Marie Buchan with her family of blurry-faced kids (Picture: BPM)

A single mum-of-eight says she could be made homeless under the new benefits cap.

Unemployed Marie Buchan, 33, of Birmingham, currently receives £26,000-a-year in benefits – but this will be slashed by £6,000.

The £20,000 welfare limit was among measures announced by George Osborne in the first Tory-only Budget for 18 years.

But Marie says she is already behind with her rent and the cut would see her kicked out of her subsidised four-bedroomed home.


Marie lives in a house rented from Bournville Village Trust with her children, aged 13 to 21 months.

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Osborne unveiled his new wave of cuts on Wednesday (Picture: REUTERS/Paul Hackett)

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She said: ‘Eight is more than enough to care for.

‘What really gets to me is I have had so much hate from over the world.

‘People say I’m lazy and take, take, take. But I’m a mum of eight who is under the cap and works hard raising my eight children. That’s a full-time job on its own.’

Marie says she used to work as a cleaner but had to quit because of issues with getting her children ready in the mornings.

She also attended a course for an NHS job but was told she could not take up her place because her youngest child would not be entitled to childcare.

The Budget at a glance Welfare cuts In a nutshell, £12billion of cuts will fall on: benefits with a cap reduced from £26,000 to £23,000 in London – £20,000 elsewhere and; tax credits for those on low incomes. Income tax threshold There are plans to raise the 40p tax threshold from its current level of £42,385. The Chancellor has pledged that it will hit £50,000 by 2020. Pensions The lifetime pensionable allowance is being reduced from £1.25million to £1million as of April 2016. Inheritance tax The Budget is also set to include an end to inheritance tax on family homes worth up to £1million – at an estimated £1billion cost to the Exchequer – a key plank of the Conservatives’ general election manifesto. BBC The £600 million-plus annual cost of providing free television licences to the over-75s is also being passed to the BBC from 2018/19 – with the broadcaster deciding whether the policy should continue after 2020. It may in return be able to extend the licence fee to cover people watching via the online iPlayer, and the licence fee is expected to rise in line with the consumer price index (CPI) measure of inflation. Housing Savings of £250 million will be achieved by forcing 340,000 local authority and housing association tenants on incomes of £40,000 or more in London and £30,000 in the rest of England to pay a market, or near market, rent from 2017/18.