Record numbers of UK families had their benefits capped during lockdown earlier this year, leaving them hundreds of pounds a month worse off overnight and plunging them into deeper poverty, official figures show. Department for Work and Pensions statistics published on Tuesday reveal that 200,000 households were capped in February, up 24,000 on the previous quarter and 122,000 higher than the same period the previous year. Campaigners called for the cap to be abolished, saying it unfairly impoverished households who had lost work during lockdown and undermined the government’s own efforts to protect low-income families during the pandemic. The average capped household lost £238 a month, though 31,000 families lost more than £400 a month and 1,900 families more than £1,000 a month. More than four-fifths of those capped in February were families with children, half of them with children under the age of five. Single parents headed 59% of capped households. The main driver of increased capping over the last quarter was likely to be families who had started to claim universal credit at the beginning of the pandemic reaching the end of a nine-month “grace period” of protection from the cap from December onwards. The latest rise in families having payments capped follows a doubling at the start of the pandemic when the £20-a-week universal credit uplift to help poorer households cope with the extra costs of Covid pushed many families over the cap threshold, leaving them even worse off than they were before the crisis. Alison Garnham, the chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said: “Especially in areas with high rents, capped families are losing large amounts of social security support and that is disastrous for the children concerned. The government must abolish the benefit cap to prevent more children from being damaged by impoverishment.” The cap – a limit on the total amount of benefit people can claim – was introduced in 2013 to provide an “incentive” for jobless claimants to find work. Ministers have since made it even less generous, despite evidence – including from the DWP’s own research – that capped claimants were less likely to find work. The cap restricts jobless universal credit or housing benefit couple claimants to household benefit payments totalling £20,000 a year (£385 a week) outside London and £23,000 (£442 a week) in the capital. These limits have remained unchanged since 2016. A DWP spokesperson said: “The benefit cap, up to the equivalent salary of £28,000 in London, ensures fairness for hard-working taxpaying households and a strong work incentive, while also providing a much needed safety net of support. “The proportion of households impacted remains low in comparison to the overall number claiming universal credit even after the temporary uplift to universal credit and increases to local housing allowance rates.”