AS hundreds fear for their lives after today’s Budget, a woman close to retirement tells the Star how the Tories’ “all in this together” policies have left her and her husband struggling to make ends meet.

Linda Taylor and husband Dennis have worked all their lives but found themselves hard up as salaries froze and costs kept rising over the last few years.

Mr Taylor was made redundant from a job in a steelworks and the couple took a small private pension, but it failed to cover their social rent in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire.

“They wanted to retrain him and at 64 and when you worked since you were 15, you think: ‘Well, I’ve done enough,’ and he has done enough,” said Ms Taylor, recalling how her husband considered taking a new job.

After speaking to a colleague, Ms Taylor was advised to go to financial charity Turn 2 Us, which was able to help the couple claim housing and council tax benefit as well as working tax credits.

However, with George Osborne’s new plans to cut funding for tax credits and roll all benefits into the universal credit, the Taylors fear that money will once again become scare.

Asked whether she feared she would have to ask for help again, Ms Taylor replied: “Yes, and we shouldn’t have to, really.

“In a year’s time, Dennis will get his pension and we won’t need the benefits because there will be enough money of our own that we paid into.

“All we need is this little bit of help.” She added it was “the first time that both myself and my husband has had to have any benefits to make up and I just feel a bit peeved that this is now going to be taken and is going to affect us.

“At last, we have been able to have something. We paid into it all our lives, all our working lives, and now if [George Osborne] is going to do that, he’s not helping we, the working people.

“We’re working, we are paying in. I get a bit annoyed. There must be lots of other people.”