Benefits cap to be slashed from £26,000 to £20,000 per family: Claimants told 'find jobs or your handouts will be cut'

Parents of families who rely on benefit handouts are being warned they must find work as their claiming limit will be slashed this autumn.

At the moment, families can receive up to £26,000 a year in benefits but that total is set to be cut to £23,000 in London and £20,000 in the rest of the country under new Conservative reforms.

And last night the Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb warned that people need to do everything they can to find work.

He said: 'We are going further to ensure the amount that out-of-work people can claim better reflects the circumstances of many hard-working families.

'With the new cap coming into force in the autumn, now is the time for people to take action'.

The department yesterday published new figures on benefits claimants showing that the number of people claiming has dropped.

22,000 people have stopped claiming benefits since the £26,000 cap was introduced in summer 2013.

A further 11,500 are not claiming as much as they did.

George Osborne announced the new cap in his Autumn Statement, following through on promises the Tories made to cut the welfare bill in their election manifesto last year.

At the time, he said: 'It is not fair that people out of work can earn more than people in work so we are going to cut the benefit cap, as we said in our manifesto, to £23,000 in London - it will be lower in the rest of the country.

'We have got to have a welfare system that is fair to those who need it but also fair to those who pay for it.'

Treasury figures show the saving resulting from the benefit cap is far from insignificant. The existing cap is saving £185million a year and the new one will save an additional half a billion a year by 2020.

The cap is designed to ensure that no family on benefits can claim more than the net income of the average working family.

The DWP figures show that people affected by benefits capping are 41 per cent more likely to find work than those who are entitled to less than the cap.

Households where one adult is working, or one is in receipt of disability benefits, will be exempt from the new cap.

The cap has proved controversial as the majority of households that have had their benefits limited include children and more than half are single-parent families. Nearly half of those affected - 45 per cent - are in London where rents are highest.

Mr Crabb warned that for families claiming benefits to avoid the £6,000 cut, they must begin searching for work immediately, reported The Daily Express.

It comes after Jeremy Corbyn said he believed that the cap should be scrapped altogether.

The Labour leader said households should be able to claim limitless amounts in benefits - and that imposing a cap has led to 'social cleansing'.

Instead, he said government should impose 'rent regulation', a policy last used in this country 30 years ago and associated with hard-Left governments around the world.

Of capping plans, he said: 'You can't put a figure on it. In the past there was no cap on it ... the amount of money saved in the overall budget from the household benefit cap is actually quite small.'

He added: 'My view is the government should introduce rent regulation.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3578279/Benefits-cap-slashed-26-000-20-000-family-Claimants-told-jobs-handouts-cut.html#ixzz49wwQskGb
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