I'm on the mobile app so haven't read past the first few pages so apologies if this has been said before.
I claimed benefits for a couple of years after I left my ex husband as my maternity leave ended and I moved back to my home city after a decade of living elsewhere whilst married. Previously I had worked full time since I was 18. I've had money, I've had no money and I've had everything inbetween. When I first moved here to my rented house I could only afford a deprived area and the local school served this area and I speak from my experiences of chatting with mothers in the playground and the friends I made there.
My experience runs the whole gamut of the discussion on this thread. Yes I've known the families who struggle for every meal and I know the single mothers who work every hour they can and its still not enough so they take on second then third jobs taking their children with them while they clean offices in the evening and their houses are cold and the children go to school with no breakfast as there's nothing to eat. I've known women living with abuse who are too scared to leave as they are afraid of what will happen to them once they do and they have to ask their husband for money for tampax and are told no as its another way to humiliate them and keep them where they are.
I've known the families who go to the food banks for food yet stand outside said foodbanks smoking whilst the children freeze. I gave up smoking as I couldn't afford it (cold turkey as I don't see why the NHS should pay to help me stop something self inflicted) and I want to scream at the parents to stop smoking and buy your shivering child a decent coat instead. But I also understand the addiction and the feeling that cigarettes are the only treat you have. I understand still further that people will stop contributing to food banks as they observe that they will not subsidize smokers who choose to smoke instead of buying food.
There are also others who lie and commit fraud, who live with working partners and claim as single parents and there are generations of families who do not work as their parents never did. Its an unpopular view on mn but it happens. There are people who expect the council to deliver them a new washing machine on the following day that theirs breaks. I once had this exact conversation when a mother told me her washing machine had broken that morning. I commiserated and told her about when mine had broken and i was hand washing for 3 weeks in winter until a very kind relative gave me her old one which was an absolute godsend. The mother then told me she had phoned the council/HA I forget which and she was ranting about how disgraceful it was that she would have to wait a week for it. The entitled attitude was jaw dropping, anything that broke she expected to be replaced free of charge immediately.
This is long sorry, I suppose I'm trying to say that I've seen desperate mothers who cannot feed themselves and their children and for whom every day is a struggle. I've also seen rampant abuse of the system and understand why people who have no experience of benefits are angry when the DM run their stories and there are constantly stories in the press of benefit fraud as the day to day struggles are not represented.
The whole issues around benefits are not as black and white as people wish them to be.