Several churches and Christian pressure groups have jointly published a statement questioning the government’s benefit cuts and unemployment proposals.
The warning by the Baptist Union, Methodist Church, Church of Scotland, United Reformed Church, Housing Justice and Church Action on Poverty resonates with the anxieties expressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury last weekend. The statement claims the government’s ideas are based on a faulty understanding of poverty, and risk stigmatising those on benefits as ‘lazy or work-shy’. Niall Cooper of Church Action on Poverty condemned ‘simplistic solutions such as benefit cuts, telling people to get on a bus to find work, and enforced labour’. Meanwhile, the Church of Scotland’s Church and Society Council has written to all Scottish MPs to ask them to oppose the housing benefit cuts.
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