Welfare: Mother on £37,000 benefits 'trapped'

Kellie Cottam, from Chorley, Lancs, described the benefits system as a "trap".

Ms Cottam, who gets 3,077.20 a month in income support, child benefit, housing benefit and incapacity benefit, spoke after Chancellor George Osborne made swingeing cuts to the welfare system in the Comprehensive Spending Review.

She suffers from a painful disability called Ehlers Danlos syndrome, and needs help to care for her children from a social worker and a care worker.

But Ms Cottam insists more should be done to help people like her off benefits. "Some people will see me as public enemy number one," she said.

"I've got four children with three different dads. I was expelled from school. I couldn't survive without benefits," she told the Chorley Guardian newspaper.

"That doesn't make me any less of a mum. I was happily married and a full time housewife but that relationship ended and the system has become my breadwinner.

"Some people won't like reading that but that's the truth."

Ms Cottam, who lives in a new four-bedroom house, added: "I can't win either way but we need to change the system.

"Benefits should be a bridge for change. I will be challenging Britain to take off the mask and look in the mirror.

"If they don't like what they see, change it.

"I didn't believe that 10 years later I would still be in the benefit system – it was only meant to be while I got divorced," she said.

New rules to be brought in by the coalition Government will limit any single family's welfare payments to 500 a week.