Same old mantras I WRITE with reference to the article in Claire Perry’s column on October 29: “There is no alternative to reforming benefits system”.

The only figure quoted in this article was the extra £2,400 that someone earning the minimum wage, in full-time employment, might be earning by 2020. This figure could possibly apply to a small demographic that fits a precise set of criteria.

Ms Perry conveniently fails to mention the average of £1,300 per annum reduction which any family receiving tax credits will have to bear from April 2016. Her government argues that the introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW) will raise incomes for many people when it is introduced in April 2016. New personal allowance thresholds will also mean many people will pay less income tax.

The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has calculated that three million families are likely to lose an average of £1,000 a year, as a result of changes to tax credits. The Resolution Foundation, which campaigns for low and middle-income families, has analysed all the changes, taking into account the NLW and new income tax thresholds.

It claims that by 2020, a low-earning single parent, with one child, who works 20 hours a week, and who earns £9.35 an hour, will end up £1,000 a year worse off.

A low-earning couple with two children, also on £9.35 an hour, will be £850 a year worse off. However, a childless middle-earning couple will be £350 a year better off, as a result of the new personal tax allowance.

Ms Perry states that ‘fraud and error’ is costing the country billions every year. Benefit fraud is recorded, by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), as £1.2 billion for the year 2013-14. A poll once recorded that the average person estimates that benefit fraud accounts for 28 per cent of the welfare budget. It is actually 0.7 per cent (DWP figures).

Ms Perry described the protests at the Tory party conference in Manchester at the beginning of October as “grubby nose-ringed rent-a-mob activists…(representing)…the last hysterical days of an ideological movement that knows its time is up”.

Aside from the fact that the protest drew praise from the chief of Greater Manchester Police (four arrests amongst 70,000-plus protesters). I would make this point, as I was one of those protesters.

When you have hundreds of junior doctors joining the protest, hundreds of homeless people, hundreds of disabled people; when you have thousands of teachers protesting, when you have thousands of other healthcare workers protesting, when you have many professional people and senior management from numerous different industries protesting, when every single police officer I spoke to told me that they supported the action and would happily join the protest if so allowed, then you know something is not right.

We hear the same tired old Tory mantras, trotted out like pre-programmed slogans: ‘hard-working families’, ‘building a strong economy’, ‘the party of the working people’ - this last phrase in particular ringing rather hollow in the light of the cuts mentioned above.

She says she is saddest that the government’s reforms are not welcomed by church leaders. Perhaps this might be because the churches are seeing the continued effects of the government’s austerity measures first-hand, and can see the very real impact of government policy.

Perhaps Ms Perry could spend less time crowing about the rollout of superfast broadband within the constituency, and more time talking with and understanding those who will be hardest hit by these measures.

PHILIP BLUNT, CEO, Trainee Tracker, Stroud