Britain’s ‘crazy’ welfare system is making fully commited young couples into fraudsters because marriage or even living together means they’ll receive a drastic cut in income, Iain Duncan Smith has warned.
So, rather than seeing their living standards plummet, several cohabiting young couples on benefits are misleading the State by pretending to reside at different addresses.
Making the strongest defence of marriage from a senior government minister for more than a decade, he will launch a scathing attack on Labour for producing this ‘couple penalty’ within the welfare system.
In remarks that set him drastically at odds with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, the Work and Pensions Secretary will demand the Coalition is determined to support marriage as ‘our most basic and successful institution’.
Mr Duncan Smith, who has long championed measures to support stable, two-parent families, will certainly assure reforms to both benefits as well as tax in their favour.
Couples living together receive much less than they might if they claimed on their own, even accounting for the savings from sharing a property.
The result is that most of those who are out of work or in part-time work say they would be much worse off living as a couple, with tens of thousands committing fraud by pretending they live apart.
