Cutting Benefits outside London Could Save Millions

The benefits cap should be lowered by 10 per cent for people living outside London and the South East to reflect the lower cost of living outside of those areas, a think-tank has proposed. Policy Exchange said lowering the limit to £23,400 for those living in the rest of the UK could save the UK Government £100 million a year. The right-leaning think tank, with close links to the Conservative Party, will spell out the plans in full in a major piece of research examining how a future government could find further savings in the welfare budget to be published later this month. The Policy Exchange paper will also say that child benefit should be capped at four children and payments progressively reduced after the first child. It says the collective benefit changes would lead to savings of £1 billion by 2020. Read more on the Policy Exchange website.