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.
52 Responses to “What a real ‘Benefits Street’ would look like”
Brian Gardner
…except that the writer of this article didnt really choose to construct reality did he? He was just responding to the programme and was trying to show where it was wrong. I dont think he said anywhere that James Turner Street was not actually real. Just that it wasnt even statistically representative of those on benefits. I think that – within a few minutes and with a fraction of the programmes’ budget – he made his point very well. I trust youwill be going onto Channel 4’s website to complain that this street isnt statistically representative
Brian Gardner
eh? Who’s left?
Brian Gardner
Exactly. They live next door to us.The bastards. We probably work alongside them (most benefit claimants are in work btw). Fuck sake, some members of our own family are probably on benefits (child benefit?). Evil scum. In fact my whole family is an example of socialism: granny on her pension, an auntie on sick pay,wife claimed maternity a few years back and now the scrounging kids are earning child benefit. Even got a mate Jason, he’s signed off work cos of an accident at work. He’s only just holding off suicide,but he’s still a jammy bastard. Scrounging bastards the lot. Least I’m productive. Least I pay my way. Least I’m alright…. for now.
Brian Gardner
Why not click on Channel 4s website and see what claims they made? Their blurb seems OK but of course the actual programme is very different. See below.
But why do you try and discriminate between pensioners and other claimants. You ask whats wrong with looking at sub groups.Thats fine – jist dont call it “Benefit Street”. If you want to demonise why not cut to the chase and go for “Non-pensioner, not incapacitated, long-term unemployed single mothers fuckingon drugs”. Sure, that’s only a few thousand in the UK. But if it makes you feel a little bit happier about yourself…..
Channel 4:
According to some politicians and media coverage, benefits are an easy route to a life of luxury, foreign holidays and lavish homes furnished with widescreen TVs – all at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.
But as austerity continues to bite, jobs remain hard to come by and benefits are squeezed, this observational documentary series reveals the reality of life on benefits, as the residents of one of Britain’s most benefit-dependent streets invite cameras into their tight-knit community.
The series follows residents of ‘Benefits Street’ as they navigate their way through life on the bottom rung of Britain’s economic ladder.
Despite the challenges the residents face, the street also has a strong sense of community. This is a place where people look out for each other and where small acts of kindness can go a long way.
Roger Allen
I watched the first programme. Sparky says ‘If its such a fiction (that any “scroungers” exist), how was Channel 4 able to find such people then? And how was it able to find so many of them on one street?’. I watched the first programme. In it, Channel 4 focussed on a limited number of people. Danny was the classic recidivist petty criminal – he acknowledged that he could have made more of himself if he could have been bothered & obviously brought his fate upon himself. The young couple, Mark(?) & Becky, were feckless & by their own admission had gone in for significant benefit fraud, on the ‘money grows on trees’ principle. ‘Black Dee’, however, was someone who had gone into modest rent arrears – it was not at all clear that this was a deliberate strategy to avoid payment. Fungi was illiterate & chronically alcohol dependent. Smoggy, who didn’t live on James Turner Street, was trying to make an honest living. He had seemingly become unemployed through no particular fault of his own & thoroughly regretted his one subsequent episode of criminal behaviour. ‘White Dee’ had a low-paying (part-time) job – she was receiving top-up income support & was not wholly reliant on the State.
People with little or no money cannot afford high-cost private rented accommodation & have no chance of owning their own homes. They therefore end up concentrated in cheap accommodation – either private-sector cheap (in run-down, low-status areas) or in hard-to-let social-rented housing in such locations. Look in such areas & you’ll find a greater incidence of people who need/expect the State to prop them up. Nobody is denying that such people exist BUT that doesn’t give a representative picture of the majority of people in the country as a whole, & especially not if the film-makers pick & choose who to highlight.