VICTIMS OF THE I’d like to see Amber Rudd on breadline. No one wants to live like this

AMBER Rudd has been busy dismissing concerns about poverty in the UK and the cruelty of the Universal Credit system.

So, while she addressed the Commons as Work and Pensions Secretary for the first time, the Mirror gave some of her battling constituents the chance to speak up themselves.

None was more damning than widow Georgina Mitchell, 60, who is struggling under the new benefits system.

She said: “I’d like to see Amber Rudd on the breadline. It’s not nice. No one wants to be living like this.”

Another constituent, Max Monroe, was searching for somewhere to sleep.

Max, 30, has been homeless since February after he lost his job and was moved from the old benefits system to Universal Credit.

One of dozens of rough sleepers on the streets of

Hastings on the south coast, he is nervous of the die-hards bedding down in the filthy underpass. So Max, from Hailsham, East Sussex, curls up in his sleeping bag in the catacombs beneath a decaying boarding house. Grim, but out of the rain. His story is a snapshot of austerity Britain. In Ms Rudd’s Hastings and Rye constituency, poverty and wealth are uncomfortable neighbours.

And it is impossible to ignore the impact of Universal Credit, pushing the jobless on to the streets and forcing families to rely on food-banks.

“When I was put on Universal Credit I couldn’t catch up with my rent,” Max tells me. “I had been working at Wickes and Wetherspoons before but after that there were no more jobs. I had a flat which I had to pay £385 a month. I was soon £200 short every month. It escalated so I went on the streets. I’d say Universal Credit was to blame.” Outside the local Jobcentre Plus, just up the hill from

HARD HIT Homelessness is everywhere in Hastings

DESTRUCTIVE Rudd