"Job Centre is screwing us into the ground': Claimant blasts DWP for late payment and 'hostility' towards unemployed"

From The Daily Mail:

A welfare claimant has criticised the body responsible for overseeing welfare payments, claiming they are trying to 'screw us into the ground'.

Karl McCartney, an unemployed father of six from Lincoln, says he has been forced to borrow £25,000 from doorstep lenders because of late payments by the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) caused by delays in the processing of his application forms, a situation he claims that many other unemployed face.

Mr McCartney also claims an DWP insider told him the body is purposefully hostile to claimants in an interview with BBC Radio 4.

He said: "It was over £25,000 and that was by the August after I’d put all my forms in in May. That sum of money is a huge sum of money and that was all the money that I'd had to spend out for whatever, for my family, my Sky TV package, and that was owed by the DWP.

"Well my family as well as myself have to live. We've got rent to pay, we've got people to look after and provide for. At the age of 42 I’m not proud of the fact I haven't found a job in years or that I had to take out a payday loan because our credit cards, our bank overdraft were all maxed out and I wasn’t the only one on the estate that had to do that."