In most areas of day-to-day life, Covid-19 has prompted a fundamental rethink of the status quo. When it comes to the administering of Universal Credit (UC), though, even a global pandemic won’t stop the Department for Work and Pensions from finding ways to deduct money from people’s benefits.

The consequences of these deductions were highlighted recently by the UK’s largest foodbank provider, the Trussell Trust, which found that just under half of their foodbank users in the UK are struggling financially because they’re repaying a loan to the DWP. In fact, those on UC were more likely to be paying money back to government than to credit providers like payday loan companies and loan sharks.

At its heart, welfare exists to provide those who fall on hard times with a decent standard of living. So it’s surprising for many to learn that the department in charge of administering welfare payments also issues loans – loans that push many people further into poverty.

The loans aren’t an arbitrary footnote only impacting a minority of claimants. The ‘Advance Payment Loan’ is, for most, taken out to tide over their household during the five-week wait for their first UC payment; put simply, the loan is there to cover claimants for the period the DWP won’t pay them their actual benefits.

This is one of the many design flaws NGOs and campaigners have observed with UC since its rollout in 2016. The original justification for the five weeks was that UC would ‘mirror’ the world of work in the sense that you wait around a month for your first pay check – but those on low incomes rarely take anything close to five weeks off between jobs, unless forced to do so.

Covid-19 has seen the amount of people claiming UC double, from 3 million before the outbreak to a high of 5.6 million in July. Households that never before required welfare payments suddenly became reliant on them, and many have been surprised by the frugality with which UC functions – the five-week wait being only one of its limitations.

Certain demographic groups have been particularly affected: more than half of the two million single-parent households in the UK, for example—which my charity campaigns for—rely on UC payments. The Trussell Trust’s findings go some way to explain why single-parent households are twice as likely to live in poverty and twice as likely to access foodbanks as other households in the UK.

It could be argued that Covid-19 caught the government unaware, but with Advance Payment Loans at least, the warning signs have always been there. Research from Citizens Advice as far back as 2018 found that those who take out Advance Payment Loans are more—not less—likely to have to borrow in other ways, too, and are at a higher risk of going into arrears for other bills.

In fairness, the government’s record on welfare delivery during coronavirus is not entirely negative. The system survived the doubling of claimants, for a start, and back in October the government announced plans to allow claimants to repay their Advance Payment Loans over 24 months, rather than 12. While only a sticking plaster, the measure will help make payments that bit more manageable. The problem is that the measure won’t be rolled out until October 2021 and will therefore be of no benefit to households struggling due to Covid-19.

The government also introduced a £20 increase to weekly UC payments in March, which, according to research from right-wing think tank the Legatum Institute, has helped shield over half a million people from poverty, and pulled over 100,000 single-parent households directly out of it. Nonetheless, plans remain in place to rescind the £20 uplift to UC in April 2021.

Large groups of people are locked out of the £20 UC uplift: people on legacy benefits, for one, and people who have their benefits capped. Since the £20 uplift, the number of single parents hit by the Benefit Cap has almost doubled, and they now account for 60 percent of all capped households. This a clear contradiction in Government policy, with the very payment designed to tide families over during the crisis instead pushing them over the limit and barring them from extra support. One single parent told the Huffington Post in September that she and her four children were surviving on just £7 per day between them.

It’s for this reason that a number of organisations, including mine, continue to call for Benefit Cap to be suspended, or better yet, removed, and for the £20 increase to UC to be maintained beyond April 2021. Without those measures, vulnerable groups like single parents and their children across the country can easily slip back into poverty and destitution – if they ever left.