Extending furlough is well and good, but it does nothing to reform the cruel and punitive benefits system

Has anyone seen Thérèse Coffey? The minister for work and pensions – just one of seven women in the cabinet – is responsible for social security including universal credit, child benefit and employment support allowance. These payments are integral to the government’s response to Covid-19, yet we’ve hardly heard a peep out of Coffey during the coronavirus crisis.

Her absence points to a bigger problem: while most of the papers this week celebrate the extension of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme until October, many people have already lost their jobs and many more will continue to do so as the UK enters what looks to be the most painful of recessions. Data from the University of Cambridge suggests 17 per cent of women and 13 per cent of men surveyed were made unemployed between 9-14 April. If you have lost your job you cannot get furloughed, but you still need to pay rent and bills, eat, and feed and clothe children or loved ones.

The fanfare about the generosity of furlough has conveniently hidden the fact that the government has hardly touched the social security system and all its many flaws since the beginning of March when Covid-19 began its sweep across the country. The government has increased rates of universal credit and housing allowance marginally, but these are a drop in the ocean compared to the reform needed to genuinely help people.

Pre-coronavirus, the establishment of universal credit – which lumped together six previously separate cash transfers into one means-tested, monthly payment – was widely considered to be failing the poorest people in the UK. Child poverty was at record highs while there was evidence that the design of universal credit impoverishes black and ethnic minority families the most, as well as increases the risk of domestic abuse. Migrants still cannot claim universal credit if they lose their jobs.

These problems are likely to get worse and affect more people in the coming months: from 1 March to 5 May this year, the Department for Work and Pensions received 2.6 million individual claims for universal credit.

Despite Rishi Sunak’s magic money tree, failure to alter the social security system will continue to see the most marginalised people failed by this government, and left to fall into food insecurity, homelessness and poverty.

At the very beginning of the economic fallout from Covid-19 we saw an increasing and wider understanding of how cruel and punitive this system is. In what can only be described as “trickle-up austerity”, those who never imagined themselves claiming benefits are now faced with a system that is designed to catch out the user and penalise them at every opportunity, even when sanctions and conditionality are temporarily suspended. Many people have been shocked by the paltry levels of support available. Those turning to housing support will be similarly disappointed at its inadequate offering.

Now is the time to call for two big changes when it comes to social security.

First of all, conditions like the two-child limit, the five-week wait, benefits cap and no recourse to public funds ought to be deemed completely untenable, at least for the duration of the economic crisis, if not for good. Last week we saw a migrant mother win her case against the government with the High Court deeming that her denial of benefits was unlawful and a breach of human rights.

The same can surely be said of the two-child limit, which requires women to “prove” they have been raped or abused to receive the money for a third child. Rates of these payments must, if anything, increase at a time when many more people will be reliant on them.

Second, it’s time for a total review of the social security system to end the “scroungers” narrative once and for all. If coronavirus has taught us anything, it’s that none of us know what lies ahead in our future. We all need a safety net to protect us when times get tough and that’s what universal credit and other social security payments should be.

The furlough scheme is a positive recognition that huge intervention in the economy is needed to protect workers from destitution, but it cannot stand alone. Social security should be front and centre of efforts to ensure the worst off do not bear the brunt of an economic crisis we are only beginning to see emerge.

Jenna Norman is public affairs officer at the Women’s Budget Group