This is what a real 'Benefits Street' might look like.
On Monday Channel 4 aired the first episode of a new programme called Benefits Street. The show is set on a street where 90 per cent of the people living there apparently claim some form of benefit.
Here is a short clip so you get the gist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr8jGiIp2MI
The clip is short but I’m sure you get the picture: the residents of ‘Benefits Street’ (actually James Turner Street in Birmingham) live as they do because they don’t have jobs. And they don’t have jobs because they can’t be bothered to get the, Or, so the programme seems to suggest.
That is, after all, what benefits are for isn’t it, the unemployed?
The point the producers of Benefits Street appear to have missed, however, is that the vast majority of people on benefits are about as far removed from some of the characters featured in the programme as it is possible to be.
Not only in the sense that they are ordinary people rather than troublemakers, but in that they aren’t unemployed at all.
Were it a real Benefits Street, it might look something like this (click to zoom):
(HT: New Economics Foundation)
In other words, the vast majority of people ‘on benefits’ are elderly. Pensions make up a whopping 42.3 per cent of the welfare bill. It’s pensioners who predominate on Benefits Street, not drug-addled, foul mouthed yobs.
The next largest recipients of welfare are those who do work but who are on low incomes. George Osborne’s ‘strivers’, in other words, who make up 20.8 per cent of the welfare budget through things like working tax credits.
The working poor are an increasingly common feature of 21st century Britain. In December the Joseph Rowntree Foundation revealed that over half of the 13 million people living in poverty are actually from working families.
Next up are the sick and disabled, who constitute 15.5 per cent of the welfare budget. They do sometimes take drugs; but it’s usually for pain relief, rather than to get high.
At the end of the street we finally reach the unemployed, who make up just 2.6 per cent of total welfare spending. Not 90 per cent, not even 10 per cent; but 2 per cent. That’s it. It isn’t so much a street as a potting shed in the garden of a small terraced house at the end of the row.
Looking again at my terrible photoshop mock up of a ‘Benefits Street’ it’s clear that, like the producers of the programme, I’ve created a woefully inaccurate representation of the true state of affairs. A real ‘Benefits Street’ would look a lot more like this:
Look at them. I hope it makes you as angry as it does me. Bloody scroungers.
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52 Responses to “What a real ‘Benefits Street’ would look like”
Adam
Graph is skewed beacause of PENSION? which is not a normal benefit.
It would seem the graph has also put “families” in a category and removed them from the Unemployed statistic.
Do we have proper data?
Adam
CH4 also demonize bankers.
Not all bankers caused the crash and rip us off.
Not all claimants rip off the state.
I find it hard to see how they are a stooge or a pox on TV. They make entertainment and seems to not discriminate against class. Instead everyone sucks!
Gristle McThornbody
Anybody looking to complain about how people on benefits are portrayed in Ch4’s documentary ‘Benefit Street’ can take direct action by mailing a letter or calling in person to the home of the CEO of ‘Love Productions’ (the film company responsible for filming, editing and producing Benefits street) Richard McKerrow.
85 Broomwood Road, London, United Kingdom, SW11 6JN
You can also contact their offices in Bristol and London.
(Films & 59), Love Productions Studios, 59 Cotham Hill, Bristol, Avon BS6 6JR
Phone:0117 906 4357 / 0117 9064 300
Love Productions, 43 Eagle Street London, WC1R 4AT
020 7067 4820
2star2
Has anybody stopped and noticed the amount of welfare-related programmes that have been on the telly recently? Benefit Busters, Skint, On Benefits and Proud, Benefits Britain? And now C4’s latest offering – ‘Benefit Street’ (which, I didn’t watch, as I could see it’s onus from a mile off) They are cleverly designed PROPAGANDA to stoke the fires of an indignant working population who are struggling living under a Tory Prime Minister and austerity. Please remember – these people have been carefully chosen. It comes at a time when George Osborne proposes to cut a further £12billion from welfare. These programmes are designed to have us all applauding this – “yes, let’s take money from the dirty scroungers, they’re not having any more of MY taxes”… You do realise that Child Benefit, Disability Benefit, Working Tax Credit and State Pensions fall under welfare, don’t you? You do realise that we are all only a redundancy away from unemployment ourselves, don’t you? You do realise that nobody who earns less than a 6 figure salary has any business listening to or voting for a Tory government, don’t you? You do know that while people are taking out their frustrations on the poor and desperate, MPs have given themselves an 11% pay rise and Tory Peers are claiming £300 a day for turning up to work and leaving 20 minutes later, don’t you? There have always been a very small group of people who will try and get what they can by doing fuck all – since the dawn of time. All that is needed is a reformation of the system of distribution of JSA and Income Support. Do not be brainwashed by these fat cat bastards. Stick together, get them out. I for one want to live in a society that protects the poor, needy, children, disabled and the working class. They’d bring back workhouses if they could. Thatcher’s children. Divide and Conquer. Don’t be fooled.
John Smith
The left has gone apoplectic, as the truth of welfare in the 21st century is exposed Everyone has a Benefit Street member living close to them, some many ..