Christelle and her baby died at the hands of a callous state

[Hopeless Romantic]

The suicide of a single mother shows a welfare state so circumscribed that it excludes those who most need our help

Last month, just as the country was preparing for the annual celebration of a poor young woman giving birth to a son, the City of London coroner reported on the death of a young mother who had been given neither shelter nor support when she needed it. Christelle Pardo had been turned away not by a hardhearted innkeeper but by the state. Six months after having all her income cut off and her housing benefit withdrawn, and with a baby to care for, she was destitute. Caught up in a system whose only response was that she didn't qualify under the rules, she killed herself and her child.

Christelle fitted no stereotype. She was a 32-year-old Frenchwoman living in Hackney who had lived in Britain since she and her sister moved here in 1997. In May 2008 she graduated from London's Metropolitan University with a degree in philosophy. At about the same time she discovered she was pregnant. She looked for work while claiming jobseeker's allowance and housing benefit. Then in December 2008, the advisers at the jobcentre told her she no longer qualified for jobseeker's allowance. According to the Department for Work and Pensions the fact that she was within 11 weeks of giving birth disqualified her from being an active jobseeker. She was told to apply for income support instead.

What no one warned her was that European nationals who claim income support must provide more proof of residence than jobseekers have to. All a jobseeker needs do is show they are looking for work. Income support is only given if the claimant can prove that for the previous five years they have been either in work, searching for work, studying, or self-sufficient. Christelle had an eight-month period in 2003 when she said she had been working in a cafe but had no employment records to prove it. Her claim was turned down.

Once that happened, the welfare state stopped operating. Her housing benefit was automatically withdrawn. The state, having decreed she was not in a fit condition to look for work, took no further interest in how the penniless mother of a new baby was going to survive.

Christelle appealed against the DWP's decision but was turned down. In April her application for child benefit was rejected because she wasn't on income support. At the same time Hackney council demanded that she repay £200 in housing benefit which she had been given just as her jobseeker's allowance was being taken away.

Christelle was desperate and applied to take the DWP to tribunal, but repeatedly failed to be given a date for a hearing. She and her baby were by now sharing her sister's one-bedroom flat. Her last attempt to get a date from the tribunal service took place on 12 June. Her sister told the inquest how stressed Christelle was by having nothing to live on. The next day she took her five-month-old son in her arms and jumped to her death from the flat's sixth-floor balcony. Her son died in hospital some hours later.

Once she was dead, officialdom showed a little concern. The City and Hackney Safeguarding Children Board announced that it would be conducting a serious case review, which is due to be published this month. It is hard not to be struck by the contrast between the state's reluctance to spend money on keeping Christelle alive, and its readiness to spend money on inquiring into her death. Staff at the DWP press office, meanwhile, would tell me almost nothing because, they said, the case was still active. Christelle's appeal had come to an end with her death, but a relative has launched one since. This will follow the same tortuous path as the last. The DWP has 50 working days to respond to the appeal, and the tribunal then has three to six months in which to hear the case. This is not a system designed to respond to desperate human need.

The trap in which Christelle found herself is not unique. In the week before Christmas the Hackney Gazette gave another glimpse of this hidden problem when it reported that a Lithuanian woman with a newborn baby was among those who had been thrown out of a squat by police. She asked for emergency housing from Hackney and Walthamstow and was refused all help on exactly the same basis as Christelle; that without a solid five-year record she had no claim on the state.

These cases raise hard questions about who should be supported by our collective generosity. The understandable logic behind the existing rules is that if someone cannot demonstrate that they have contributed to this society then the society has no reciprocal obligation to them. Yet we will happily support fit and healthy jobseekers. If Christelle had not been pregnant but had still failed to find work over the next year, she would have continued to have her living expenses paid. It was precisely because she was not in a position to support herself that the state declined to do so.

I don't believe this is a stance a civilised society can justify. It pitches foreign-born mothers back into a Victorian-style existence in which pregnancy may mean destitution and disgrace. But my reaction may be a minority one. On websites there is a striking lack of sympathy for the Christelles of this world, and a marked resentment about the number of people demanding our collective help. Two thousand years on, we still haven't decided whose side we're really on – the innkeeper's, or that of the penniless stranger and her baby.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/07/mother-suicide-welfare-state