Nick Clegg was taken to task on his LBC radio show by "William from Stafford" over how government welfare changes were forcing the poor to increasingly use food banks.
"Where is the evidence of compassion?" William Morris asked the Liberal Democrat leader, warning that there was a "perception of a lack of fairness and compassion from this government" among those who use the House of Bread food bank he runs in Stafford, Staffordshire.
Morris grilled Clegg on the tightening up of the rules on jobseekers' allowance, which mean that thousands have had their benefits stripped automatically for a month for low-level offences such as missing an interview with their Jobcentre adviser. Previously, advisers could remove it at their discretion for one or two weeks.
A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services Union said: "Jobcentre staff are under intolerable pressure to apply sanctions, often with the threat of disciplinary action hanging over them if they fail to do a certain number in a given period."
According to figures from Department of Work and Pensions, more than half (54%) of the 874,850 sanctions applied to JSA claimants in the 12 months to September 2013 were for low-level problems. A total of 36,188 of them were lone parents, which means that thousands of single parent households were left on the edge for weeks.
Nick Pearce, director of the IPPR think-tank, wrote on his blog: "So someone can lose their only source of independent income for a full month simply for missing an appointment.
"It is turning people into supplicants at food banks, applicants to payday lenders, and appellants at tribunals. It is not a cornerstone of welfare reform, but a symbol of what happens when human relations are stripped out of public administration."
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