THOUSANDS of people are relying on food banks to survive because of failings in the welfare system.
Volunteers sort through some of the food donated by
people to the Rochdale Foodbank [GETTY]
A Sunday Express investigation has
uncovered scores of cases in which people need charity handouts after being
denied benefits because of administration errors and punitive sanctions.
As many as 580,000 cuts to benefit
payments were made between October 2012 and June 2013, a six per cent rise on
the same period a year earlier, before rules were toughened.
Employment Minister Esther McVey
said the sanctions, or cuts to benefits are used only against those who were
“wilfully rejecting support for no good reason”.
However, our research reveals some
sanctions are unfair. We spoke to:
• A blind woman whose benefits were
removed because she did not apply for a cleaning job.
• A father with terminal cancer
punished after he missed signing on because of a hospital appointment.
• A woman refused benefits because
she forgot to “sign on” on the day of her younger brother’s funeral.
• A 33-year-old man with severe
dyslexia who had his benefits removed because he could not fill in his claim
form correctly.
• A mother of three denied benefits
because her husband mistakenly filled in a claim form with the wrong date of
birth for one of their children.
• A man whose benefits were removed
after he missed two job centre appointments because of the death of his mother
following a stroke.
Geoffrey Reeves feels let down by a system which does
not give him enough even to afford curtains [STUART MASON/PENDLEMEDIA.COM]
In other cases people have been hit
for using the wrong ink on a claim form and failing to apply for jobs that are
too far away for them to reach affordably.
Mother-of-two Suzanne Harkins, 42,
a former psychiatric nurse from Paisley, Renfrewshire, was denied benefits after
her husband David, 42, failed to complete a course he had been told he did not
need to attend.
Mr Harkins, also a psychiatric
nurse and former manager of a mental health unit, had been unable to work after
suffering a nervous breakdown four years ago.
Mrs Harkins had given up her job to
care for her late mother who had Parkinson’s disease and cancer and who died
last week.
The family could not afford their
mortgage payments and their house was repossessed. They presented themselves as
homeless to Renfrewshire Council which offered them a flat to live in days
before Mrs Harkins gave birth to her second child.
Soon afterwards the benefits office
cut the family’s weekly benefits by £120 after wrongly sending out a duplicate
appointment for a course Mr Harkins had already completed.
Last winter the family had to live
on £50 a week. Mrs Harkins became so malnourished she could no longer
breastfeed.
Suzanne Harkins with her son Mason, two
[WWW.ALANPEEBLES.COM ]
However, she said she and her
family would not have survived without the food bank, which is run by the
Trussell Trust: “The trust saved our lives. My son would come home from school,
open the cupboard and say: ‘When will we have food to eat?’ ” The benefits
office has now admitted its mistake and reimbursed the family.
Geoffrey Reeves, a 55-year-old carpenter and father of two, had worked since he left school at 16 but says he was hit by the recession four years ago when work dried up. Mr Reeves, from Eccles, Greater Manchester, says he has been unable to find another job and has suffered benefit sanctions for failing to make the mandatory 20 job applications a week because there are not enough jobs to apply for.
Geoffrey Reeves, a 55-year-old carpenter and father of two, had worked since he left school at 16 but says he was hit by the recession four years ago when work dried up. Mr Reeves, from Eccles, Greater Manchester, says he has been unable to find another job and has suffered benefit sanctions for failing to make the mandatory 20 job applications a week because there are not enough jobs to apply for.
He said: “I have been working all
my life but there just are not the jobs out there. The bills are piling up. I
cannot afford to eat. I am suffering from depression because of it all.”
Chris Johnes, UK poverty programme
director for Oxfam, said: “We are seeing the impact of arbitrary and harsh
sanctions in which people are pushed to the edge of destitution because they are
caught up in an unresponsive and callous bureaucracy.
“It is a situation no person should
have to be in living in a rich nation like ours.”
