THE Conservative candidate for Forest West described how the country has become “addicted” to benefits during the final hustings of the parliamentary campaign.

The comments came during a debate in Fordingbridge last Wednesday that mainly focused on the welfare state and spending.

Desmond Swayne, the Conservative Minister for International Development, said: “We are obsessed with cutting up the cake when our obsession should be with increasing the size of it.

“I believe in aspiration, in enterprise and initiative and all of these things should be encouraged, I believe that we do nobody any good featherbedding them on benefits.

“We give people the expectations that we owe them a living, I believe it is a consequence of a system that we have imposed for the last 40 years.”

Janet Richards, from the Green Party however disagreed stating she believed more money was needed to be raised by the wealthiest in society and distributed to the poor.

She added: “We would increase the minimum wage to a living wage and increase it to £8.10 an hour and £10 an hour by the end of the parliament. We would abolish zero hours contracts and we will also focus on making work pay.”

Ukip’s Paul Bailey said the tax threshold needed to be raised to give a bigger incentive for workers to come off benefits.

He said: “We would stop child benefits to children that don’t even live here and limit it to the first two children of any family.

“There is a popular misconception that Ukip are against the immigrant, no, what we do say is if you come here we would like you to have a job to come to and we would like you to have accommodation sorted, and we would like you to have NHS approved health insurance - and I would like you to speak English.”

Labour’s Lena Samuels argued that housing associations needed to be kept as they provided a “stable base” for families that could not afford to buy.

She said: “It is about giving people equal access to services so that they get job opportunities by giving them the right education and the opportunity to work at a decent wage.”

The candidates also clashed on defence spending during the debate at St Mary’s church with Mr Swayne saying his party was committed to maintaining the NATO target of spending two per cent of gross domestic product on the armed forces.

He added: “When we came to office we found a £38 billion hole in the defence procurement budget. A billion minutes ago Jesus was preaching in Palestine.”

Ms Samuels stated that defence spending was a Labour priority whilst there was a Russian threat and Ms Richards declared that by scrapping trident the Green Party would have extra money to spend on conventional forces.

Mr Bailey however added that a cut in the foreign aid budget would enable the government to meet the NATO commitment.

The Liberal Democrat candidate Imogen Shepherd-DuBey was absent from the debate.