The extraordinary experiment that PROVES the welfare state has lost its way: In a new documentary, benefit claimants are challenged to live on handouts applied when welfare state began in 1949. The results will astonish and infuriate you
Channel 4 series challenges those on benefits to live on 1949 handouts
Arthritis sufferer Karen filmed having medical assessment
Wheel-chair bound Craig 'delighted' to be found work in 1940s system
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The extraordinary experiment that PROVES the welfare state has lost its way: In a new documentary, benefit claimants are challenged to live on handouts applied when welfare state began in 1949. The results will astonish and infuriate you
Channel 4 series challenges those on benefits to live on 1949 handouts
Arthritis sufferer Karen filmed having medical assessment
Wheel-chair bound Craig 'delighted' to be found work in 1940s system
When we first meet Karen, star of a new Channel 4 documentary, she is driving a huge, silver Nissan people-carrier. The 54-year-old grandmother is smartly dressed in fashionable clothes, jewellery and sports an immaculate manicure.
But neither her car nor her clothes are paid for by her wages. Instead, Karen is among the 20 million people claiming benefits in Britain.
In Karen’s case, her lifestyle is funded by her incapacity benefit, which she says she receives because she has diabetes, irregular heart rhythm, arthritis, backache and high blood pressure. ‘Because people can’t see the pain I’m suffering, [they] look and think: “There’s nothing wrong with her”,’ she explains. ‘I feel like I’m being targeted, but I’m not out to scrounge. I’m genuine, you know.’
Karen was a care assistant for 22 years, but has been out of work for seven years, during which time she has claimed £155-a-week disability living allowance. Her car, too, is paid for by the state. Karen feels benefits are her right, that she has done her bit by working in the past. Now, she says, it’s the state’s turn to support her. ‘I’ve done my f***ing share for Britain,’ is the way she puts it, in her blunt Midlands accent. ‘I’ve worked for me money, I want me money.’
The documentary shows that this is precisely what has happened to Karen. She lives in a modern terrace house with one of her children, son Aaron, who is in his early 30s but has serious learning difficulties and is also supported by disability benefits.
There are photos everywhere of her children and grandchildren, although we never learn how many she has. There is no mention of who her husband or ex-partner might be. As she sits at home on her leather sofa, surrounded by figurines and nick-nacks and a large gold statue of an Egyptian mummy, you can’t help but feel hers is not a fulfilling life.
When a welfare officer visits Karen and remarks that her house is clean, and her lawn mown, she reveals that this has been done by her son.
Strikingly, Karen, who is very overweight, has long acrylic nails, immaculately painted with a different shade of polish on each finger. Her hair is freshly braided and her manicured hands glitter with enormous rings.
There’s no doubting she suffers from pain and discomfort, but it’s also obvious that the demoralisation caused by her various ailments — which she refers to officiously as ‘my health issues’ — is exacerbated by lack of purpose.
Creator: Economist Lord William Beveridge devised the welfare state in the 1940s
She is a stark contrast to her fellow claimant, wheelchair-bound Craig, who has spina bifida, a genetic abnormality of the spine which causes leg weakness and paralysis. Clearly unable to move unaided, he explains he desperately wants to work but has been struggling in vain to get a job.
To be assessed for benefits in the documentary, Craig and Karen, with pensioner Melvyn, have to visit a 1940s-style Labour and Welfare Office, a forbidding stone building where two po-faced welfare officers interview them.
These officers use the original rules of the welfare state — which were some 8,000 paragraphs long — to assess their payments. Karen’s ‘new’ 1940s weekly handout is deemed to be £38.48 — compared to the £155.34 she currently receives. The car she has courtesy of today’s mobility allowance is also taken away.
She is furious. Expletives rain down on the welfare officers as she insists: ‘I can’t live off that.’
But this is not the worst news. If she wants to keep even this small payment, she will have to be assessed for work.
Her response is a tirade: ‘I’m not well, I’ve got a list of illnesses what are wrong with me. Go to the younger people, what are they doing? Leave me alone, I’ve done my f***ing share for Britain, I’m doing no more. They can f*** off.’
Her pleas fall on deaf ears. Conditions recognised now as disqualifying someone for work were simply not recognised when the system was established.
Despite Karen’s protests that she’s ‘in pain every single day 24/7’, she is forced to complete a 1940s-style medical assessment. It is toe-curlingly fascinating to watch.
‘Would you be able to climb ladders?’ asks the doctor.
‘Oh no,’ said Karen.
‘Jumping?’
Karen laughs at the sheer idiocy of the idea.
‘Throw something?’
‘No.’
‘Pull an object?’
‘No.’
‘Pushing?’
‘I would find that a struggle.’
The doctor puts a 12lb bag of potatoes at her feet and asks her to lift it.
‘No, struggling with that,’ she says, not even getting it off the floor.
The doctor then places one potato on the desk in front of her and asks her to pick it up. She pauses, unsure what to do.
Call me sceptical, but I could almost see the cogs turning in her brain, as if she was thinking: ‘If I pick up this potato, I might lose my benefit, but if I don’t pick up this potato, that will look ridiculous.’
She reaches forward tentatively and picks it up, saying ‘there’s pain in here’ while rubbing her arm ostentatiously.
Karen’s medical isn’t finished yet, however. The assessor then gives her a piece of paper and pen, before getting her to draw a star and cut it out. This she does without complaint until he tells her the test will show if she could do tailoring work.
Her response is then instant: ‘This is actually hurting my thumb.’
Of course, I’m not in a position to dispute her, but it does seem unlikely that holding a pair of scissors for a few seconds would exacerbate arthritic joint discomfort. The doctor then presents Karen with a typewriter and asks her to type. After hovering her manicured hands over it for a split second, she decides she can’t. Of course she can’t. Never mind any medical conditions, her acrylic nails are getting in the way.
Once here, I fancy I see a panicky look in her eyes. Because when Karen sees disabled people working machines she must wrestle with another dilemma: she doesn’t want to be labelled a ‘cripple’, to use the 1940s pejorative, but then again she wouldn’t want to say she wasn’t a cripple, in case it impacts on her benefits.
Although these scenarios are staged for the purposes of the documentary, Karen will surely have feared there were real-life implications for her benefits if she showed herself able to work on national television. In the end, struggling with her dilemma, she sits and watches as a woman with one hand worked a sewing machine.
‘What time do you have to be up?’ Karen asks her. ‘Early,’ explains the woman. Karen raises her eyebrows.
By a twist of fate the pair had been at school together.
‘I remember you as a strong woman,’ says the lady, working the sewing machine with her good hand as her stump holds the garment steady. ‘Do you want to have a go?’ she asks cheerfully.
Dole queue: Around 20 million people are currently claiming benefits in Britain
‘Honestly, I’m knackered,’ said Karen miserably, shaking her head before saying: ‘I don’t like showing vulnerability . . . All you will see is a brave smile, but deep down I’m suffering. I just want people to stop judging me.’
And we will, love, we will, I thought. Just as soon as you stop pretending you can’t pick up a potato.
The three-part series is not just compelling television, it’s a revelation.
The programme uses experienced former benefits officers to staff a dole office recreated to look exactly like one from the 1940s.
They give out payments, adjusted for today’s prices, that people would have received in 1949, the first year of the welfare state’s operation. The handouts are subject to the tough requirements of that time.
The results are both depressing and heartening. In episode one, Karen, Melvyn, a cheery 71-year-old widower, and Craig, a 24-year-old in a wheelchair, have their 2013-level benefits taken away for a week and are put through the 1940s system.
All three are from Nottingham, where half the population is on some kind of benefit.
Yes, half. Even though we have become inured to the dependency culture, that single figure tells a terrible story. For benefits were originally conceived as a temporary helping hand in times of trouble, not a lifestyle choice. Joblessness allowances, pensions and the NHS were meant to provide a safety net, but were something the individual should aspire well beyond.
Beveridge described welfare payments as ‘an attack upon want’. But want was only one of five giants he was trying to slay. He described the others as ‘disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’. Yes, idleness.
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