TORY REFORMS PUNISH ABUSED

Duncan Smith ‘set to take cash from battered women and give it to their attackers’

TORY welfare reforms will take money from abused women and give it to their abusers, MSPs were warned yesterday.

An expert who campaigns for women’s economic rights said Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s planned Universal Credit will move cash away from women in violent households and hand it to their partners instead.

Universal Credit, designed to lump together all the working-age benefits each household gets, has been plagued by problems but is due to be in place by 2017.

And Professor Diane Elson, head of the UK Women’s Budget Group, told Holyrood’s Welfare Reform Committee: “There are so many question marks about that.

“It’s clearly not going to be safe and secure for women at risk of abuse and abusive relationships.

“It’s not going to be secure for many women even if they’re not in abusive relationships, as money that they were getting in their hands moves away from them.

“There’s going to have to be more bargaining in households about how that money is spent. It’s going to be much harder to budget.”

SNP MSP Kevin Stewart said later: “Today’s evidence highlighted the worrying risks Universal Credit poses to women in abusive relationships. The Tories can’t be trusted to make decisions over welfare on Scotland’s behalf.”

The committee also heard that abused families are already suffering because of the Tory attack on welfare.

The Child Poverty Action Group told of one family with four children fleeing violence who fell foul of the Tory benefits cap.

They were then told they wouldn’t get extra payments because their electricity use was higher than average and one of their children was getting “expensive” counselling because of the violence they had experienced.