Food bank Britain: Thousands need charity handouts because of welfare system failings

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

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.

The trust saved our lives. My son would come home from school, open the cupboard and say: ‘When will we have food to eat?’

Suzanne Harkins

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.

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.

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.”

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/443511/Food-bank-Britain-Thousands-need-charity-handouts-because-of-welfare-system-failings