Cardenden and Kinglassie MP, Peter Grant, has called for an immediate end to benefits sanctions being imposed on families with children.

Mr Grant made his call in the House of Commons in response to a Government statement on the latest Child Poverty statistics.

He asked Ian Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, “Does the Secretary of State not agree that the Government could immediately stop making child poverty worse by announcing an immediate end to any benefit sanction against families with young children?” Afterwards Mr Grant said, “This debate showed just how out of touch the Tories are. In response to questions about child poverty they kept on repeating statistics about people in work and out of work.

“The fact is that for a great many people in this constituency having a job doesn’t get them out of poverty. Low wages and exploitative contracts mean that more and more people don’t earn enough to live on even if officially they’ve got a full time job.

“The Tories’ response is to punish the poor for being poor and to punish the sick for being sick. Benefit sanctions are being imposed for the flimsiest of reasons and with no thought whatsoever to the damage theyse will cause.

“We’re not talking about using sanctions to weed out the cheats and scroungers, we’re talking about a Government that according to whistleblowers from inside the DWP, is setting out to trap people into making a mistake so that they can be sanctioned. It’s bad enough when this happens to fit and healthy adults but when the victims are families with young children it’s inhuman. How can it ever be right to starve a newborn child as a way of punishing its parents for some imagined misdemeanour?” Mr Grant, the MP for Glenrothes and Central Fife, added that the Secretary of State had provoked a furious reaction on the SNP benches when he claimed that “exhaustive” checks were always made before anyone was sanctioned.

He said, “This might be what the spin doctors are telling the Secretary of State but it’s not what my constituents are telling me and it’s not what desperate parents are saying when they turn up at food banks to collect emergency food parcels to feed their children.

“Families who are already struggling to get by are being plunged deeper into poverty by the deliberate actions of this Government and no amount of patronising words from the Secretary of State is going to hide that fact.”