Iain Duncan Smith said he could live on £53 a week if he ‘had to’ (Picture: PA)

A petition with almost 250,000 signatures calling on Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week has been dismissed as a ‘complete stunt’ by the work and pensions secretary.

The petition was launched on change.org yesterday as a raft of benefits cuts and freezes came into force.

Mr Duncan Smith made the claim following a discussion on the Today programme in which market trader David Bennett said he was left with only £53 a week after rent and bills following a cut to his housing benefit.

But the cabinet minister has branded the petition as a distraction and insisted he had been forced to live on the equivalent of £53 a week in the past.




‘This is a complete stunt which distracts attention from the welfare reforms which are much more important and which I have been working hard to get done,’ he told the Wanstead and Woodford Guardian, his local paper.

‘I have been unemployed twice in my life so I have already done this (lived on the equivalent of £53 a week).

‘I know what it is like to live on the breadline.’

Dom Aversano, who posted the change.org petition, earlier told Sky News: ‘He did a brilliant PR exercise before to depict himself as a compassionate Conservative; he’s nothing of the sort.

‘He’s viciously attacking the most vulnerable and poorest members of society.’

At a daily briefing, David Cameron’s official spokesman refused to directly answer questions from journalists in Westminster whether the prime minister could live on £53 a week, answering only: ‘The PM, like the secretary of state for work and pensions, feels that benefit levels are fair.’

Change.org, which has 25million users worldwide, says it aims to empower people to ‘create the change they want to see’.

But it has been claimed that an attempt to post a similar petition on the government’s own website, where any petition that reaches over 100,000 signatures can be debated in the Commons, was rejected.

Tiernan Douieb said he received this email informing him his petition had been rejected (Picture: Tiernan Douieb)

Comedian Tiernan Douieb told Metro he had submitted a near identical petition to epetitions.direct.gov.uk yesterday after Mr Duncan Smith’s interview but had received a rejection email shortly afterwards.

He insisted the petition was not ‘too extreme’.

‘I was very careful to type it without offensive remarks or slurs, just a polite suggestion,’ he told Metro. ‘And I kept insisting it would help the economy.’

It does appear however that a separate and related petition did make it through to the government site, although the reasons for the other’s rejection are unclear.

Treasury minister Greg Clark has appeared to contradict Mr Duncan Smith’s remarks meanwhile, by saying any MP on a £65,000 salary would ‘certainly struggle’ on £53 a week.

But he added to Radio 5 Live: ‘I think the context is this – we’re all having to tighten our belts…right across the board there are difficult choices to be made, it is an incredibly difficult situation.’