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<p>Work offers people the best opportunity to get out of poverty and to become self-reliant;
adults in working families are around 4 times less likely to be in poverty than those
in workless families. This is why we are undertaking the most ambitious reform to
the welfare system in decades - so that it supports people to find and to stay in
work. People use food banks for many and varied reasons and, while there are no official
statistics on food bank usage, recent data from the Trussell Trust shows that the
majority of users are out of work.</p><p>As a safeguard for people needing more support,
we have a well-established system of hardship payments, benefit advances and budgeting
loans. Universal Credit has introduced a further package of measures announced at
the Autumn Budget 2017, such as making advances of up to 100 per cent of the indicative
award available and increasing the repayment period to 12 months, removing the 7 waiting
days, providing an additional payment of 2 weeks of Housing Benefit to support claimants
when they transition to UC, and changing how claimants in temporary accommodation
receive support for their housing costs.</p>
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