cost of living.
Seeking to stop Trump from squeezing a political win out of his policy’s failure, Heinrich’s bill also forbids the president from putting his own name on the tariff rebate checks, as he famously did with Covid-19 stimulus checks sent months before the 2020 election.
“The president may call the affordability crisis a ‘hoax,’ but working people feel it every time they pay for groceries or everyday essentials,” Heinrich said. “This bill will return the money lost to Trump’s tariffs back to the people who paid the price.”
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Children playing football on the street in Luton, August 1, 2025
MINISTERS were urged to go further to tackle child poverty as MPs voted on lifting the two-child benefit cap today.
Labour has faced calls since they came to power in summer 2024 to scrap the Tory policy that restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in most households.
Seven Labour MPs were suspended by the party after a backing an SNP motion to scrap the welfare measure in a vote in Parliament that year.
The government had at the time cited spending controls as a reason for not being able to ditch the policy immediately, indicating there would be no change without economic growth.
But following repeated calls from charities, campaigners and many of the party’s own MPs, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced in the autumn Budget last year that the government would move to scrap the policy from April.
Addressing the Commons for the second reading of the Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill today, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said that the policy used children as pawns and was “all about the politics of dividing lines” between the “deserving and undeserving poor.”
But Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside Kim Johnson said that she feared the Bill to remove the cap would never have happened without the campaigning of the End Child Poverty Coalition (ECPC) and National Education Union (NEU).
She said: “It’s a shame that it has taken so long to reverse this draconian cap that was driving hundreds of families into poverty every single month.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
The suicide of Tamara Jade Logon after her disability benefits were wrongly withdrawn is the latest in a series of deaths in which coroners have cited DWP failings, exposing a pattern of preventable harm, says DYLAN MURPHY
A DAMNING coroner’s report has concluded that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) played a significant role in the suicide of a vulnerable young woman, Tamara Jade Logon.
This case is the latest in a deeply disturbing pattern of deaths where the DWP’s actions have been officially cited as a contributing factor, intensifying calls for a full independent inquiry into the department’s systemic safeguarding failures.
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It is time to end the culture of secrecy and unaccountability that has allowed these tragedies to occur under both Tory and Labour governments.
The Labour government must live up to its obligations under international human rights law and take action to stop the continuing abuses committed by the DWP against disabled people.
The labour movement must help build a social security system based on dignity, trust and compassion, and ensure that the DWP is held responsible for its duty of care to every single claimant. The lives of the most vulnerable members of our society depend on it.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.
STARK REALITIES: Crips Against Cuts Portsmouth protest, in April 2025, as benefits applications are bureaucratic and often unfairly denied / Pic: Tim Sheerman-Chase/CC
