Lesley Riddoch: No benefit in system that won’t pay

SHOULD benefits for families be capped at two children? Last week Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith provoked a storm of protest by suggesting claimants should face the same constraints on family size as working parents.

Some backed the idea – most were aghast that the poorest children would inevitably suffer.

The move will save £200 million – a small sum compared to the £18 billion already cut from the welfare budget. So why do it? Is IDS trying to scapegoat the poor or just saying what hard-pressed families are really thinking? Who knows.

Increasingly, society inhabits ghettos where those in work don’t know those on long-term benefits. Colourful court cases involving a tiny number of “feral” families are disproportionately influential – and given blanket coverage in the press.

But claimants facing eviction because of benefit delays have no “days in court”. The confidential nature of benefit claims means official mistakes are generally kept secret. Statistics almost always contradict the most sensational claims of benefit scrounging – but they are no match for the memorable stories of serial fraudsters packed with highly repeatable detail.

Occasionally, tales from the other side of the fence emerge. This is one. Welfare groups and charities assure me it is not in the least exceptional.

Kathleen – a young mum and former chef from Dundee – contacted me two weeks ago because she’d just sent her autistic son to a neighbour’s house to be fed and was facing eviction from her home. She’d had no benefit payments since August and was at her wits’ end. No part of the welfare state could or would help, she’d had three emergency loans, had been refused a fourth and was absolutely distraught.

How could a young mum be completely beyond state help? Easy.

In a nutshell, Kathleen had changed address and therefore missed a summer renewal letter regarding Disability Living Allowance worth £520 a month. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) discontinued her claim also ending the “passport benefit” of Carers Allowance. Kathleen should have been claiming Child Tax Credit since 2011 but had wrongly been told she was ineligible because her partner was self-employed. When welfare advisers contradicted this HMRC ruling Kathleen made a claim but the paperwork was apparently lost.

HMRC then suggested she start a new claim under tough rules brought in this summer which limit backdated claims to just a month – whoever has been at fault. Starting a new claim would mean losing thousands of pounds earmarked to sort out electricity and gas arrears and repay the friend who paid her rent to prevent eviction last month. Unfortunately, the other route is no quicker – the tax credit appeals backlog is already several months long.

Meanwhile Kathleen’s housing benefit (HB) payments were stopped because of her self-employed partner’s declared earnings. In the good old days Graham’s kitchen-fitting business was successful – but work dried up completely with the recession. It took time for the authorities to go through his books and establish their joint HB entitlement – a task further complicated by intermittent earnings from occasional jobs.

By the time payment was made Graham, Kathleen and her son had lost their tenancy. Reluctantly, the pair decided to split so further variations in Graham’s income wouldn’t disrupt her benefit payments. If he had simply given up work and signed on, life and love would have been easier all round.

Finally, alone in her new home on 7 August of this year, Kathleen found that all welfare payments had simply ground to a halt.

She was bailed out by Charlie Kean, a Dundee tradesman who set up a children’s charity in 1988. Since then 43,000 disabled and deprived kids have had Christmas outings, Charlie’s been named Dundee Citizen of the Year and Family Hero for Scotland and welfare services have frequently asked him to come to the rescue when all else has failed.

“The authorities were going to take her house off her while all those back payments were being sorted out. No-one could help her.

“I can’t see a mother who’s not well herself, with a disabled kid, out on the streets. So I said I’ll meet you at the bank and I gave her the money for the rent. She walked out of bank in tears. I also called the landlord and he said thanks for phoning and explaining the circumstances.”

Why was no part of the Welfare State able to do the same?

A volunteer at the Dundee Food Bank told me; “Most of our clients need food parcels because of benefit delays.”

A welfare rights expert in Stewart Hosie’s office (Kathleen’s MP) spent the best part of an hour on the emergency benefits hotline only to be disconnected.

Then he was told the tax credits computer system had crashed and no enquiries could be dealt with till the following day. And so it goes on and on and on.

Kathleen has discovered the shortcomings of our benefits system the very hard way. It simply cannot handle changes in circumstances or income, an appeal against a decision or a change in rules.

An employment support has been made – though it went straight to paying off her electricity bill and her housing benefit payments from now on will be £120 less than her rent.

Since Graham moved out to make life simpler, Kathleen is deemed to be “under-occupying” the house so she must either find a cheaper flat for her son and herself nearby (to remain round the corner from her mother) – or use her restarted carers allowances to subsidise the rent.

If you have followed this complex case, it’s impressive. If I haven’t made a mistake, it’ll be surprising. If a coherent official explanation ever emerges, it’ll be a miracle.

Meanwhile Citizens Advice Bureaux will see an estimated 700,000 people this year struggling with benefit complexity and countless hundreds, maybe thousands, will be hungry or cold or evicted or all of the above before Christmas.

Will the new “simplified” Universal Credit system continue or remedy this chaos?

If a “perfect storm” of ordinary life events can turn claimants into impossible cases dependent on charity and the generosity of strangers we have returned to the poorhouse in Cameron’s Britain.

No wonder IDS opted not to make the long journey north to explain himself at Holyrood.