The Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and the Church of Scotland issued a statement as a series of planned cuts begin to take effect, including the transition of Disability Living Allowance to Personal Independence Payment, the benefit cap and the bedroom tax.

'These cuts make April fools of us all,' said Paul Morrison, Public Issues Policy Adviser. 'We are witnessing what happens when we create a culture that blames poor people for their poverty.

'It is a lie to say that most people on benefits are lazy, that they have an easy life or that they are responsible for the nation’s financial deficit. When people are willing to believe those lies, poor families pay the highest price.'

In response Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, has stressed that the changes to the welfare system are fair. Speaking on Radio 4, Mr Duncan Smith said the government was trying to lower the welfare bill.

'The reality is that successive governments have come in and when they've had a problem they've cut welfare bills and then later on they've ballooned again,' he told the Today Programme.

'What I'm trying to do is to change the process so that we end up restructuring the culture so that people find that work always pays. It doesn't right now.'
Some of the key changes to the benefits system to be introduced in April are:

The transition of Disability Living Allowance to Personal Independence Payment. This involves the planned reduction of support to this group by 20 per cent together with a new test, similar to the discredited Work Capability Assessment.

The total benefit cap. This will be rolled out in four London local authorities, before being imposed on the rest of the country. This measure affects poor children disproportionately, say the Churches, as they are nine times more likely than adults to be affected. The average cut of £93 a week will be devastating to many of the quarter of a million people living in affected families.

The 'Bedroom Tax'. This will affect around a third of all families in social housing - over two million people. Only working age families will be affected. The average cost will be £14 a week, or £16 a week for housing association tenants.

Most benefits received by working age families and children will be up-rated at around a third of the rate of inflation, resulting in a real-terms cut in payments. This will affect those in low paid work and those out of work – including the majority of people unable to work because of illness or disability. The poorest in society - those who are on the very edge - will find life that little bit harder year on year because of this measure.

'Some families will experience the effects of more than one of these measures,' added Mr Morrison.

'It is worrying that there are no Government estimates for the number of people who may be affected by two or three of these cuts at once.'

The Churches also say that politicians and the media have misrepresented those who receive benefits as well as people experiencing poverty, in order to justify spending cuts.

In their report, The lies we tell ourselves: ending comfortable myths about poverty, the Churches say that statistics have been manipulated and misused by politicians and the media to support the belief that the poor somehow deserve their poverty, and therefore deserve the cuts.

The report has been sent to every UK MP and Member of the Scottish Parliament in Britain and people are being encouraged to write to their parliamentary representative asking how they will be using the information to better inform policy-making.

'But this isn’t just a problem for politicians or the media,' Mr Morrison continued. “When ordinary people allow myths about poverty to go unchallenged, whether it’s in the pub or the newspapers, we all become complicit in a great injustice.'