Many benefits recipients will be worse off until April 2025, IFS warns

Government cost-of-living payments are a ‘crude patch’ which cost around £2bn more than if benefits had risen with inflation, the think tank said.

Many people on benefits will be worse off until 2025, says the IFS (Yui Mok/PA) (PA Archive)

Many people on benefits will be worse off until 2025 due a failure in payments keeping up with inflation, a think tank has said.

The annual uprating of benefits in April will “merely take them back to around the real level they were at a year earlier”, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.

Hundreds of thousands of people could be better off if they earned less due to the way the Government’s cost-of-living payments will work, the organisation said, adding that more money is being spent overall than if benefits had been raised in line with inflation.