Cardinal Nichols says that welfare reforms are not providing motivation for people to get out of poverty but are instead punitive.
Ministers must heed the cry of the poor and stop their “punitive” welfare reforms, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has said.Cardinal Nichols said it is a disgrace that the Government’s welfare reforms were driving families into destitution and did not provide “motivation” for people to bring themselves out of poverty.
Cardinal Nichols defended his comments criticising the Government’s welfare policies and said that ministers were refusing to engage with the “facts” that people are “living in destitution” due to the reforms to benefits.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show he said that numbers of families in poverty and accessing food banks were “clear implications” that the reforms were causing problems. “A family in destitution, in a country as wealthy as this is a disgrace, that should not happen,” he said.
Cardinal Nichols dismissed arguments that people accessing food banks were treating it as a commodity that they can sell on and described a woman who had been unable to feed her family for days bursting into tears when she was handed food
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