On Monday the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, pledged in his Conservative party conference speech to look again at strengthening sanctions to make sure people cannot exploit the UK’s “safety net” for a “life on benefits”. As someone who receives benefits and faces the threat of sanctions every day, his speech made me feel sick and cross.
As I returned home from my day working as a learning support assistant and listened to what Hunt said, I wondered: have I not worked hard enough today? There’s no room for working parents on benefits in his simplistic depiction of people working hard on the one hand, and those living a life on benefits on the other. But that’s not my life, nor that of millions of parents just like me, facing in-work poverty and the ever-present threat of sanctions, even when they are in paid work and using what spare time they have left to care for their children.
