UN envoy visits seaside village fighting to stay afloat under austerity
IT’S a sunny day in Jaywick and people are walking along the seafront and chatting at their front doors. By lunchtime, there’s already a buzz around the tiny Essex village.
Unlike generations of politicians, a United Nations investigator, Philip Alston, is making time to visit during a tour of the UK to investigate the emergence of ‘extreme poverty’.
Today, he will report to a disintegrating UK government what he’s made of the harrowing stories he has been hearing across the country.
I hope Alston will tell ministers about Rob, a nurse, who developed a serious health condition and found himself assessed by “people who barely have a health qualification” and was found ‘fit for work’.
“In January I applied for ESA,” Rob told the UN man. “It took them seven weeks to tell me they had never received the form. I had to live on handouts. Going to a foodbank, it really does make you feel worthless.”
And I hope Alston will tell them about a young disabled woman called Mollie who described “watching poverty crippling my mother”. And Rebecca who spoke about the “hostile environment” of zero-hours work. And a young woman called Raven who spoke up about “girls with toilet paper Sellotaped into their underwear” during their period.
Jaywick, which regularly tops the list of ‘most deprived’ parts of the UK, is well used to being the poster child for poverty.
A few days ago, a picture of one of its streets – Austin Avenue – was used on an attack advert by the Republican party in the United States.
“They’ve no right,” Doris Telford, 69, a retired advocate for elderly people says. “They’ve never even been here.”
Scott Michael, 38, nods. “We’re fed up of people saying we’re a shanty town,” he says. “We’re a community.” A tenant of one of the houses in the picture asks not to be identified. “I didn’t have a choice about moving here,” she says. “The council moved me out of London because of the benefit cap. It’s a good enough place but the houses are falling down.” Built when motoring was in its infancy, Jaywick’s streets are named after cars, and the street plan was designed to look like a car grille. In the 1920s, newly mobile families were able to get to the seaside at weekends, and a property developer had the idea of selling them land to build chalets on. During the postwar housing crisis people started moving to Jaywick permanently. Now, decades on, many of these originally temporary homes are desperately patched up, or in dereliction, but local spirit remains strong. Even the village’s one pub is called the Never Say Die. Today, at the Community Centre, built on what was once the boating lake, most of Jaywick has squeezed in to see Mr Alston, the man from the UN, and to hear searing testimonies organised by Unite Community.
One man, called Steve, tells Alston he and his wife had both been made redundant by the job centre. “The debts just kept racking up,” he says. “We were relying on foodbanks. We could just about afford to feed the kids, but we were missing meals. I felt I needed to provide, as a man, and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t realise how bad it had affected me.
“In January 2014, I contemplated taking my own life. I thought no one will miss me, I’m useless. I’m just going to end it.” When he tried to get help he was told he could only have telephone counselling.
Another speaker, Trisha, tried to take her own life after getting £20,000 into debt. She’d worked her whole life for the NHS but left with spinal problems.
Help from Christians Against Poverty made her realise “I’ve got a lot
to live for and a lot to offer”. But she adds: “Now, my area has gone to Universal Credit and I’m struggling again. All the clothes I’ve got on now are from the British Heart Foundation. I was six weeks with no money coming in, living off baked beans.”
She finishes sadly: “It’s a lonely world out there.”
Wheelchair-user Erin’s family went from “a comfortable middle-class twoincome household” to near destitution after she had a brain haemorrhage. The family have found themselves excluded from the rental market because of insidious ‘no DSS’ rules.
“So I am to be made homeless,” Erin says. “I don’t where I am going to be putting our 12-year-old child to bed. This is the hostility faced by disabled people under austerity. We’ve even lost the very human right of a home.” Alston is clearly moved by what he’s heard, and he reassures people their testimonies “are not going to be for nothing”. At the end of the meeting, in carefully chosen words, he echoes one of the final speakers. “Mike says that ‘Austerity is a political choice not an
economic necessity’. That’s right. Poverty is a choice. You can choose not to make people poor.”
Outside, night has fallen, and opposite the Community Centre the boarded-up Mermaid Inn and the derelict Dolphin Diner are a reminder of what Jaywick once was and could be again, given a fair chance.
Today, the world will hear from Alston. How bitterly ironic that while he’s been here one of the politicians most responsible for these stories – Esther McVey, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions – has resigned. Not from shame, but because she now hopes to become Prime Minister.
‘‘ Poverty is a choice. You can choose to make people poor