IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/127501.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Did increasing the UK’s Universal Credit and working tax credits by £20 per week in 2020–2021 reduce food insecurity?

Author

Listed:
  • Loopstra, Rachel
  • Geiger, Ben Baumberg
  • Reeves, Aaron

Abstract

This paper evaluates the UK Government’s decision to increase the main form of social security by £20 per week during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, exploring whether increasing the generosity of social security for some, but not all, claimants affected food insecurity. Using the Family Resources Survey, we found a decline of about 7 percentage points in food insecurity amongst benefit claimants affected by the uplift compared with claimants not affected (95% CI −13.9 to −0.9%). This association did not change substantively following adjustment for covariates, nor when the model was re-estimated using matching methods. Results were not driven by changes in the composition of claimants over time. These analyses suggest food insecurity could be reduced if the generosity of the social security system increased. In actuality, the UK government went in the opposite direction, removing the £20 uplift in October 2021, potentially exposing claimants to higher rates of food insecurity again.

Suggested Citation

  • Loopstra, Rachel & Geiger, Ben Baumberg & Reeves, Aaron, 2025. "Did increasing the UK’s Universal Credit and working tax credits by £20 per week in 2020–2021 reduce food insecurity?," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 127501, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:127501
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/127501/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    food insecurity; social security; Universal Credit; United Kingdom;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:127501. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.