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The betrayal of Benefits Street A decade on, Channel 4's poverty safari is still taking its toll

'Channel 4 made a fiction from a whole class' (Credit: Channel 4)

'Channel 4 made a fiction from a whole class' (Credit: Channel 4)


February 17, 2024   7 mins

James Turner Street in Winson Green, Birmingham, renamed Benefits Street by Channel 4 in 2014, was originally christened Osborne Street, and this makes me laugh. With its cast of depressives and drug addicts, fed and clothed by the state, and living in semi-affable chaos, Benefits Street, which posed as social commentary, did more to sell George Osborne’s policy of Austerity than anything. What could be done with such useless people but tax their spare rooms and cut their child benefit? It was cruel but effective television: a legendarium of the underclass. Benefits Street was a very partial study of poverty, and worthless for it.

Here I am, walking down Benefits Street, behaving no better than Channel 4 when it put a camera on a drug addict called Fungi — he named himself for mould — lamenting the loss of his child. This late Victorian street is fascinating, but TV can turn anything into Madame Tussauds. The houses are small, and neat, but the overriding aesthetic is bins.

Birmingham Council has a mad bin policy. Each tiny house has two vast black bins outside it. As if in fury at this mad bin policy, the street is filled with rubbish. When I discuss this with the residents — they all talk about rubbish — they blame each other. This is a very ethnically diverse area, and they blame eastern Europeans. If I were Channel 4, I would find an eastern European to defend himself — did you drop that nappy, did you? — but I’m not, and I don’t.

As if to delight Channel 4, the first thing I see is a robbery, and it is barely 10am. With sublime irony, it takes place opposite HMP Birmingham, which dominates Winson Green: there used to be a workhouse and an asylum too, but only the prison made it. There is scuffling, and a young woman punches her way out of a corner shop and hurries across the road. She was stealing food worth pennies, says the woman who works in the shop. She tells me not to worry. It happens every day. It’s easy for a tourist to find what they are looking for here: despair. I see a homeless woman near the tram stop, scrabbling on the floor for silver she has dropped. She is frightened it will be stolen, and she grapples with the dirt.

“I think of Fungi, later to become a ghostly tabloid staple. He died in 2019.” (Channel 4)

But James Turner Street is more functional than it looks: or, rather, it isn’t special. The man who owns the MOT shop — that is the industry here now, cars and corner shops — suggests that, if it were honest, Benefits Street would have been a franchise, with an outpost in every town. “What they [Channel 4] tried to isolate — ‘this is the dump of the UK!’ — it isn’t,” he says. “Every area you go to you will find a street where people are going through similar struggles. It is just another street. It’s in line with the rest of the UK. It has become worse [in the last decade]. The only ones who are benefitting are the upper class.”

We stare at business owners, landlords, driving Range Rovers past his window. He knew Stephen “Smoggy” Smith, “the 50p man” from TV, who sold household goods for 50p. He had a kind heart — he gave things away to struggling parents — but he moved on. Everyone who starred in the show has moved on, been imprisoned, or died. The only one I manage to contact is Sherrell Dillion, now a successful model. She sends me a courteous message on Instagram, but she can’t face talking about the show: “I’ve spoken about Benefits Street until my legs fall off.”

There is an Ofsted-rated “outstanding” school on the corner and, opposite it, the community garden. I am given a tour by a kindly old man. He shows me compost “fully rotted down”, which he sells for £4 a bag, the wildlife sanctuary — birds, squirrels, “rats of course” — and the herb beds for local families. On Bonfire Night they had 200 people, and fire pits. “They [Channel 4] weren’t interested in anyone with a functional life,” he says. “They picked on people with benefits, they picked on the ones who were more colourful, so to speak. It helped to sell the programme.”

I see an elderly couple walking into a house. It belongs to the man’s brother, he says, who is in hospital. He is happy to let me in. And here it is: the fictionalised house. The decor is from the Seventies, when wages in Birmingham were among the highest in the country: they collapsed within a decade as manufacturing did, though Benefits Street didn’t talk about that. The carpets are dark swirls; the wallpaper is a pattern of red poppies; there is a horse figurine on the gas fire, and seascapes on the walls; the small Christmas tree is dying in its pot. The woman is cleaning a stain from the red velveteen couch on her knees.

He tells me that 2014 was an odd time in the history of the street. There were alcoholics and drug addicts here: “a period when they all seemed to come together”. His brother likes it here: “He’s not an adventurous person. He’s lonely, and he took to drink.” He tried gardening to ease his loneliness, by taking part in an allotment scheme: “It fell by the wayside and disappeared. No one is left from that time.” Or almost no one. They tell me to call on a lady four doors down. I knock, a face peers out of the front window, and an ancient woman opens the door a crack. She has lived here for 50 years, she says. “They [Channel 4] never came to my house. I don’t smoke cigs,” — and she laughs — “I don’t smoke ganja.” Her husband is dead and she tells me she thinks she will die soon.

“Everything has changed here. It was lovely,” — and she points down the street — “Mrs Shaw lived there. And,” — she squeezes her forehead up — “I can’t remember her name. It’s my home. I paid for it. Not council. My husband was a bus driver. We had hanging baskets: lovely plants. There is rubbish everywhere. God forgive me. I am not telling a lie. I won’t do anything about it because I will soon be gone. We all have to go sometime. This street has gone to the dogs — that’s what I say. We are human beings.”

She points down the street: “They are gone. They are gone. They are gone”. She opens the door wider. Her small living room is very hot, and gaudily decorated. She points at a photograph of her hanging baskets in bloom: so I will believe that they existed.

I bump into a man who worked for 47 years as a lorry driver. It is important to him that I know this. “I refused to go on [the show],” he says. “They didn’t say they wanted people on the dole. I can show you the paperwork. They never said nothing about a job centre, [about] benefits. They didn’t tell people what they were doing. They said it was about the community.” He shuffles off in anger, still smarting at the insult. But still he turns back and adds: “I have been burgled 28 times.” Then I meet Jay, a youngish man with paper bags of new goods. “It’s a shithole!” he exclaims. “No matter what street you pick, it is definitely the shitter end of Birmingham. But you could have thrown a dart at any major city in Britain: Birmingham, Liverpool, London, and you would have hit a James Turner Street. We drew the short straw there and ended up on the telly. I should imagine it would ruin your life if you were on drugs.” I think of Fungi, later to become a ghostly tabloid staple. He died in 2019.

Lee Nutley, another star of the series, who died in 2016 (Channel 4)

He points towards HMP Birmingham: “There are more criminals this side of the fence than that side. You could have picked any street in any big city and found characters like that. Apparently, some of them did well out of it.” I follow him home. He lives in an HMO [house of multiple occupation] “with three men from Gambia who smoke weed”. We sit in the living room, which has a vast red sofa and a vase of plastic flowers. It smells of bleach because they are cleaning up after a mouse infestation. It got so bad the landlord moved a cat into the front bedroom. I also meet Minnie the English bulldog who, Jay says, “saved me”. She places herself between us, and growls. Minnie is trained to bark at people wearing face masks and carrying pipes. I also meet his flatmate, who is masked, though Minnie doesn’t bark at him. Jay introduces me as his probation officer.

Jay shows me his housing benefit papers: the landlord gets £1,000 per room per month from the taxpayer, or almost £50,000 a year for a house worth £100,000, with no hot water downstairs “apart from the shower”, cockroaches, and mice. This stuns me but Jay wants to talk about crime. He’s been in HMP Birmingham — “one of the best prisons in the UK” — for violence and theft, “though I’ve calmed down now. It’s much better than Strangeways. The drug scene is terrible here. Crack, heroin, cannabis: you name it. These HMOs aren’t helping.” Drug dealers steal from each other. They find cannabis plants using heat sensors and smash their way in, but no one is arrested because you can’t telephone the police and say your cannabis plants have been stolen.

Jay went into a spiral when his mother died. He split up with his partner, his children were taken into care, and he started drinking. “I think I’m coming out the other end of it,” he says. “I could do with moving from here to be honest.” He stares at me: “If you’re looking to start again this isn’t the place to do it. People keep themselves to themselves. It’s hard to start a new life here. It’s hard to live on benefits. Most people are on benefits, and I don’t know how. I look around me, and everyone I know is on the sick. There are five people living in this house and not one person works. How can that be? I don’t see anyone putting into the pot. How can everyone I know be taking out?”

“It’s hard to start a new life here. It’s hard to live on benefits.”

He was offered a job at the carwash round the corner, he says, for £10 per six-hour day in mid-winter. The minimum wage is £10.42 an hour, not £1.66, but the owner trusted the taxpayer would intercede. Now Jay is off for depression: “They will sign anyone off for that. I have been on the sick for two years.” He used to fit ventilated wall systems in London and wishes he could again, but he lost his licence for drink-driving. “The gaffer wouldn’t touch it. I shamed the company.” The next day I go back to say goodbye. His housemate answers the door. Cannabis smoke flows around him like a special effect. He says Jay is asleep and can’t be disturbed.

I leave, knowing that there are variations of Jay in the inner suburbs of all of our cities, but we don’t see them. Channel 4 made a fiction from a whole class — and a fiction can be easily ignored. It was. It still is.


Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

TanyaGold1

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J Bryant
J Bryant
7 months ago

This piece reminds me of the author’s “Life on the Cornish Breadline” essay for Unherd. It was a sombre and moving piece, and her current essay has the same tone, the same narrative voice, the same cadence to the prose, like a grandfather clock winding down.
It’s important we’re aware of the lives of the poorest among us, but I do wonder if TV series like the one by Channel 4, and perhaps even this article, amounts to little more than poverty p*rn. Perhaps I’m being too cynical.
The most interesting observation in the essay was, “There are five people living in this house and not one person works. How can that be? I don’t see anyone putting into the pot. How can everyone I know be taking out?” I suppose part of the answer is that in a society where so many traditional jobs have been off-shored, people must rely on the government for income, and the government heavily taxes the remaining wage earners. From what I’ve read, though, the UK tax burden is the highest it has ever been and is now actively penalizing initiative and productivity. Perhaps Benefits Street is a glimpse of the future.

James Rowlands
James Rowlands
7 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Nobody offers solutions.

Here are some that will work

A two bin collections a week ( all rubbish)

Drug dealing …. Death penalty

Using …. Min 20 years

Robbery ( after 3 convictions ) life

Noise after 7 pm in the evening £5000 fine

Shall I go on?

Don’t worry I don’t vote. Nobody to vote for with policies that will work

Dark Horse
Dark Horse
7 months ago
Reply to  James Rowlands

Using min 20 years! In a rehab centre to help them off their addiction and train them in gainful skills. Not in a prison where they will easily get supplies of their drug of choice and become even more addicted.
And even more useless and unemployable.
Putting people in prison for decades is massively expensive.
There must be a better, cheaper alternative.
Get them out of that environment and somewhere secure and train them to do a job and put them to work full time in a drug free prison.
Make more effort to create safe drug free prisons in the first place.
Have Muslim only prisons.
Extremists use our prisons as recruiting grounds.
This has to stop.

jeanette bell
jeanette bell
7 months ago
Reply to  Dark Horse

What’s wrong with prison management? Why are there drugs in UK prisons? It’s not like that in hard line countries. The UK is a soft touch with politicians unwilling to take responsibility in order to collect votes.

Dark Horse
Dark Horse
7 months ago
Reply to  James Rowlands

Massive fines are pointless and uncollectable in a population mired in poverty.
Noise pollution should lead to instant eviction of tenants and confiscation of property for owner occupiers.

Mrs R
Mrs R
7 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

“The decor is from the Seventies, when wages in Birmingham were among the highest in the country: they collapsed within a decade as manufacturing did, though Benefits Street didn’t talk about that.”
Here is the answer as to why the working class were betrayed and dumped on benefits. What happened in the 70s? We joined the Common Market, within a decade manufacturing was indeed stripped out and gone. The area around Old Trafford and other areas around Salford and Manchester were alive with industry and manufacturing: people worked and the place was well kept. There were some streets that were slums but on the whole it was a thriving area and people worked. I know because that is where I grew up.
The working class were dumped on benefits and education dumbed down. New Labour did the rest. Its leaders, Blair and Brown, held the British working class in contempt and it appears, to me at least, that they went out of their way to try and destroy them. Frank Field did his sterling best to raise the issue of welfare dependency and the horrific consequences it had already wrought by 1998 on swathes of the once working class but Blair didn’t want to hear it and didn’t listen.

Dark Horse
Dark Horse
7 months ago
Reply to  Mrs R

Frank Field was a top quality politician.

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
7 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

The problem with her earlier piece about Cornwall was that part of the reason there was a lack of affordable housing was new incomers from London with money to spend on property, like Tanya herself.

Ian_S
Ian_S
7 months ago

The fruits of globalisation. But let’s see who we can accuse of links to slavery 200 years ago.

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
7 months ago
Reply to  Ian_S

Of globalisation. But also of the breakdown of communities caused by the 1971 Misuse Of Drugs Act, a crazy benefits system that rewards idleness and profiteering, and a host of other things. It’s possible to put the genie back in the bottle (witness the gradual transformation of slums and crime in mid-19th British cities), but it won’t be easy and will need a lot of tough love.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

Yes but what astounds me is that absolutely NOTHING has been done to reform, just more demonisation of the poor, less social housing than ever and more profits for the already rich.
Indeed there are much worse places than James turner st in the uk.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
7 months ago
Reply to  Ian_S

Ahh I should have known it was woke to blame. And if that link’s too tenuous it’s the globalists.

Dennis Roberts
Dennis Roberts
7 months ago

“the landlord gets £1,000 per room per month from the taxpayer, or almost £50,000 a year for a house worth £100,000, with no hot water downstairs “apart from the shower”, cockroaches, and mice.”

However, the landlord is not considered a benefit claimant.

Richard Hopkins
Richard Hopkins
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

This shocking business model warrants further exposure, as it is likely to be copied in every city. Is it any wonder that Birmingham council is in a state of utter financial disarray?

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

No, the landlord is a rent seeker. And more destructive to an economy than high tax welfare is rent seeking.

Welfare spending can be dialled up or down as politics shifts. Rent seeking corrupts politics itself. Directly or through a spouse or child, over two thirds of our MPs benefit from rent seeking. It is no mystery why uncontrolled immigration is touted by MPs as a good thing for the economy when the overwhelming measure of their personal and family’s economic success is rental income.

Instead of capital being spent on the production of goods and services, it is gobbled up by inflated land prices being bought for rental return. Less than 5% of the capital raised and spent on residential property is spent building new property. That is destructive rent seeking in action and it is directly causing low productivity growth, a yawning current account deficit, and falling living standards.

Dennis Roberts
Dennis Roberts
7 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Couldn’t agree more and as Richard says it is barely discussed. All the coverage is devoted to things like Brexit or the various 0.1% adjustments to GDP every month.

Saw a stat this week which said productivity per person in the UK fell by 0.6% last year. Staggering, but barely noticed.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

PETER RACHMAN RIDES AGAIN!

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
7 months ago

For that they could stay with Tanya at the Hotel de Crillon ! Tanya wouldn’t mind sharing a room . ( see her more upmarket perch at the Spectator this week ) Can it be she whizzes between the Place de La Concord and Benefits St . Birmingham in one of the top end Range Rovers she gets to borrow for a plug ?

M Shewbridge
M Shewbridge
7 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Bloody well said.

I understand why the beneficiaries of this parasitism don’t want to talk about it, but it amazes that few others do either.

It’s the scourge of the modern world.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Yes. This is a crucial point.
When these people run for office it’s never mentioned that they’re landlords

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
7 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

I once owned rough rentals in a rough part of town in a city.

Yes, the income can be high when it comes together like this – but in reality it is a nightmare mostly. This landlord gets a check from the council – try where you do not… But the thing is, sure the money in this one is good – but I promise you it is not as good as it sounds.

Costs – electricity, rates, insurance, and Management fees as you really do not want to manage it yourself – maintenance, mortgage, and just the hassle.

This silly first post – if it is so easy why is he not doing it? Really, Why Not?

Because it is NOT EASY. Go on poster – get a £100,000 dump of a house on that road and make £50,000 a year, why not – do 10 of them – get rich its EASY!! Right?

No its not – it is a hard way to make your money. If it was as easy as the first poster says everyone would do it and the costs would come down – but it is NOT EASY, I know, I did it.

Mark HumanMode
Mark HumanMode
7 months ago

as a landlord i appreciate your sentiment, but to convince others you need to provide at least one example of what makes it so hard.

N Forster
N Forster
7 months ago
Reply to  Mark HumanMode

An old friend of mine bought 30 flats in the NE of England. All in rough, poor areas. All on interest only. He thought he’d do well – have the tenants cover the mortgages along with a little extra, then sell the flats for a profit when the time came to pay off the principle loans.
Instead he found at any one time at least one tenant was not paying, often up to half a dozen. All the money he thought he would make he paid to solicitors. For the ten years he owned the flats (he’s sold them all on now, for pretty much what he paid for them) he was permanently employing solicitors to deal with tenants who didn’t pay.
It wasn’t quite the jolly he hoped.

Dark Horse
Dark Horse
7 months ago
Reply to  N Forster

I think there is a proposal to pass a law that all housing benefit must be paid directly to the landlord bypassing the tenant entirely and can be withheld if the landlord fails to maintain the property.
Of course he should have the right to evict quickly and easily anyone who trashes the place and put them on a public blacklist.
Bring back the workhouse.
Not the Dickensian nightmare of Oliver Twist but the place my colleague lived with her mum and sister for two years as a child when her father abandoned them.
It was warm, clean, comfortable. The staff were kind but strict so standards of behaviour were high. Her mum worked in the kitchen and they went to the school they always had. Minimum disruption. Two years later the council found them a nice house.
They bought it under right to buy.
They made good friends in the workhouse.
Only mistake made was not replacing every council property sold with a new one using the receipts from the sales.
End result mass homelessness – disaster!

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
7 months ago
Reply to  Mark HumanMode

From experience I can tell you that more often then not tenants from certain “backgrounds” make locusts look like house pets.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

That I can scarcely believe. I would like to see those papers and understand better what is going on there. It must be a short term accommodation of some sort.
Anyway, if the landlord plays by Birmingham council’s rules, why should he be criticised? He is offering a service the council needs and that the council is willing to pay a set amount for.

Richard Hopkins
Richard Hopkins
7 months ago

The anticipated cost of housing benefit for 2023 was £14.3 billion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-63129705

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago

Almost exactly the same amount as we squander on Northern Ireland each year.

And yet the ungrateful ‘swine’ are still bringing vexatious prosecutions against British soldiers who were sent there more 50 years ago to STOP ‘them’ tearing each other apart!
We shouldn’t have bothered, it was a total waste of blood and treasure, and a national disgrace.

ps. Apologies for this off-piste rant!

Peter F. Lee
Peter F. Lee
7 months ago

Nothern Ireland should have been returned to the Irish Republic long ago. Immigrants from Scotland and England, should have been given the choice, return to where came from or be part of the Irish Republic.

Carl Valentine
Carl Valentine
7 months ago

Charles no one would wish to deny you another piste-off rant…

Dennis Roberts
Dennis Roberts
7 months ago

From my time spent on housing forums prior to the GFC, the landlords on there considered HMOs to be the most profitable form of ‘investment’.

Given the description of the condition of the house I don’t expect he’s playing by the rules, just pocketing the easy money (whilst no doubt telling everyone he’s a risk taking entrepreneur).

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago

No,he’s a criminal shyster being enabled by other criminal shysters we laughingly call the Government who can twist the laws to enable this sort of crime,in fact he may be one of them.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago
Reply to  jane baker

The Laws of England NO longer speak with the voice of authority, and in fact haven’t done so since Thursday the 13th August 1964.*

(*The last hangings in the UK, a double one as it turned out.)

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
7 months ago

By your logic, a waster on the dole who gets paid to get high and do nothing is also merely “playing by the rules”.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago

Hasn’t Birmingham just gone BUST?

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
7 months ago

The house is clearly a hovel and unfit for human habitation. The landlord (and I’m surprised at the assumptions that he’s a white Tory spiv type character) is renting out to people on the fringes of society and also, by the sounds of it, criminality. They won’t complain about damp, vermin or mould as they don’t want the authorities showing an interest. He’s not playing by the rules. I am left wondering what the various weed-smoking Ghanains are doing here. I do feel for the lad who lost his job and family. You would think that a safety net is actually there for someone like that as some people aren’t able to get back on their feet without help.

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
7 months ago

Agreed; most of the landlords where I live are Asians and they shamelessly exploit their own kind and anybody else who’s just turned up. All the prosecutions for properties without fire certificates etc all concern Asian landlords.

E Wyatt
E Wyatt
7 months ago

The tenants are also afraid of being put out on the street if they speak out. Slum HMO landlords don’t bother with the niceties of eviction law.

Walter Marvell
Walter Marvell
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

Well said. The true scale of the benefit giveaways is monstrous, especially in housing. Even working people are being subsidized via tax credits. We refuse to acknowledge that our society has hit the buffers. If you fail to supply affordable homes(ditto energy) for the majority of your citizens and continue to suck in a million new people a year, you are speeding in a top gear with a locked wheel toward a tree and terrible crash. An already bust magic money State can put a finger in the d**e by splurging on these bailouts and giveaways. But it will not prevent the carnage. As with energy, or the fate of those sad folk on Benefit Street, you cannot unwind 20 years of deep structural dysfunction and policy disaster.

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

And he’s very likely a.Tory landowner.

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
7 months ago
Reply to  jane baker

Given the largest owner of HMOs sits on the Labour benches, this isn’t Tory vs Labour. Red man good, blue man bad (and vice versa) is rotting democracy.

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
7 months ago
Reply to  jane baker

Again, having watched the show, when one of the landlords did appear (I think for the property where the ‘East European’ family resised), he didn’t look like your typical Tory voting gammon/Peter Rachmann; somewhat more ‘multicultural’ as I recall.

E Wyatt
E Wyatt
7 months ago
Reply to  jane baker

Very unlikely. The biggest slum landlord in my city certainly isn’t.

Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

That’s a lot per room. But at half the price it might be reasonable, Adults in temperate climates can get by perfectly well with a shower and a kettle, and cockroaches (are they even a thing in the UK?) and mice can be gotten rid of. If you can be bothered.
Could you really buy the house for £100,000?

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
7 months ago
Reply to  Gerry Quinn

You could easily buy the house for £100k. In the now benighted former industrial town where I grew up, you could buy two Victorian terraced houses for that money the last time I looked.

William Cameron
William Cameron
7 months ago
Reply to  Gerry Quinn

The market rent of that whole house is under £600 a month. So why is the council paying 12 times that ?

Tom Hedger
Tom Hedger
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

I expect the council once owned many of the houses in that street. Didn’t cost them £50,000 a year to maintain them then.

Andrew Daws
Andrew Daws
7 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

I don’t believe those figures for a moment. I rent out two rooms in my London house, and a friend has 2 BTL new build 2 bedroom flats, all in good areas, and we don’t get anywhere near that.

j watson
j watson
7 months ago

The original Series and articles reminding us illuminate in our minds the clash between how much responsibility and agency we believe individuals have and how much responsibility we believe society/State should take for one’s lot in life. This has been the tenson in social policy for two hundred years with variations in how much one leans in either direction when designing and implementing Policy. What 99% of most of us would agree I think is that both individual and society have responsibility here. We’d differ on where we struck the balance of emphasis.
Having been v lucky in life, I can’t help my primary reaction being ‘did these fellow members of my society get the same or similar opportunities I did?’ The answer seems obvious. From that flows – we must do more whilst not stripping people of their own agency too.

Albireo Double
Albireo Double
7 months ago
Reply to  j watson

How much “more” should we do? And what form should that “more” take?

I’ve had all manner of problems in my long life including addiction, Illness, “depression” and homelessness, and I’ve never claimed a bloody penny.

Problems are there to be sorted out. And our responsibility is to sort out our problems, is it not?

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

Did you ever receive a helping hand or kind word–if not the pound coin you may have preferred–when you needed it most?
“Am I my brother’s keeper” is one of the greatest quandaries and rhetorical evasions of all time, uttered by the world’s first murderer.

Albireo Double
Albireo Double
7 months ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Yes I have – and I’ve passed on many times the number of kind words. But only when I was in a position to do so.

And no I’m not my brother’s keeper – and neither is he mine. But it doesn’t preclude helping each other out from time to time.

If people want to live in a stupor of drink or other drugs, we are powerless to help them until they’re ready. And when they do need help, that help is available immediately, literally 24/7, effective, and free.

The state has no place in this. No place at all.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

“From time to time” is better than nothing, but also quite feeble and cheap, in my opinion.
Do you pretend you’ve made yourself all by yourself, for good or ill?
No need to answer right away, or at all. Think about it.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

In countries where the state provides nothing, you get unbelievable crime and violence. This is why European countries decided to provide and we have less of that compared to countries that don’t have a benefit system.
Basically if a society cannot offer jobs and affordable housing there will be poverty. It’s up to us to either make it contained poverty with routes out or feral poverty where the rest live in fear.

j watson
j watson
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

Individuals have agency I concur Albireo. But if we recognise the deck is loaded against some and a real poverty trap can exist, do we have responsibility too to ameliorate or at least provide more assistance? I think so, but individuals have responsibility too so it’s where we strike the balance.

Albireo Double
Albireo Double
7 months ago
Reply to  j watson

We probably won’t agree. But I think we get it wrong the moment we stop focusing on equality of opportunity and start fantasising about equality of outcome.

And where, in all of this, is the principle that self-motivation declines as others start to pay people for doing nothing?

j watson
j watson
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

Equality of opportunity would be a good start and on this we would agree. Of course though it’s impossible to totally achieve, but we can make it more equal and fairer. Because we can never make the start-line the same for everyone I think it then beholds us to recognise some of that in how we treat those who had less opportunity.
I don’t support equality of outcome. Incentives are important. But I do concur to keeping the differences in outcome not so vast it rips at the fabric of society.

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

Well, bully for you! Maybe you had a job that paid enough for you to save money before you succumbed to illness and homelessness, so you used your savings to live on, maybe you begged for money in the street. Maybe friends and family helped you out. as you are still alive and in one piece, somebody must have helped you as the last I heard one can’t live on thin air.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
7 months ago
Reply to  Eleanor Barlow

Exactly. Self-reliance and hard work are real, but without some assistance or relenting love in a seemingly lonely struggle, we’d all be far worse off than we are. Pure self-sufficiency is fictional for any created species, especially a social one.
“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god”.  –Aristotle

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
7 months ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Some people find themselves alone and deserted by family/friends due to mental illness. I cam across a fair few of these lost souls when I worked for a mental health charity.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
7 months ago
Reply to  Eleanor Barlow

Indeed. I’ve had a taste of what you’re talking about first hand, in terms of burning bridges and safe havens while out of my mind on drink and (more rarely) manic energy. I also know the saving grace of having someone open their heart or door to you when you don’t deserve it. I try never to betray or forget that.

Peter F. Lee
Peter F. Lee
7 months ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

One does not develop the character of self-reliance and hard work by perpetual hand-outs. Generations of families have been living of government hand-outs for years. Not sure what the answer is, but the current systems develop dependencies that will never be eliminated.

Albireo Double
Albireo Double
7 months ago
Reply to  Eleanor Barlow

The addiction, misery and homelessness all came early in life – I dug myself out. That’s what we’re supposed to do isn’t it? Both for our own sake and to motivate others?

Being given money over those years of my life would have kept me stuck. It has to get bad enough to give you the shove to get going.

Yes I got kind words and advice when I was ready to listen, and I’ve passed those on to others over the last 33 years.

There are too many people with little or no understanding, thinking they’re being “compassionate” giving other people’s money away to those who are not helped by it. It’s a bottomless hole. It’s BS and it needs to stop.

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

Yes, ideally we should be able to dig ourselves out of difficult situations. But some people with the best will in the world are unable to do this, maybe due to having learning difficulties or mental illness. Any civilised society needs to have a safety net. Unfortunately, the one we have in the UK is incapable of making the right decisions.

Jon Barrow
Jon Barrow
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

Any ‘help’ which looks something like a powerful person/org/nation extending largesse to a supplicant tends to cause resentment.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
7 months ago
Reply to  Albireo Double

I acknowledge there’s much truth to what you’re saying. But not ever needy person is identical. And tough love, without the love, is too common of an overcorrection for excessive indulgence of self-unfortunates. Thanks for your first-hand perspective and willingness to give back.
After getting burned a few too many times, I tend to give little or no money to those who beg. But I will give them respect and attention, in most cases. And I will get them a blanket or jacket or (on one occasion) a bus ticket home if I can.

Howard S.
Howard S.
7 months ago

When the government pays people to remain poor, they will gladly remain poor.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
7 months ago
Reply to  Howard S.

Gladly or not, they’ll remain poor. You got that bit right.

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago
Reply to  Howard S.

No one gets a proper FINANCIAL education in school. Not in my day,but I’ve heard,not today either. But when your whole economy is based on “growth” which means Selling Stuff” it’s not a good move to inculcate principles of frugality into your target market when you can’t force the natives of far off continents to purchase your manufactures at the point of a Gatling gun. I remember aged 14 in 1968.feeling deeply offended when one of our English teachers addressing our class said,” What do you girls spend your pocket money on? You spend it on clothes,make up and records”. Most of the girls nodded in a tacitly assenting way,as they did do that,they were all nice and intelligent girls,there was lots more to their lives. I felt angrily offended at her assumption that we were all noddle headed girlie numpties especially as she said it in an approving way,after all Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,I didn’t spend my pocket money on that,mainly because I don’t recall having any after the age of 12 and I didn’t have a Saturday job. But I wouldn’t have bought those things anyway and aged 15 when I started work and had money I spent it on plants and old books. We spend so much of our lives being directed what to be interested in,what to desire and what to return our “money” to THEM by what trash or other,like slave trade goods,shiny beads. Only so many people are now aware and drawing back that THEY don’t like it.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
7 months ago

I’m reading John Welshman’s “Underclass” at the momemt. Recommended. It shows how the idea of there being a residuum of unemployable semi-criminals in society who must somehow be “dealt with” has been around for a very long time – he tracks it from the late nineteenth century but it really goes back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws.

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
7 months ago

From watching the series, I recall that the ‘East Europeans’ who apparently leave rubbish in the street were Bulgarian Roma. Not Polish plumbers or brickies. Presumably still there and I doubt very much registered as settled EU migrants. If you’re at the bottom anyway, having that sort of behaviour arrive in your street and being demonised as racist if you object is hardly an incentive to give up heroin or look for a job.

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
7 months ago

Brilliant journalism.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
7 months ago

The paradise created by the nanny state.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago
Reply to  Daniel Lee

And to think we once lived in the :
IMMENSA ROMANAE PACIS MAIESTAS*.

(*The immeasurable majesty of the Roman Peace.)

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
7 months ago
Reply to  Daniel Lee

I’d say the destruction of working class towns caused by offshoring all our industry (because the market always knows best obviously) is a bigger cause of this wretched existence than the dole

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Exactly

Andrew Dalton
Andrew Dalton
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The dole, and welfare in general, has become a form of Huxley’s Soma. Neoliberalism and Globalism has required something to keep the broader public content and I’d argue this is not unlike the furlough schemes seen in the Covid shutdowns.
Over the coming years, as technologies such as AI and robotics continue to develop, ever greater proportions of the populace will find themselves unemployed or underemployed. Whatever strategy as applied to address this, my suspicion is that society will trend towards looking like H.G. Well’s Eloi.
Bringing me full circle to the point you made – I think the removal of purpose is as much of a problem as economic compensation. Either way, agency has been removed from far too many people’s lives.

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The Commie Labour unions, Scargill and that lot – the car factories closing, all industry losing money –

That was what did it.

The closing of all the Mills in Leeds, Bradford, Rochdale AFTER bring in hundred thousand Mupauri Pakistani to work them because the British would not – then closed because they were outdated and the Chinese built new and high tech ones – and so the misery of those areas –

It was not simple off-shoring. It was lack of government investment, and lack of workers who cared.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
7 months ago

” … the landlord gets … from the taxpayer … almost £50,000 a year for a house worth £100,000″ That is why nothing is being done. The asset owning class are doing very well plundering the public purse.

Mrs R
Mrs R
7 months ago

Be interesting to see the demographic of those landlords who neglect their properties and let them fall into disrepair while charging the stupid government exorbitant amounts.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago
Reply to  Mrs R

There was one family in Nottingham who owned huge numbers of houses all of them vile. Pillars of the community and the evangelical church, racist as heck but happy to plunder immigrants and poor indigenous.

Gill Parkinson
Gill Parkinson
7 months ago
Reply to  Mrs R

It’s not the government it’s us!

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
7 months ago
Reply to  Mrs R

Indeed. I’ll ignore it if it doesn’t confirm my prejudices though.

Peter F. Lee
Peter F. Lee
7 months ago

This has been said quite a few times; but one should not compare revenue with asset valuation. What I would be more interested in is what are the landlord total annual expenditures. On average what percentage of the year are all four rooms being rented. What are the losses due to non-payment of rent and evictions. What are the average annual repair and renovation costs There are pretty stringent rules regarding tenancy which tends to favour the tenant. I just do not think it is any fun anymore being a landlord; there are better ways of earning a living.

Mr Tyler
Mr Tyler
7 months ago

Rubbish in the streets is terrible where my mother lives, in the London Borough of Harrow. Microwaves, mattresses, sofas and other large items are piled up next to trees and on the grass verges, and so is a lot of ordinary household rubbish and food waste. It’s as if some people think this is now the accepted thing to do, rather than using the bins that are everywhere. It is depressing to see.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago
Reply to  Mr Tyler

Councils charge for removing large items so people dump them. It would probably be cheaper to waive the charges as they’re not that high so can’t be that lucrative

Rick Frazier
Rick Frazier
7 months ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

Yes and it seems jobs related to keeping these streets and communities clean could be made available to those willing to work. They could be paid more than they receive for not working. These UK councils seem to be comprised of fairly stupid people, much like the bulk of the US Congress.

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
7 months ago
Reply to  Mr Tyler

I know the Harrows – what a horrible set of towns – but one thing is I watched them change – now they are not British anymore… Slough, Hays, really all West London – except couple pockets, ruislip, Pinner, Northwood, Ickenham are still nice – but Boris’s Uxbridge – they shut the malls and shops after dark because people are afraid to walk to the tube or catch the bus in the dark…. And it is the open borders to blame. Weird men standing around in the streets during working hours giving a weird vibe, women all covered up pushing prams, old people from odd corners of the world looking very poor and carrying shopping bags shuffling home….. It is a mess.

The bus during the afternoon! The children! Just shrieking obscenities and shoving and literally screaming and throwing litter – not the children of my days – but very ‘multicultural’

This woman – she should walk around the Harrows at night – no need for her to go to Birmingham.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago

Does the grossly obese creature/blob in the caption photograph really deserve ANY benefits whatsoever?

She’s hardly going to starve is she? Like a Camel she could probably live off her ‘fat reserves’ for a full six months or more, could she not?

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
7 months ago

I believe she’s the participant in the show who turned her life around. Fair enough, I say!

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago

If so I agree, and in that case the “best of British”, as we used to say.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago

She really did.

B Emery
B Emery
7 months ago

I thought she committed fraud before appearing on benefits street and stole a large sum of money from her previous employer before taking benefits. I could be wrong, I’d have to check. Maybe she did turn it around afterwards.

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
7 months ago
Reply to  B Emery

It was after the show, yes. I believe The Sun (that bastion of respectable journalism) did a ‘where are they now’ follow up a couple of years back.

Ben M
Ben M
7 months ago

I used to live just by the prison off Handsworth New Rd in a triangle of streets in the mid 80s with my husband and two young children in a council house – when it was still possible as a British citizen to get allocated basic 2up 2 down walk in off the street housing. I did not buy our house – but a recent immigrant did and is now renting it out to British people.
The catalogue of errors that have happened to the working class of that time are legion (the children of postwar workers, including immigrants , being vastly different to the arrivals of the past 25 years) and have come from both left and right.
Abolition of Grammar schools for bright working class kids, not teaching children how society works (how council is run, how money works and civics), decline and outsourcing of manufacturing, not using money from selling council housing to rebuild, pretty much everything Blair did, having a benefit system that penalised staying with the father of your children, globalisation and immigration…

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
7 months ago

The comments I read here makes me realize that the welfare state in the UK is well and truly entrenched.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago

If the truth be known it is a gargantuan vampire that sucks the very life from what is left of British society.
Worse, we did it ourselves and can blame no others!

Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
7 months ago

Maybe Fungi named himself for the famous Dingle Dolphin?

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
7 months ago

Incredibly sad and shows how the system fails everyone. The taxpayer pays and pays, while people spiral ever further down and a few landlords and drug dealers get rich.

William Cameron
William Cameron
7 months ago

The Tax payer is paying that £1000 a room a month. It is within the Govt gift to reduce that figure to £100. The govt is the monopoly purchaser. No one else is going to pay that rent. So why does the council pay £50,000 when the true maker rent of the house is £6000 a year ?

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
7 months ago

I can tell you why – because that is what the landlords charge. If you can provide that for £100 do it – you will get all the business.

But I will tell you – renting to the ‘Underclass’ is not easy – they carry a huge set of issues. If they do not make a good bit of money renting there – they would not do it. The hassles! Gov regulation is a vast expense – the whole thing is expensive and is miserable to own and run. It looks cheap – but take in everything and it is not.

If it was as easy as this writer makes it sound every one would do it – but they do not because it is a hard way to make a living – renting to the underclass. I can tell you from experience. I got out of it – it made good money – but was very unpleasant a way to make money.

Pamela Booker
Pamela Booker
7 months ago

No wonder Birmingham coouncil has gone bankrupt!

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago
Reply to  Pamela Booker

Don’t worry they will have made very sure their “gold plated “ index linked Pensions are secure.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
7 months ago

Tanya always shows which side of the barricades she’d be on come the revolution . If she didn’t demonstrate her big heart and ready flowing tears for the underclass here no one would pay her to review high end Rolls Royces and hotels like the Crillon in Paris , elsewhere .

Caroline Foulger
Caroline Foulger
7 months ago

This is a complete scandal. How can a local council justify paying this amount of rent for a property? Pure incompetence. Most voters are willing to pay taxes to support those who need a safety net, but this is at best incompetence and more likely criminal negligence by the Council

Gordon Arta
Gordon Arta
7 months ago

‘There are five people living in this house and not one person works. How can that be? I don’t see anyone putting into the pot. How can everyone I know be taking out?” It wasn’t Channel 4’s ‘safari’ which got it wrong, but Gold’s crocodile tearjerker.

R E P
R E P
7 months ago

I suppose this is the Tories’ and Brexit’s fault.