Can giving families a £26,000 lump sum get them off benefits for good?
That’s the idea behind a fascinating TV documentary. Madness? Read on — and you may be surprised . . .
SCOTT Gavin is thinking of buying a holiday home in Spain and is going through the pros and cons of villas versus apartments, pools versus hot-tubs.
Having cash to spend on life’s luxuries is a nice position to be in, he admits: ‘it’s the dream, isn’t it? To be able to walk into the car dealership and actually think about putting a deposit down. To go into the travel agency and say: “Yes, i’ll have a holiday.” ’
He’s also discovering the flip side of suddenly having some spare cash — namely the constant ‘i want, i want’ from his young children.
‘i say “i can’t afford it”, but i do internet banking and they can see the account,’ he says. ‘They tell me “Look! You have all this money.” ’
So is Scott, 32, a father-of-four, one of our newest Lottery winners, still finding his feet after a windfall? He certainly talks like one.
intriguingly, he’s not. Rather, he is one of the ‘stars’ of a controversial Channel 5 show called The Great British Benefits Handout, where families who were previously surviving on welfare are handed £26,000 in a lump sum — the average amount received in benefits in a year — and told they can do what they like with it in exchange for signing off weekly handouts for 12 months.
naturally, the programme-makers insist this is far from a cynical stunt — and there is certainly evidence that the practice, known as giving an Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT), has been used to successfully reduce poverty in developing countries.
The philosophy behind it is that the recipients make better life decisions with a lump sum — they can start a business, or invest in education — and stand a better chance of breaking out of benefits dependency.
Even the Economist magazine declares: ‘ Giving money directly to poor people works surprisingly well.’ and the UCT is now being considered as a strategy by countries such as Switzerland and Finland.
Guy Davies, commissioning editor of Channel 5’s factual output, points out the participants of what is effectively a British trial of the controversial UCT strategy, were given a financial adviser.
‘ Given a £ 26,000 leg- up, these families have the chance to get out of the benefits trap for good,’ he says. ‘This series observes that process and the results are both surprising and fascinating — hopefully this experiment will stimulate debate.’
So far, so worthy. But the reality is that watching someone like Scott being given such a huge lump sum and being party to his decisions on how to spend his windfall is compulsive viewing. This is why cynics have dubbed the series ‘ poverty porn,’ accusing Channel 5 of turning a pressing social issues of the day into lowbrow entertainment.
in this series, viewers have seen one mother-of-three, a 38-year-old called Donna, blow £6,000 in six weeks — mostly on trainers, expensive meals and clothes, rather than on the hairdressing business she said she was hoping to invest in.
Then there is Lorraine Worrall, a grandmother from Essex, who spent £1,120 of her money on Botox.
viewers were, perhaps rightly, furious. One tweeted: ‘These people on the Great British Benefits Handout get £10,000 a year more than me and i work 40 hours a week.’
But what happened to those from the first series a year ago? TO
manY people’s surprise, after a rocky start for some, all have reported that their lives have changed in a positive way since they received the money.
Hull father Tony Herridge and his partner Diane Esders set up a second-hand goods business.
One of their first purchases was a van, which seemed sensible — until viewers discovered Tony didn’t have a driving licence.
But today, while their business might not be booming (Tony also has to work as a security guard two days a week) it’s making enough to keep them off benefits. He claims their time on the show ‘ changed our life 1,000 per cent’. ‘We don’t ever have to sign on benefits again,’ he says. ‘it is an absolutely brilliant feeling.’
it also heralded a crucial change in mindset. One of Tony’s comments should sound alarm bells for those in charge of our welfare system.
‘When you are on the dole, you have a safety net, so you get scared to come off it,’ he says. ‘ So we had to get rid of that safety net. That was the scariest thing.’
it helped, too, that they were starting a business while in the full glare of publicity. Tony points out that his company’s Facebook page had 300 followers in the first week of the show, while by the second week, it had soared to 100,000.
another contestant from the first series, single mother Rachel, who had been on benefits for 20 years, used her £26,000 to pay rent in advance, and to pay off debts.
AYEaR on, Rachel — who has had the most rollercoaster journey of all, and was back on benefits briefly — has finally secured her first job. She is now working in an admin position in the rail industry.
‘Of all the contestants Rachel is the one i’m most proud of,’ says the show’s financial adviser Lee Healey. ‘ She has now got her firstever job. She went back to college. She hung in there.’
The undisputed star of the first show, however, is Scott. at first he seemed to be the sort of bloke you would never just hand money to.
Jaws dropped last year when he was handed the money and promptly went out and bought . . . a raccoon.
But the creature was part of his grand plan to set himself up in the children’s party business, specialising in bouncy castles and a travelling zoo, where kids would be entertained by snakes and rats and lizards.
Business genius, or a load of baloney? Well, when you hear about what happened to the raccoon, you do rather assume the latter.
‘ah well, i had to get rid of him,’ he confides, when we catch up with the family. ‘He bit me. i was told he was used to being handled by people, but he wouldn’t let anyone near him.’
The miracle, though, is that Scott’s party venture is still going.
The business is, if not booming, trundling along quite nicely. and if the social experiment can be judged on whether it got the family off benefits then, yes, it did. Scott says they haven’t claimed a penny in a year, and his wife is expecting their fifth child — the ultimate proof that they have turned a corner, he says.
‘i know some people have children so they can claim more benefits, but that’s not us. if we’d still been on benefits there’s no way we would have considered another child.
‘Being on the programme changed our lives,’ he adds. ‘it wasn’t a Lottery win, but it did the same job. it gave us options, choices.’
He now says that he’s making more than double what he did when he
was on benefits — when he was getting £550 a week.
He might work long hours installing bouncy castles and looking after all his animals — a tarantula, a boa constrictor, a Monitor lizard, a bearded dragon, an anaconda, a collection of rabbits and more rats than is strictly comfortable — but he says he doesn’t see it as a job.
‘I’d do this as a hobby anyway, but to be given the chance to make a living from it is amazing.’
Pride of place in the living room in Kirkby, Merseyside, where he lives with wife Leanne, 27, and children Jake, 11, Robert, nine, Chloe, eight, and Ellie, five, goes to a barn owl who likes human company. ‘He thinks he’s a parrot,’ says Scott.
It’s all most entertaining, and you can see why the programmemakers would want to hold Scott up as an example of what can be achieved, but the truth is more complicated than that. ‘I’d say that 95 per cent of my business at the start came from the programme,’ he says candidly.
‘Even now, a lot of it does. I used to get upset at people saying: “Why should the likes of him get money when they will just waste it?”
‘But people phone up and say: “We read about you online. Now we’d like to book you for our party.” No publicity is bad.’
Chatting to him, it becomes clear that the real madness here doesn’t involve raccoons or barn owls. It lies in the system that put a man like him — able and willing to work — on benefits in the first place.
Before he was plucked from the benefits system by the programmemakers, Scott was a working man.
Until a year before, he had been earning £250 a week as an engineer. Not enough to support four children — one of whom is autistic — and pay rent and bills, but it was only when he went to talk to the Benefits Agency about whether he would be better off ‘on the dole’, that he discovered he was, as he puts it, ‘doing it all wrong’.
‘It was them who said to me “have you ever thought about being a full-time carer for your son?” ’ he says. ‘If I did I could get more than £500 a week. Not only that, but I’d get housing benefit, my council tax would be paid and the kids would have free school meals.’ HE
AddS: ‘I thought it was mad. I said: “So you’ll pay me for looking after my own son?” ‘The whole thing was nuts. If I signed on, I’d get about £400 a week but I’d still have to pay my own housing and council tax. But being a carer changed it all.’
The system is designed to offer a safety net to those in desperate need, yet Scott would never have put his family in that bracket.
‘They ask why people go on benefits. This is why. I know people who have been on benefits for ten years. They are stuck on them.’
And he adds: ‘I believe that you are more respectful of money if you earn it yourself. But if the Government is just going to hand it to you, it’s difficult to say no.’
Interestingly, Scott doesn’t feel that the Government should simply hand out £26,000 a year (the maximum a family surviving totally on benefits can receive) in the way the programme-makers did.
‘No. Too many people would abuse that. Look at the woman in this series. How can you spend that much in a few weeks?
‘But I do think people should be given help, if they have a genuine business plan and if they are happy to be vetted to check they aren’t drug addicts or alcoholics. If some- one wants to, say, set up a market stall, why not help them out? But their earnings should then be deducted from their benefits until they can be stopped completely.’
There are lessons to be learned from this show. One is that if you go on TV, you give your fledgling business a huge boost.
The current series will see six families — twice as many as in the first series — grapple with how to spend their £26,000. What would Scott’s advice to them be?
‘The only way they are going to benefit from this is if they think very carefully about what they spend this money on,’ he says.
‘Yes, £26,000 seems like a lifechanging amount, but believe me, it can go fast. But it can also turn their lives around, forever.’