Jenny Welsh
Mother
I will be over £1,000 worse off with the new changes to tax credits. My family will be affected in a variety of ways, mainly not having the buffer we need to pay when our (donated) car needs repairs, the house needs maintenance, which is not covered by the landlord, and my daughter has a growth spurt and needs her clothes replacing. I have invested in a freezer so I can stop buying fresh vegetables and move over to cheaper frozen food. Scrimping on healthy food is not something I ever imagined I would have to do, however this is what will be happening as a result of these cuts.

Carol Peter
Part-time worker
I lost £300 a month in the last round of cuts in 2010 and now I stand to lose another £1,000 a year. I never hear anybody mentioning the plight of the part-time workers, of whom there are now 8.8 million.
Most of us can’t get any more work, because most employers want you to be flexible, so it’s almost impossible to get another job to make your hours up.
Also Cameron says he’s putting the tax threshold up, but for us part-timers it doesn’t matter as we don’t even earn enough to pay taxes anyway.

Hilary Kemp
Single mother, full-time worker
I receive about £21,000 and I have calculated I shall be about £2,000 a year worse off. I have worked so hard to bring up my daughter on my own since she was three months old so for all that time I have needed support while at work. Most well-paid jobs incur long hours and weekend work. You just cannot do that when you have a child to support. My daughter is also autistic so it has meant me taking a lot of unpaid time out of work in order to attend hospital appointments. I have got increasingly into debt because of the expensive childcare.

Eddie Tempest
Self-employed
I will be affected tremendously through these vicious cuts. I have no transport as I don’t drive therefore work has been hard to obtain. After I went self-employed I had only tax credits of £52 per week to support myself with until I could start earning any money from my business. Now six years on I have not progressed much further due to the constant demands for high-utility charges, council tax and ever-increasing costs of day-to-day living which exceeds the £52, making it impossible to find the necessary funds to advertise my business in order to generate more work.

Roy Medhurst
Self-employed musician
Being a musician in this country is difficult because it is an underrated and underpaid profession, despite being widely required. I have had to rely on help from tax credits for a while now to keep afloat of bills and rent. My tax credits have recently been halved making life even harder. This situation is made ridiculous when George Osborne made taxpayers pay the £100,000 interest on the remortgaging of his second home which he already owns outright.

Holly Nolan
Self-employed with a disability
By August 31 next year, I will lose approximately £50 or more per week. I am self-employed and struggle with bipolar affective disorder and chronic migraine. My son will be 16 soon and even his child tax credit will drop slightly. I have struggled in higher education in order to go on to obtain a PGCE and am headed in that direction for next September, but this will be reliant on my health. If it were not for friends helping me cope, I would be destitute, or worse, by now.