Tory minister Tracey Crouch says families hit by tax credit cuts should stop spending money on TV subscriptions

The minister says helping families cut back their spending was the kindest approach

Conservative DCMS minister Tracey Crouch

Families hit by George Osborne’s tax credit cuts should “go without” certain things like subscriptions to television services, a Conservative minister has said.

Tracey Crouch said some people would need to make “savings” and that she had come across households where cut-backs were necessary.

Economists say the cuts will likely plunge 600,000 children in working homes into poverty by 2020 and that a concurrent increase in the minimum wage would come “nowhere near” to recovering the money lost.

The minister at the culture department defended Government policy, however, and said the Chancellor needed to better communicate why he was cutting £4.4bn from the in-work support for low-income families.

“I think at the end of the day one of the kindest things that we can do is try to help people to support themselves and work around their finances,” she said in an interview with The Spectator magazine.

“Some of my most heartbreaking cases are those that come to me saying that they are struggling and then you go through with them their expenditure and income — I’m not generalising at all, I’m talking about some very individual cases — and actually they just haven’t realised some of the savings that they need to make themselves.

“You know it can be… things like paid subscriptions to TVs and you just sit there and you think, ‘You have to sometimes go without if you are going to have people make ends meet’.”

Ms Crouch said that her own family had often “struggled to make ends meet” when she was growing up.

Last month Mr Osborne said people on low incomes would lose out if the Government did not cut their tax credits. He claimed the cuts would prevent the Government’s budget deficit from hurting people.

The Government was defeated in the House of Lords on the cuts, however, promping a re-think.

The Chancellor has said he will try to mitigate the effects of the cuts in new measures to be announced in the Autumn Statement. David Cameron has refused to say whether people will still be made worse off, however.