THE Department for Work and Pensions speaks with an honesty unusual in Government departments when it frankly admits the benefit system is broken.

This country should be rightly proud of its welfare state and its compassion towards helping those who, through little or no fault of their own, need the assistance of the taxpayer to get by.

But the system has ballooned into such an unwieldy beast that we now have generations of people to whom the aspiration to stand on their own two feet is an anathema.

Why work when there is no need?

And then we have people like Lorenza El-Kority, a single mother-of-three who speaks out today about the ‘trap’ whereby she would be worse off if she began to work full time.

Now there will be some who attack Ms El-Kority for speaking out – you can almost write the spiteful online comments likely to be posted.

But ignoring the prejudiced, this woman genuinely seems to want to work and, importantly, show her children a life dependent on benefits is no life at all.

We should all remember that if people like Ms El-Kority give up on teaching her children that lesson then the benefits system will never be fixed by this or any other government.