Benefits Street is a British documentary series broadcast on Channel 4. It followed the lives of benefit claimants and showed them committing crimes, including a demonstration of how to shoplift, and portrayed a situation in which people are dependent on benefits and voluntarily refuse to seek employment.
The first season began airing on 6 January 2014 and ran for five episodes, during which it documented the lives of several people living on James Turner Street in the Winson Green area of Birmingham, where the media reports that 90% of residents claim benefits. The second series began airing on 11 May 2015 and ran for four episodes, with this season focusing on the residents of Kingston Road in Stockton-on-Tees.
The show was highly controversial; Channel 4, the police, and the media regulator Ofcom received hundreds of complaints, and there were death threats made against the residents of the street on Twitter. Channel 4 was accused of making poverty porn, and many of those taking part claimed that they were misled by the producers. Ofcom launched an investigation into whether the programme had breached the broadcasting regulations, but ultimately concluded its rules had not been broken. The producers defended the series, arguing that the reaction to it demonstrated the importance of making such a documentary. The series was mentioned in the House of Commons and prompted some political debate on the topic of benefits.
A number of programmes were commissioned by other channels covering the same topic, while Channel 4 commissioned a follow-up series provisionally titled Immigration Street that would follow the lives of immigrants in the UK. Benefits Street gave Channel 4 their highest viewing figures for any show since 2012.
Background In 2012, Love Productions approached the BBC with the idea for a programme that would feature a prominent member of the business community working with unemployed people, but the show did not come to fruition after the unnamed individual had to withdraw from it because of other commitments. The format for the series that would later become Benefits Street was then suggested, but the BBC declined to commission the series because it was producing a number of other programmes concerning similar issues, such as People Like Us and Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits. Love Productions then suggested the format to Channel 4, who agreed to commission the programme.
Writing in The Observer in January 2014, Nick Mirsky, head of documentaries at Channel 4, said that Love Productions intentionally selected an area where a high proportion of the residents were in receipt of welfare payments "to show the effect of benefit cuts on a community for whom they were the principal source of income". The filming and production process took eighteen months. Both Mirsky, and Ralph Lee, Channel 4's head of factual programming, said the residents of James Turner Street were consulted about the series before filming began.
Cameras observed them over the course of a twelve-month period. The decision to call the series Benefits Street was taken two weeks before the programme aired. The comedian Frank Skinner, who is from the West Midlands, was approached to narrate the documentary but turned it down because he had concerns about how people from Birmingham would be portrayed, and did not wish to criticise the city. The voice-over was provided by former Coronation Street actor Tony Hirst instead.
The first episode of Benefits Street was aired at 9:00 pm on Monday 6 January 2014, and ran for five episodes. A live one-hour debate to discuss issues raised by the series was then scheduled to air after the final episode, Channel 4 announcing plans for this a few days after the second episode had been transmitted. During the week following the broadcasting of the third episode, West Midlands Police charged several James Turner Street residents with drugs-related offences in connection with a raid their officers had carried out in June 2013.
On 23 January, the Birmingham Mail reported that items of Benefits Street branded merchandise, such as mugs and T-shirts, were being produced for sale over the internet by individuals wishing to cash in on the programme.
James Turner Street James Turner Street is a residential street of Victorian terraced houses in the Winson Green area of Birmingham. The street is in the city's Soho Ward, part of the Ladywood constituency, and has a B18 postcode.
It is first recorded in local records as Osborne Street in 1877, and given its present name in 1882. According to education historian Alison Wheatley, the street is possibly named after a James Turner who taught at King Edward's School in Birmingham, and the name may have been suggested by a former pupil, who became a town planner, as a way of honouring Turner's legacy. The Birmingham historian Carl Chinn believes the street was named for a local businessman and partner in the firm Hammond, Turner & Sons, a manufacturer of buttons.
Of Winson Green, Chinn writes that it was originally developed as a "better-off working class district", but that by the late 20th century many of the properties in the area were falling into decay. Dr Chris Upton, reader in public history at the city's Newman University, has described the street as part of a "ribbon development" of suburban districts built as Birmingham expanded during the latter part of the 19th century. While many of the street's original residents were locals who moved from the inner city back-to-back houses, some had moved from as far away as London and Cornwall to work in Birmingham.
Upton describes them as "the respectable working class"skilled workers who earned around 30 shillings (£1.50) per week, and who in many cases could even afford to employ a maid. Those who grew prosperous moved to wealthier areas, and were replaced by immigrants from Asia and the West Indies, who came to the UK during the years after World War II. A high proportion of those who lived in the area were employed by Birmingham's industrial economy, which enjoyed prosperity until the collapse of the city's manufacturing industry in the early 1980s, resulting in mass unemployment. Professor Steven McCabe of Birmingham City Business School has noted that Birmingham lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs between 1971 and 1981, and that the city's GDP per capita, which in 1976 was the highest for a UK city outside the south east region, had fallen to become the lowest in England seven years later.
In the 1980s, unemployment in Birmingham reached 20%. McCabe says that in many areas, including James Turner Street, the unemployment rate has not fallen since the 1980s. Clare Short, who grew up in the area and represented Winson Green as Member of Parliament for Ladywood for 27 years, has said that high unemployment brought a "new culture of drugs, crime and mental health problems." On their website, Channel 4 have described James Turner Street as "one of Britain's most benefits-dependent streets". Sources reported in January 2014 that 90% of the street's residents are benefits claimants.
Synopsis Narrated by Tony Hirst, the series is presented in a fly on the wall documentary format that follows a year in the lives of the residents of James Turner Street, a road in the Winson Green area of Birmingham, which Channel 4 describes as "one of Britain's most benefit-dependent streets". The programme portrays a situation in which people are dependent upon welfare payments, and often lack the motivation to find employment. Some residents are seen committing crimes such as shoplifting, and attempting to raise money to support themselves and their families. Others are shown to have more ambition, such as a young mother who wants to become a model. The series also aims to show the street's sense of community spirit, with residents helping each other in times of difficulty.
Episode list
Follow-up programmes
Reception
Political and media response The programme led to some political debate on the issue of welfare. Speaking in the House of Commons on 13 January, Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, suggested the programme justified the changes being made by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government's Welfare Reform Act. The following week, Duncan Smith gave a speech to mark the tenth anniversary of his Centre for Social Justice in which he said that areas of the country were being ghettoised by long-term unemployment and had remained largely hidden from the rest of society. Conservative MP Simon Hart raised the subject of Benefits Street at Prime Minister's Questions on 15 January, saying that a street of the type seen in the series existed "in every constituency in the land".
Prime Minister and Conservative leader David Cameron responded that the government should "intervene in people's lives" to get them off benefits and into employment. After declining an invitation to visit James Turner Street, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that he believed both left- and right-wing arguments on welfare were wrong. "We want a welfare system which is compassionate." Shortly after Clegg's comments, Birmingham councillor Desmond Jaddoo told the Birmingham Mail that he had compiled letters to Clegg, Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband on behalf of some James Turner Street residents inviting them to visit the street and asking for help to find employment.
Writing for the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald, the Liberal Democrat MP Duncan Hames argued that the programme would contribute little to the subject: "We do need to have a rational, informed debate about how to improve our welfare system, but the editorial line taken by supposedly factual ‘reality TV’ adds very little to that." The programme was condemned by the current Ladywood MP, Labour's Shabana Mahmood: "I found it shocking that Channel 4 or any other organisation would present poverty as entertainment. It was profoundly wrong." In the Radio Times, Clare Short, who represented the constituency prior to Mahmood, said the series was "totally unrepresentative" of the area, and condemned it as "crummy and misleading".
Others have also criticised Benefits Street, arguing it does not present a balanced view of the subject. Labour MP Anne Begg, chair of the Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee, said that the programme was a "misrepresentation" of people claiming benefits, arguing that it focused on those claiming unemployment benefits which makes up a small proportion of the overall welfare bill. Referring to the first episode that featured a shoplifter, Chris Williamson (also a Labour MP) said it was "irresponsible" to portray him as a typical benefits claimant.
Owen Jones, a columnist for The Independent, described the series as "medieval stocks updated for a modern format". In an article for the Birmingham Mail, writer and television personality Samantha Brick, a native of Birmingham, said that the series was an "atrociously unbalanced" view of the city. Shadow Welfare Minister Chris Bryant claimed that the residents of The Bishop's Avenue in Hampsteadknown as Billionaire's Row because of its expensive propertieswere as likely to have drink and drugs problems as the residents of James Turner Street.