Welfare cuts put kinship carers at poverty risk

Adults who bring up child relatives, saving the state billions in care costs, are threatened by tax credit cuts and benefit cap, says Family Rights Group (The Guardian).

Tens of thousands of kinship carers – adults who volunteer to bring up child relatives when parents are unable to do so – risk severe poverty, debt and losing their home as a result of welfare cuts, experts have warned.

Although kinship carers save the state billions of pounds each year in care costs and make significant personal sacrifices – an estimated two-thirds of kinship carers give up work to look after child relatives – many are threatened by tax credit cuts and the benefit cap.

Also in the news

More UK jobs fail to pay a living wage (The Guardian)

Almost a quarter of jobs outside London paid less than the living wage in 2014, with the proportion of low-paid roles increasing over the past four years, official figures show.

The Office for National Statistics says there were 6m jobs paying less than the living wage across the UK in 2014, of which more than half were part-time roles.

Poverty expert wins Nobel Economics Prize (Yahoo News)

Angus Deaton, a British-US professor at Princeton University, won the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for groundbreaking work on poverty. He promptly warned that inequality is becoming a serious global threat.

The 69-year-old academic, who has spent more than 30 years in the US, was honoured for using household surveys to show how consumers, particularly the poor, decide what to buy and how policymakers can help them. India, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, is a key area of his research.