Millionaire minister Iain Duncan Smith was told to stop “ignoring” the evidence that his savage benefit cuts are swelling the queues at foodbanks yesterday.
Holyrood’s welfare reform committee said it was convinced of a direct link as it published the results of its study into the Tory grandee’s “Dickensian” assault on Scotland’s poor.
Committee chairman Michael McMahon, a Labour MSP, said the evidence showed people in work but poorly paid were increasingly reliant on charities’ food parcels just to feed themselves and their families.
The Trussell Trust foodbank network had told the panel it had recorded a 400 per cent rise in people using its foodbanks over the past three years.
Of the 71,428 people who needed the network’s help in the last year, more than 30 per cent were children, it said.
Yet Mr Duncan Smith, whose estimated wealth tops £1 million, sent a DWP official to tell MSPs that food parcel recipients were not starving but “maximising their economic opportunities.”
“People will tell you things in order to maximise their economic choices, in the same way people will tell you that ‘I am looking for work,’ because they know the consequences. If they say ‘I am not looking for work,’ then they get sanctioned,” he told gobsmacked MSPs.
The defence echoed Thatcherite crony Norman Tebbit’s speech in March demanding that officials “initiate research into junk food sales in areas where people are (relying) for basic food on the foodbanks.”
But Mr McMahon said the Con-Dem coalition could “no longer ignore the evidence” that welfare cuts were keeping people from feeding themselves.
“There can be no place for this in a modern, prosperous nation, just as there should be no need for foodbanks.
“Our evidence showed some low-paid workers need to access foodbanks. This makes it even more insulting for them to insist that people using foodbanks are anything other than in desperate need of help.
“Allowing this Dickensian model of welfare to take root is simply unacceptable.
“Ignoring the problem cannot be part of the solution,” he said.
A spokesman for the DWP dismissed the report as “opinions.”
rorym@peoples-press.com