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Cherry picking contagion..............
Benefits cuts: what's it really like to live on £53 a week?
Iain Duncan Smith has claimed that he could live on £53 a week in benefits.
Two people with an income around 2% of the work and pensions secretary's
describe life on the edge
Connie, from north-west London, is just four years younger than Iain Duncan Smith,
but that's where the similarities end. Financially comfortable as an IT teacher
at a further education college until she was made redundant, she now gets by
on an income around 2% of the size of that received by the work and pensions secretary.
Connie, 54, and her husband, David, get £225.80 a fortnight in jobseeker's allowance
between them, or just over £56 a week each. Connie is scathing about Duncan Smith's
protestation that he could live on such an amount.
"It's almost impossible," she said. "He could maybe live like that briefly, but he couldn't
sustain living like that. He can't even imagine the things he'd need to budget for
. Nobody helps you with the stamps to apply for jobs. You have to carefully budget
for getting the bus. We get a card which gives us a 50% discount for the buses,
but you need to find the money for the photograph on the discount card."
Connie and her husband, a former driver and warehouseman, are actively looking for work.
She hands out her CV at conferences and is studying at the Open University to acquire
new skills. In the meantime, like many on minimum benefits, they find the sums don't
quite add up. "At the moment we have about £3 a week left for food after all the bills
are paid. We only survive because of family. My mother-in-law pays for all our food
. If it wasn't for that we'd be destitute."
When the boiler in their flat stopped working before Christmas Connie sold
her guitar to pay for the repair and tracked down a plumber who would agree
to tell them what parts they needed to buy and then return to fit them, to minimise
the bill. She said: "I haven't got many more things I can sell. We can't keep on
living like this for much longer."