What EVERY MP should know about welfare refrorm

Since Employment and Support Allowance was introduced back in 2008, campaigners and those affected have warned that it is flawed. Not because people must face assessment to qualify for support but because the wrong people are declared "fit for work".

People clearly too disabled to work get harassed and pressurised into work programmes they clearly cannot comply with, while the number of "cheats" or "scroungers" caught, remains at exactly the same level it always did.

Throughout the last year, we have warned of a tipping point.  With over 110,000 decisions already found to be wrong and overturned, 11,000 people a week are being put through flawed assessments. It is only a matter of time before this becomes the toxic story of recent years. MP mailbags are already bursting with letters about this.

With the double-disaster of care cuts, horrific stories of neglect and want join the stories of war widows with cancer sent to the job centre and soldiers with their legs blown off told to get a job.

I live in a safe, Sussex, Conservative seat with a 17,000 majority. Our local press is just as conservative, though with a smaller "c". We are not given to emotional outbursts and certainly not generally in favour of the "feckless" or "workshy"

This week, the Headline splashed in maximum sized font across the Worthing Herald screams :

HOW CAN I GO TO WORK?

Wheelchair bound Mark Saunders is diabetic, has lost a leg, is partially sighted and needs dialysis three times a week, yet the government wants him to go to work - or risk losing his benefits. 

Meanwhile, the Bognor Regis Observer carries this starkest of headlines : 

I'LL BE LEFT TO DIE ALONE BECAUSE OF CUTBACKS

And goes on to explain how a local man with a progressive muscle-wasting disease, bedridden and unable even to draw up his own insulin has had his full time carer cut, left with just 5 hours a day and no night time care. To give one graphic example from the story, he explains how in he event of a fire, he would have to burn alive, unable to move independently. 

As campaigners like myself have tried to explain so many times, no one minds a fair assessment to see what work a person could do, but no-one, anywhere in the country has the appetite for sending people like Mark Saunders to the jobcentre. 

We all have ageing parents or face the threat of a minor condition worsening. No-one in the country wants to see severely disabled, bedridden citizens left lonely and lying in their own filth, unable to feed themselves or draw up life saving medicines. 

Stories like this become more and more common up and down the country, in every local paper, in every community centre. You may not see them in the Daily Mail yet, but soon, it is inevitable and it will be to our great, great shame. Once more, I urge the government to halt the roll-out of ESA to 1.9 million of our most vulnerable people until it can be made safe and "fit for purpose" 

I urge them to reconsider cuts to local councils so deep that they leave those we most have a duty to protect living in utter despair. 

Now. Before we make mistakes we will regret for decades. 

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From now on, if YOUR local paper has a similar story, please add links to the comment thread below. I will list them all by MP and constituency and we will start to build up a directory of stories from around the country. Just keep an eye on the front pages and send me the headlines. 

Many thanks.