I was too ill to work – the Tory benefit cap left me and my children with £50 a week to live on

theguardian.com:

The cost of living crisis is nothing new to me; I’ve suffered at the sharp end of the UK’s punitive welfare system for the best part of a decade.

I taught English to international students for 18 years before illness forced me to leave in 2014. Despite having worked for the school for many years, when they were hit by a shrinking demand for lessons they changed all our shifts around. The rota I was given conflicted with my childcare duties. I have two children who were young at the time and as their mother and I are divorced, we have a shared residency agreement. This means I had little flexibility with shift patterns.

The stress of managing this schedule, coupled with the high cost of living in London, obliterated my mental health. My anxiety caused my body to burn with heat, my hands trembled uncontrollably, and my heart beat so fast that I thought it would come out of my chest.

I was signed off work. I claimed statutory sick pay but that only lasts for up to 28 weeks, so then I had to claim benefits. I received employment support allowance for a few weeks, but was assessed as being “fit for work”; I was ill but not ill enough. Bureaucratic errors meant I was sent to the wrong jobcentre and my benefits claim stopped for 10 weeks. At this point, jobcentre staff had to give me food bank vouchers.

It’s just my luck that when I was applying for benefits the Tories introduced the benefit cap along with universal credit. This took out-of-work benefits – like jobseeker’s allowance – and housing benefits and consolidated them into one monthly payment.

The cap was intended to stop people from having lots of kids to scrounge from the benefits system. However, research published in April 2022 found that this stupid and astoundingly