I HOLD a weekly demo against workfare and sanctions outside Ashton Under Lyne jobcentre.

Last Thursday I met a man who was very angry and upset. He’d lost everything that he loves in life. The reason? The jobcentre, he said.

This man had had a family and a partner. They got along, even though one of their children had cerebral palsy and, by this man’s account, was very disabled.

They managed, but his partner became more and more stressed and upset. The enormity of looking after a disabled child became too much for her.

I really don’t think that they were getting the advice or the support that they needed.

I’ve found that this happens a lot. Sometimes families and situations like this get overlooked and can give the appearance of being able to cope, when in reality the situation is different.

This man said that he had supported his partner and children but it all became too much for her and she had a nervous breakdown.

She was admitted to hospital and became so ill she has since been unable to return to the family home.

I ask for no judgement on her behalf. We don’t know how hard her life had been. She did her best for her children. As a result he was left alone with his children, one of them being severely disabled.

He put in an application for disability living allowance and carer’s allowance and income support for himself. He had to be at home to look after his children. They had been through so much already and he very obviously had to be there to care for them.

He thought that everything was going to be OK. Yes, it was going to be hard but he would cope. That, he said, was his job as their parent. But all this changed in a matter of weeks.

The jobcentre called him in for a back-to-work interview. They wrongly told him that he had to look for work and start claiming jobseeker’s allowance.

Yes, we know that he did not by law have to do this. Indeed his place was to be at home caring for his disabled child and his other children.

He said his whole life felt like he was on a treadmill. He had no rest. The jobcentre said he hadn’t looked for work enough.

He said he had, but he also had to care for his children. Then the sanctioning started. One sanction after another.

He was going hungry and he didn’t know what to do. He just saw himself as a failure to his children.

He said to me: “I couldn’t even provide £70 a week for them. I’m a failure as a parent.”

So he took the only option that he thought he could take at the time. He contacted social services and told them that they would have to take over the care of his children. He couldn’t provide for them. He could give them love but it’s not enough, he said.

He also said to me that now the children are in care they get everything that they need, everything that he couldn’t provide because the DWP refused him the basic human right of being able to bring his children up in their home environment.

To add insult to injury he will now be on another sanction because Ashton Under Lyne jobcentre is now sending him to a workfare programme at an Age Concern charity shop in Manchester. He can’t afford the bus fare and the jobcentre won’t provide the bus fare either.

This man wasn’t known to our protest group at the time of him losing his children or at the time of the jobcentre wrongly telling him that he had to return to work. If we had known him then we would have helped him and this might not have happened.

It’s no use saying that he should have done this and he should have done that. It’s too late now. He wasn’t supported enough by anyone and that is indicative of the state that this country is in at the moment.

Make no mistake the DWP does things like this all the time and gets away with it.

• Charlotte Hughes blogs at thepoorsideoflife.wordpress.com.