THERE are people who live in your neighbourhood who have no food to eat today.

Up until recently they’ve been claiming Universal Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance. They’ve spent 35 hours a week looking for work, but have had their social security payments stopped on the decision of a single member of staff at their local Job Centre. They have no immediate right to appeal so there’s absolutely nothing that they can do to stop it before it happens.

A 24-year-old claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance gets a cash income of £57.90 a week to cover all food, household bills and travel. But this week they have nothing.

They may have made a mistake in their paperwork, or have been late for an appointment. They were possibly asked to do something by Job Centre staff which may have helped them find employment which they didn’t do.

This is an opaque system riddled with administrative errors and subjective decision-making which is operating in a fundamentally unjust manner. It takes away benefits from military veterans for selling poppies. It removes the sole source of income from people with a heart condition who failed to complete their medical examination because they were having a heart attack at the time. It punishes people in poverty who fail to account for not filling out their job search evidence form on Christmas Day.

The punishment for this, and this can only be termed as such, is that they now don’t have enough money to eat or pay their bills. I have spoken to several of my constituents who have told me they were not even informed of their right to an emergency hardship payment to reduce the impact of the decision. There is an appeals process, but it’s not available before your payments stop.

Once the decision is taken by the Job Centre, there is nothing you can do to have the decision overturned before your benefits are taken away.

Of those who do appeal against the decisions taken to deprive them of the necessary means to live, half are upheld. It is a system which is, at best, 50 per cent correct. If there was another law in this land which resulted in half of the judgements being overturned there would be a national outcry. Parliament would be in uproar, new laws would be quickly drafted and passed and Ministers would be forced to resign.

About one in five people who claim Job Seeker’s Allowance have had their benefits stopped in this way. The system is fundamentally flawed.

Those affected are already living on the margins of our society. Those least able to stand up for themselves and to tell their own story. And rather than giving them support, care or comfort, this abhorrent scheme means that they can’t feed their children or heat their homes. It is a national scandal.

This is an inhumane system which punishes the vulnerable rather than seeking to help them back onto their feet. It takes people who are already living in poverty and removes their only source of income. The situation is such that DWP staff have received guidance on how to deal with victims suffering from mental health issues who are pushed towards self harm or suicide.

It’s clear that despite punishing hundreds of thousands of people in this way, the Department of Work and Pensions has not been able to use their experience to provide any credible evidence whatsoever that this system of financial penalties works to help get people back into stable employment.

But this didn’t stop Iain Duncan Smith’s Department of Work and Pensions from apparently fabricating case studies in an official leaflet in an attempt to legitimise this failing process. This is a government who have lost the argument in relation to the facts, and now appear to be resorting to propaganda to prop up their regime.

This is an ideological crusade against the poor, not an evidence-based mechanism to help people find work.

The limited powers over welfare that have been offered by this Conservative government to the Scottish Parliament specifically preclude measures to mitigate this unjust process.

Matters are so bad that even the government’s own Tory MPs on the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee joined calls for a broad and independent review of benefit conditionality and sanctions earlier this year because of their concerns over the effectiveness and operation of the current process.

Only a fundamental rethink will protect the interests of those affected. The argument that this helps people to find work has not been proven, while the evidence of the despair and poverty inflicted on its victims is growing larger by the day.

This is why food bank use in Scotland is at an all-time high, and why homes go without power when families can’t pay the cash meter.

An increasing number of families in every part of our country cannot afford to eat today. This simply can’t continue.

The Tory government’s approach is one without compassion or care. It has no credible evidence to support it, and it must be reformed as a matter of urgency.