WORCESTER’S parliamentary candidates have clashed over benefits, with the city’s Conservative hopeful saying he doesn’t want it “to become a way of life”.

During a hustings debate, Robin Walker defended the Coalition’s record despite heavy criticism from other parties.

Speaking to students at the University of Worcester, he said: “One of the things that has happened over the last few years is that overall the welfare budget hasn’t reduced the way we wanted it to, and part of that is because we’ve got increased disability spending due to higher numbers of incidents.

“That was the right thing to do but more broadly, I don’t want benefits to become a way of life for people.

“We don’t think the overall welfare bill can become an overall bigger part of the budget.”

Green Party candidate Louis Stephen said: “The Coalition Government has been pushing this anti-austerity agenda which is about cuts.

“This is a very rich country which could actually do all the things it wants to do, but chooses not to - it’s about cuts to the most vulnerable and we’d reverse that.”

Labour’s Joy Squires called benefit sanctions “pretty diabolical”, saying her party would scrap targets on it, and she repeated its pledge to scrap the so-called ‘bedroom tax’.

“For a very many people I come across, the trip to the benefits centre has become something to absolutely fear rather than anything else,” she said.

She said Mr Walker’s view about trying to bring welfare spending down might sound plausible but “masks the most awful situation” some people end up in.

Peter McNally, from Trade Unionists and Socialists Coalition, said: “You can judge a society by how it treats the most vulnerable and disabled.”