Single mothers and people with disabilities in the UK descend on Parliament

WE MUST GIVE OUR Full SUPPORT:

Single mothers and people with disabilities WHO will descend on Parliament Thursday to press peers to reject the government's aggressive Welfare Reform Bill.

They plan to hold a protest and lobby to highlight concerns that the Bill - which seeks to cut the disability allowance and cap the benefit a family can receive to £26,000 a year - will leave them homeless and at the mercy of loan sharks.

A similar lobby in December resulted in peers defeating government proposals to cut housing benefit by between £12 and £22 a week for council tenants who have a "spare" room.

Protests last year also forced ministers to scrap cuts to mobility money for people living in residential homes.

But Single Mothers Self Defence and Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, the groups behind tomorrow's event, warned that the Bill still contains many other cuts which threaten to plunge poor families, particularly single mothers and disabled people, into deeper misery.

The campaigners said in a joint statement today that the housing benefit cap was already forcing families to go without food and heating to pay the rent, or to live in overcrowded conditions.

"Cap greedy landlords, not low-income people," they demanded.

They also condemned plans to abolish the ring-fenced fund usually used to support children coming back from care or women fleeing domestic abuse.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has claimed that the government is introducing a cap on benefits "to restore fairness to our welfare system while ensuring that support goes to those who need it."