UP TO 80,800 families face a starvation Christmas this week as the ministers responsible scoff luxury dinners and quaff fine wines.

Grim figures released by civil servants’ union PCS yesterday reveal the dismal impact of harsh Tory “sanctions” designed as a cost-saving measure by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

Using the latest figures and historic trends PCS calculates that 74,000 unemployed people will spend Christmas with their jobseeker’s allowance suspended.

Another 6,800 disabled people will also go without payouts.

Mr Duncan Smith’s victims have been left penniless because their unemployment or disability benefits have been stopped.

One told campaigners it would be better for her three-year-old “if she wasn’t there” after having payments halted for the second time.

Disabled People Against Cuts activist Linda Burnip said the group had referred the woman, who has a serious mental illness, to social services.

“She’s in a ‘better position’ than lots of people because she has hardship payments of £21 a week on which to supposedly live,” added Ms Burnip.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said sanctions did “nothing but heap blame and misery on some of the poorest in society.”

The union says the number of people affected is up 2,000 per cent on previous Christmases since Mr Duncan Smith, who shocked Britain this week by laughing uproariously as MPs told of the tragic personal impact of his policies, ordered tough new welfare penalties in October 2012.

People deemed punishable now receive no money at all for between one and six months under Mr Duncan Smith’s regime.

The union has previously revealed how staff appraisals are linked to the number of people sanctioned, effectively pushing workers to find excuses to kick people off benefits, despite assurances from Mr Smith that targets aren’t used.

But there is “no evidence that stopping people’s benefits improves their chances of finding long-term employment,” said Mr Serwotka, demanding that sanctions be scrapped.

“Many are being punished for simply turning up late to an interview or refusing to work for free for a profitable company on one of the government’s failing workfare schemes.”

Ms Burnip said that sanctions were a “catch-22” for unemployed people.

“They don’t serve any benefit,” she said.

“If people have no money they can’t go to interviews. They can’t buy clothes.

“We’ve had someone come to us after being sanctioned for going to job interview because their clothes weren’t posh enough.”

She said of Duncan Mr Smith: “He’s lied to get into the position he’s in, his home’s paid for by his father-in-law, he’s probably never achieved anything on his own merit yet he’s happy to leave disabled people, single parents and children to starve over Christmas.”