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3 years ago, I raised with HMRC a couple of reasons behind the rising demand for food banks. First, it was taking them around 2 months to process changes to tax credit claims, after families had sent off the necessary paperwork. This left all too many parents short of money [1/5]
Since then, HMRC has set in hand a new telephone service which has cut the average duration of this process, from 2 months to a little over a week, thereby preventing any loss of income for families. 55,000 families benefitted from it in 2017 and 129,000 did so in 2018 [2/5]
Food banks also reported to me that new parents often sought help due to complications with their application for Child Benefit. Of particular concern were the delays in processing applications that resulted from birth certificates either being lost or not being included [3/5]
Since then, HMRC has put in place an automatic records checking service. This has put around 14,000 claims in payment for families whose applications have not included a birth certificate [4/5]
These 2 reforms will have helped to ease at least some of the burden on food banks, not to mention their impact on the wellbeing of each of these families. We desperately need DWP to take a similar approach to Universal Credit, to prevent any gaps in income from opening up [5/5]
