Report Launch: Intersecting Inequalities
Intersecting Inequalities: BME women and Austerity – report launch
UK Policy Briefing
This briefing is an overview of the gender impact of the Universal Credit system
The Chancellor has announced that the waiting time for Universal Credit payments will be cut from six weeks. This is welcome news, but fails to address the many other significant problems that exist with Universal Credit.
This briefing is an overview of the gender impact of the Universal Credit system. UC was introduced in 2013 and is being rolled out across the country in stages until full implementation in 2022. It replaces six means-tested benefits and tax credits with one single monthly means-tested payment.
The main goals in introducing UC were to simplify the benefits system and ‘to make work pay’.[1] It is hard to find anyone who disagrees with such broad objectives – although there are in our view better ways of trying to achieve them than redesigning means-tested benefits in this way.
However, in addition, a series of problems in the design of UC from the beginning, made worse by subsequent cuts, seriously undermine these objectives.
As a result of the cuts to spending on Universal Credit:
Intersecting Inequalities: BME women and Austerity – report launch
WBG and EVAW 2018 briefing on Universal Credit and financial abuse.
This report explores the crisis that has been created by finding cuts to local government since 2010.
Dr Naomi Elster shares her reflections from our Spring Conference and explores the link between closing the gender pay gap and the gender pensions gap