Blog: So, not before time, there will be drastic cuts in the housing benefits system, with the Department for Work & Pensions looking to save £1.8 billion by 2014/15, in changes which will affect more than 6,000 Shropshire households, writes Emma Suddaby.

While I have real sympathy for those who struggle on, working for such a low income that they need help to house themselves, there are also many living in unnecessarily palatial homes who find they can do very nicely thank you by filling a few forms in rather than going out to work to pay for the extra space.

But the problems run deeper than that. For many of the long-term unemployed, returning to work can be a minefield of lost benefits and restrictive hours, where working pays considerably less than living on handouts.

And it’s all very well tutting and sighing about ‘scroungers’, but we’re all trying to get by as best we can. As long as such generous benefits are being made available, people will take them . . . would you look a gift-horse in the mouth while the kids need new shoes and the cupboards are empty?

So before cutting housing benefit, let’s hope the difficulties of getting back to work are properly addressed, as promised, so that those likely to be affected have a realistic chance of avoiding poverty and homelessness.

I know only too well how difficult it can be to get back to work after spending a few years in the wilderness at the start of my rheumatoid arthritis.

I was truly unable to work for a while and thanked my lucky stars to be born in a country that looks after its sick and disabled so well.

But I soon realised that getting back to work is just not as simple as going out and getting a job. The labyrinth of rules and regulations on how many hours are allowed, plus the loss of tag-ons like council tax benefit and NHS dental treatment, mean that, for some, it just doesn’t make any financial sense to return to work, no matter how much they might want to.

Add to that the complexity of the current system and you practically need a degree to find a way out of it anyway.

Right now, returning to work is like a twisted game of snakes and ladders in which you find a job and climb a ladder, only to slip down a hidden snake of lost benefits.

What we need first is to see changes to benefits that encourage people who want to get back to work, to do so, rather than the current system that just encourages them to get better at playing snakes and ladders.