The big issues. In the run-up to polling day we examine the key election battleground issues including education, immigration, health and the environment, starting with living standards. From a couple surviving on ever-changing benefits to graduates relying on night-shifts, no one is expecting a big improvement after the general election

Jayne and Tony are living on 20% less than they did in 2010; Gina is so strapped she can’t afford a tube ticket some days. Holly and Kieran go without new clothes; Jenny and Nick haven’t had a holiday since 2012 and live in fear of brown envelopes.

Schools' hidden funding crisis: teachers take drastic action as cuts hit hard Read more

Meet the real people at the sharp end of welfare cuts. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, more than one in three families with children in the UK are struggling to make ends as a result of five years of austerity. Even more damningly, half of all people in poverty live in a working family.

And irrespective of who wins on 7 May, life is unlikely to improve dramatically.

The Guardian spoke to five families – some entirely reliant on welfare, some barely receiving benefits at all – about how five years of austerity have affected their lives, and how they view the prospect of further spending cuts. Here are their stories.

Chapters

The carer

Jayne Linney, 53, and her partner – and primary carer – Tony Hamon, 56, live in a small two-bedroom housing association flat off a busy road in Leicester.

Two bad car accidents, the first in the early 1990s, damaged both the top and bottom of Linney’s spine and she now suffers from a range of conditions including nerve entrapment, arthritis, incontinence, Sjögren’s syndrome (an auto-immune disorder that affects her eyes) and above all fibromyalgia, which causes often acute pain all over her body.

I feel sick when the brown envelopes land

“On a good day,” she said, adjusting herself painfully on the sofa, “I can just about make it as far as the front door. On a bad day, every single step hurts so much you want to cry.” A former children’s worker, she has been unemployed since 2010 and has – perhaps unsurprisingly – suffered bouts of severe depression.

Hamon, a former army medic who served in Northern Ireland and Germany, has the genetic disorder Dupuytren’s contracture, commonly known as claw hand. Mild symptoms started emerging 15 years ago but the disease, which causes his fingers to bend into the palm of his hand, has advanced aggressively over the past 12 months. He was recently forced to give up working as a delivery and coach driver when his commercial licence was not renewed on medical grounds.

The couple survive on a bewildering basket of ever-changing benefits with increasingly obscure acronyms: Linney gets £213 of ESA, for example, but her DLA of £300, paid every four weeks, has now been replaced by a PIP worth considerably less (the initials stand for employment and support allowance, disability living allowance, and personal independence payment.)

Hamon gets a carer’s allowance of £255, also paid four-weekly (“That in itself’s a nightmare,” he said. “Why can’t they pay monthly, like the direct debits for our bills? Makes life so complicated.”)



The 2012 Welfare Reform Act changed their lives completely, said Linney: “It’s almost like they were out to get us. The old disability benefit had three bands; the new one has two. I was assessed at the top of the lower band, which meant £150 a month gone just like that.” She is appealing, but it will be a lengthy process.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jayne Linney and Tony Hamon, at home in Leicester. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Along with a cut in housing benefit, the introduction of the bedroom tax – which costs them £14 a week – and having to pay some council tax, the couple calculate their monthly income has fallen by up to £400 since 2010.

“The result,” said Linney, “is that we’re constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul. PIP is supposed to cover the extra costs of disability – incontinence pads, higher heating bills because I’m home all the time, non-prescription painkillers – but half the time it pays the rent. It’s not sustainable.”

The couple buy their clothes on eBay (“I found a nice pair of shorts for Tony the other day – 99p,” said Linney) and do their bulk food shopping online, both to save money and because neither can now carry heavy bags.

It is, Linney said, “a horrible life. I worked for 30 years. Now we’re in arrears on everything; we live at the whim of these decision-makers who can only do what the screen says, and can’t deal with complex conditions. They’re on at you all the time, every tiny change – I’ve got a complete phobia of brown envelopes. I feel sick when they land: I’m terrified what they’ll ask for next.”

The working professional

If welfare is cut any more, we wouldn’t cope

Holly, 36, is a registered nurse in a nursing home; Kieran, 35, is a security guard by trade, but work started drying up four years ago and he has been largely unemployed since.

The couple – who preferred not to be fully identified – live in a semi-detached house outside Newcastle with their three children. Holly works full time, usually three 12-hour shifts a week, sometimes four.

“It’s pretty full-on, to be honest,” she said. “It’s quite good, sometimes, that Kieran is around to look after the kids. But it’s tight.”

Holly’s earnings vary according to the hours she works, but average between £1,800 and £2,000 a month before tax. That means that Kieran, who has been looking into retraining to improve his job chances, gets told his family income is too high for him to be able to count on getting any funding for a course.

“It is quite stressful,” Holly said. “I get £70 a week in working tax credit and £47 in child tax credit, and to be honest we need every penny. If welfare gets frozen we might just about survive, but if it’s cut any more we wouldn’t cope. Right now, look, I’m four days from payday, and there’s £39.40 in our bank account. That’s a typical month.”

This is not a family that has been foolish. They own their own home, bought a few years ago, with a mortgage that currently costs them £564 a month. Holly finished paying off her student loan two years ago and the couple have no further outstanding debts (“I would never, ever go there again,” she said. “Hate owing money. Absolutely hate it.”)

But they are struggling. Holly gets paid on the 28th of each month, and within a week, when all the bills are paid, “there’s usually £500, max £600 left. I don’t think that’s a lot for a family of five to live on for three and a bit weeks, really. We’re counting the pennies constantly; always online or on the app checking what’s left.”

Their last holiday, in August last year, was a weekend camping in Wales, dropped off and picked up by relatives because “we don’t have a car and it was the only way we could afford to get there”. Holly can’t recall the last time she or Kieran had a new piece of clothing, but she does try to put some change aside each week so maybe once a month, on a Friday, they can have a takeaway.

She knows she needs dental work done, but because she earns too much to qualify for free treatment, she hasn’t been to the dentist. There have been times, too, when she has cried off visiting her GP because “I hadn’t got the £8 for a prescription”. (Kieran, who has diabetes, and the children qualify for free medicine.)

There are a few places, maybe, where they could shave a bit more off their outgoings. They’ve already knocked £15 off the Sky bill – down to £60 now – but, Holly said: “You need broadband, don’t you, that’s like a necessity now. And the phone of course. And the telly … I don’t know; the kids like it so much and I really don’t want to deprive them of that as well.”

“We’ve dipped into savings quite a bit. And, you know, I think, I’m a professional, in my late 30s – and what have I got to show for it? Compared to my parents’ generation, I just don’t feel in the least bit … prepared for what’s to come.”

The squeezed single mother

Colleagues will say, ‘Come out with us after work,’ and I can’t afford it

Gina LoBuglio is not, at first glance, someone who looks like she’s been squeezed. A former nanny who did a literature degree as a mature student in her 30s, she is now 47, a single mother working as studio manager for a central London start-up, and lives in an unremarkable two-bedroom flat in south London.



“I thought: get a good degree, develop a good career, all will be fine,” she said. “That all looked perfectly realistic back then. Everything felt possible; all doors were open. But I graduated in the summer of 2008 – just before the crash – and … well, nothing turned out how I thought.”

LoBuglio had to move on from the one-bedroom place where she had been living while she was studying: her son, Nick, then turning 11, needed his own room. Her student loans exhausted and desperate for money, she took what was only ever intended as a temporary job at a furniture shop in Clapham and, as a single mother, qualified for housing benefit. She moved into her present flat.

By 2010, however, the shop was struggling, and eventually stopped paying her altogether. “But I couldn’t walk away, because the jobcentre told me if I did that I would not get anything in the way of benefits,” she said. “I had to stick it for six months, and try to prove constructive dismissal. That was a hard, hard time … It got to the point where I was walking to interviews because I couldn’t put money on my Oyster card.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gina LoBuglio and her son Nick, 17, at home in Battersea, south-west London. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Then in 2011, the coalition government drastically tightened housing benefit rules. In a once very affordable part of town, rents had multiplied, and under the latest housing allowance guidelines, Lobuglio’s housing benefit was slashed by more than £400 a month, from £200 a week to just over £100.

She persuaded the office where she had found work to give her an emergency rise, and her friendly landlady to forgo the annual rent increase, but she was in serious financial trouble. Even now, with a new and better-paid job, money remains terrifyingly tight: Lobuglio survives by virtue of a steadily mounting credit card bill, and a revolving monthly overdraft.

“It’s hard,” she said. “I have no real comeback to the people who say, ‘You shouldn’t be living here. Move further out.’ Except, you know, my support network as a single mum is here. My son is happy and doing well at the school. And because I’ve been here so long, my rent is actually pretty low – I’d have to move miles out, really miles, to find somewhere as cheap.”

Lobuglio doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t go out (“I really can’t afford to. I count every last 50p.”) She takes a packed lunch to work, and never stops off for coffee. She buys food, essentials and clothes as cheaply as she possibly can – Tesco, Lidl, Primark – and is lucky to be able to count on her boyfriend, when things get “really, really, bad”, to pay for the occasional big shop.

Like Linney, LoBuglio gets a lot of envelopes: “You have to tell the council of every little change, every tiny bit of extra income – and it takes them time to process. So you never know what the next envelope’s going to say. Perhaps you’ve been overpaid, and your benefits are being suspended. Maybe they just want your last six months’ bank statements. You never know.”

Right now, LoBuglio is most worried about what her son will decide to do. He’ll be 18 this year, and if he doesn’t go to university or stay in full-time education, her housing benefit will be stopped and “we’ll just be homeless”.

Quite suddenly, she starts to cry. “It’s like … I’m leading this double life,” she said. “Nobody round here knows, and nobody at work. I wear this social mask – but I don’t fit in the box.

“I’ll be sitting in the council offices, waiting to be assessed, and I’m sending work emails … Or colleagues will say, ‘Come out with us after work,’ and I can’t. I’m totally struggling, on benefits, trying to make the best of a terrible situation, and working so unbelievably hard …

“I can’t get a raise big enough to get off benefits. It’s just a shit, limbo situation. In like some kind of gilded cage.”

The struggling entrepreneur

'Computer says no.' That’s all it’s really about, isn’t it? Finding reasons to give people less

Jenny Townsend, who is struggling to get a small online marketing and PR business off the ground, and Nick Tuff, a gardener, live with their six-year-old daughter, Layla, and son Jamie, five, in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hornchurch, Essex.



Made redundant from her sales job in 2008 when she was first pregnant, Jenny qualified for a while for jobseeker’s allowance. After Jamie was born in 2010, she suffered from sciatica and postnatal depression, and for a while – after twice being ruled fit to work, but finally winning a bitter appeal that, she said, left her “in floods of tears most days” – was on employment and support allowance.

“That made a big difference,” she said. “£70 a week; it paid for food, and medicine. But in the end it turned out to be a mixed blessing: for some reason – I have no idea why; they went over my case a hundred times – they had me down as a single mother. So I was overpaid.”

That wasn’t the last time Townsend had problems with overpayment. “Since 2012,” she said, “we’ve had housing benefit, £57 a week, and child tax credits. But now they’ve said they overpaid that, too – we had an invoice for £3,000 of overpaid housing benefit … I practically collapsed; totally freaked out. It was mad. I’ve no idea what I’d done wrong.”

After Townsend presented Tuff’s pay slips (in a good month, he takes home around £1,300); her accounts (her business earned her no more than £160 a month last year); and the family’s rent bills and service charges, she got the overpaid amount reduced to £1,700. The family is still entitled to housing benefit of up to £25 a week – but the episode has left her confused and angry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jennifer Townsend and her children, Layla and Jamie, at home in Hornchurch. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

“I’ve always been completely and totally honest,” she said. “But sometimes, really, it feels like they’re determined to come after you, no matter what. They tell you one thing, then another, then another … You go this way and that. You never know what to think. You never know what they’ll want.”

Meanwhile, the rent is just over £500 a month. Electricity is £120, phone and broadband £50, water £52, council tax £116. They are repaying a loan (for furniture and white goods, when they moved into their present flat) at £100 a month, and have run up a credit card bill of nearly £4,000, on which they pay back what they can.

That doesn’t leave much out of Tuff’s £1,300-a-month take-home pay.

So clothes come from charity shops and Primark; food from Asda or Lidl with a big monthly shop for basics at Iceland. They don’t run a car (and Tuff’s work van is for work only), and their last holiday was in the spring of 2012, in Menorca, paid for with the £1,500 Townsend managed to wring out of the company that had made her redundant while she was pregnant.

They are not much looking forward to the next few years. Townsend hopes her business will pick up but is not over-optimistic: her clients’ businesses are mostly at much the same stage as hers. She’s worried about what will happen when the children need their own bedrooms, although the housing office “are all right. Quite nice. At least they try.” The DWP people, on the other hand, are “ruthless”.

And whatever happens to welfare and benefits, it seems clear to her that the whole business is, increasingly, going to become a question of “computer says no. That’s all it’s really about, isn’t it? Finding reasons to give people less. Even if, like me, for 17 years you paid your dues.”

The graduates

Everything seems to cost a little bit more now than it used to

Veronica and Paul (neither want to be fully identified) really shouldn’t be worried. Between them, they have four degrees; she is an experienced midwife in her mid-40s; Paul, a few years older, is a manager – a senior one – and also in the public sector.

They live in a four-bedroom house in Oxfordshire that they bought nine years ago: a long-planned move out of the large city where they both still work, in order to give their two children, then both at primary school, a better quality of life.

Veronica brings in about £1,700 a month working two, sometimes three 13-hour shifts a week. “When I first started, over 20 years ago,” she said, “you used to get the odd really busy day. Now they all are: we empty a bed to put someone else in it. Working on a delivery suite now is like working in A&E.”

Paul earns what many people would consider a very good salary: just over £50,000, enough to mean the family no longer receives full child benefit – a loss that, somewhat to their surprise, they really noticed.

“It’s been an accumulation of individually quite small things,” said Veronica: “No pay rise for either of us, for years. Higher NI and pension contributions; that’s £100 less in Paul’s pay packets. Car parking at work – £30 a month, that costs now. And everything seems to cost a little bit more now than it used to.”

If Veronica hadn’t increased her hours and taken on more night and weekend shifts, the couple would by now be about £2,500 a year worse off than in 2010. “But the scariest thing,” she said, “is this talk about a seven-day NHS. If that means an end to unsocial hours pay, we’re finished.” (Night shifts pay 30% more than day shifts. They make up a big chunk of Veronica’s earnings.)

“We should be swimming in it,” said Veronica. “We’re really not, though. We have no wiggle room whatsoever. The cars both have 130,000 miles on the clock. If one of those goes, I don’t know what we’d do. The washing machine gave up at Christmas and we had to put the new one on a credit card.”

The couple have discussed selling their house and buying something smaller. “We might well just have to, in fact,” said Veronica, “and of course, we could. We’d be fine. We knew when we bought it would be a stretch for a while – but nothing suggested we’d be getting squeezed like we are now.”

How the parties say they will help

Conservatives

The party is concentrating on tax cuts, rather than market interventions to reduce the cost of living. It would raise the personal allowance to take those on the minimum wage out of income tax and promote schemes to help first-time buyers own their own homes. More recently, the party has pledged to freeze rail fares until at least 2020 and offer 30 hours of free childcare to parents of three- and four-year-olds. However, rises in benefits would be frozen at 1% for the first two years at least, and so would public-sector pay. The party has ruled out a rise in VAT.

Labour

This has been a major plank of Ed Miliband’s offer for a while, starting with his pledge to freeze energy bills in autumn 2013. He also wants to cap rent rises to inflation and freeze rail fares. The minimum wage would rise to at least £8 by 2019 and the party would protect tax credits as well as scrapping the bedroom tax. On top of that, the party is offering 25 hours of free childcare to parents of three- and four-year-olds. It has ruled out a rise in VAT.

Liberal Democrats

The party also wants to raise the personal allowance and extend free childcare to all two-year-olds and then to children aged nine months and over from the end of their parents’ paid parental leave. The Liberal Democrats support the idea of freezing benefit rises to 1% but would end the public-sector pay freeze and make sure all workers in central government departments were paid the living wage. Like Labour and the Tories, the party wants to freeze rail fares.

Ukip

Ukip would scrap tax on the minimum wage, claiming to have had this policy before the Conservatives, increase the marriage tax allowance to £1,500, and abolish the bedroom tax. It would stop taxing tampons at the same VAT rate as luxury goods and scrap hospital parking charges. The party would also limit child benefit to two children per family.

The Green party

The Greens would provide free childcare, abolish zero-hour contracts, increase child benefit, cap rents, provide free public transport for local people and students, cut rail fares by 10%, put up the minimum wage to £10 an hour by 2020, and provide free social care for older people.

Rowena Mason