Couples with children ‘to be hardest hit’
According to this article “A couple with two children will be £1,250 a year worse off by 2015 as families “shoulder the burden of austerity”, according to an Institute for Fiscal Studies report published on Wednesday.
The study, commissioned by the Family and Parenting Institute charity (FPI), examines the impact of the package of tax and benefit reforms being introduced between January last year and April 2014, including the introduction of universal credit, which brings together benefit and tax credits.
According to the report the income of families with children will feel the most impact, falling by 4.2% in the five years to 2015. By contrast, families without children will see a loss of only 0.9%, equating to £215, underlining the degree to which spending cuts are impacting on support for children.”
Bearing in mind the fact that we know in addition to this that it costs more to live in rural than urban England I suspect it will be even tougher for rural families to get by in future in this context than their urban counterparts.