Visitors to foodbanks are often in distress, so Heidi Allen MP is right to cry (Tory MP cries at universal credit impact speech from Frank Field, 5 December). The most distressed person I’ve seen as a foodbank volunteer was a man making his first visit ever after Christmas. After spending on rent, fuel and food, he and his partner had no present for their four-year-old daughter on Christmas Day. He told me between tears: “She kept on asking if she had been naughty. We reassured her, but she just asked again and again. She doesn’t realise about money and could not understand.” (In the Salvation Army we had a suitable book and another toy for her, donated by the public.)
Robert Holland
Keighley, West Yorkshire
• Frank Field is right to highlight the very unreasonable state-imposed stress that leads to suicidal thoughts among benefit claimants. “It’s just one thing on top of another,” was the cry from a 50-year-old single adult in London trying to pay off rent and council tax arrears, which had piled up when he had no income as a result of a three-month benefit sanction, out of £73.10 a week jobseekers’ allowance. He was then forced by the jobcentre into a zero-hours contract and moved on to universal credit, both leaving him without income again for weeks at a time. Then the bailiff called at 7.30am demanding £400 for a TV licence fine, and his fees, to be paid the next morning.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers against Poverty
• Your upsetting headline (4 December) about the rise in child poverty links with recent reports of the need for improved therapeutic provision for the increasing number of children experiencing anxiety and depression. The connection between psychological disturbance in childhood and poverty is well established. Having retired after 30 years in the NHS working as a clinical psychologist with children and their families, I knew that our best therapeutic efforts were often of limited effect in the face of the destructive force of poverty and its associated personal and social disadvantage for many of the families we saw. Alleviation of their poverty would have been the more powerful therapeutic instrument.
Steven Dorner
London
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