One particularly severe consequence of the universal credit rollout – likely to be objectionable to even the staunchest of Tory voters – is being overlooked.

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Universal credit is set to replace the main means-tested benefits. These include not just employment and support allowance (ESA) and jobseeker’s allowance (JSA), but also two benefits claimed by millions of low-waged employed people: working tax credits and housing benefit. Part-time workers don’t know what’s about to hit them. The effect it will have will be huge, and the consequences for the government could prove fatal.

By May 2016, 15,000 working people had been moved on to universal credit. The Resolution Foundation estimates that by the time it is fully rolled out it will affect 1.2 million workers. Many of these will be families, and about 200,000 will be lone parents. Most are unaware that once they are moved on to universal credit their claims will entail the same degrading treatment currently reserved only for the unemployed.

Under universal credit, workers on low incomes will be made to look for extra hours as a condition for receiving the benefit. If they are earning less than the equivalent of the minimum wage at 35 hours a week, they will be placed in one of two “labour market regimes” (otherwise termed a “work-related activity group” or “conditionality group”) with conditions attached to their benefit claims to “incentivise” them to increase their hours – or find higher paying or full-time work.

Those placed in the “intensive work search regime” will be obliged to “take intensive action to secure … more work, attending regular work-focused interviews, attending work search reviews (at least fortnightly) and undertaking work preparation, work search and other work-related activities”.

If they are judged to not be complying with these conditions they will be sanctioned, just as jobseekers are now. At the higher level this would mean the loss of about £70 a week for three months for the first failure, six months for a second failure, and three years for a subsequent failure. Millions of sanctions have already been applied to people on ESA and JSA with dire consequences. Not only are sanctions often applied unfairly, numerous studies have shown that sanctions do not in fact work as an effective incentive to finding employment. Pushing people to the brink of destitution tends to diminish rather than enhance people’s ability to find a job.

One group who would be expected to benefit from a welfare system that can pay varying amounts of benefits according to changing irregular working hours – as planned on universal credit – are those on zero-hours contracts. However, this group will be among those hardest hit by the regime of in-work conditionality and sanctions. Already, as with JSA and ESA claimants, we are seeing sanctions being applied to in-work universal credit claimants for spurious reasons. They have had money deducted when irregular working hours have made it impossible to make scheduled appointments, or after having told the jobcentre they would be on holiday.

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For many, the money will be taken from elements of the benefit paid for children and housing. Removing money intended for the children of working people – to the point of threatened eviction for rent arrears – will hopefully be a step too far for most of the population, and will be intolerable for the families affected.

It’s possible that employers may also withdraw support for the measures when they witness the effect on their staff. Workers weakened by hunger, or exhausted from having to walk for miles as they can’t afford bus fares, or unable to wash with hot water because they can’t top up gas or electricity meters, generally do not perform well at work.

In abandoning the traditional distinctions between the “deserving hardworking”, and “undeserving”, non-working poor, the government is taking a very unwise political risk. The financial punishments currently reserved for the unemployed have been accepted by many because they appear to follow a particular – albeit simplistic and ill-informed – justification: why should hardworking people subsidise those portrayed as lazy scroungers? It has been this logic that has propped up support for the Conservative party among many working class people for years. That narrative is about to fall apart.

The consequences of universal credit will be catastrophic, for those claiming the benefit of course, but also for the government that implements it.

• Pilgrim Tucker is a housing campaigner who supported the Grenfell Tower residents’ campaign, Grenfell Action Group