Return to Benefits Street
Ten years ago it was the reality TV show that sparked outrage over Britain’s welfare culture. ROBERT HARDMAN went back to see what’s changed – and found not just a thriving school but a twist that’s even more surprising...
Even though it was bin collection day earlier this morning, there are still scattered heaps of filth littering the kerb.
Aside from the mandatory fridge (there always seems to be an old fridge hereabouts), I spot a broken glass table, piles of food, lots of dirty nappies and the packaging for a new 55 in Sony television.
I meet Marcela Asan, 32, who is sweeping up the litter left on the pavement outside her front door, as she does each morning.
‘every day, I clean, clean, clean! I clean the whole house, but still we have mice getting in because of all the rubbish,’ the Romanian mother-of-two tells me. ‘We have complained to the landlord but he just says this is normal in Britain.’
So far, so very Benefits Street. Ten years on from one of the most successful British social documentaries of recent times, things would appear to be very much the same on a terraced street once painted as the armpit of inner-city Birmingham.
except that appearances, of course, can be deceptive.
Most adults round here, it turns out, have a job. What’s more, so did most people ten years ago — not that viewers saw it that way.
Meanwhile, the primary school at the end of the road, which was in special measures back then, has just been garlanded with an ‘outstanding’ rating by Ofsted. In other words, this is no slum.
It was in January 2014 that characters such as ‘White Dee’, the warm-hearted ‘auntie of the street’, ‘Black Dee’, later jailed for drug and firearms offences, and Fungi, an endearingly hopeless addict, became unwitting national celebrities.
TheIR lives in James Turner Street, round the corner from Birmingham’s Winson Green Prison, became a real-life soap opera.
Week after week, more than six million viewers watched as residents spent their days shoplifting or defrauding ‘the social’ or growing cannabis, with the occasional doomed attempt to enter the world of work.
however, they were painted in a sympathetic light, helpless victims of a crumbling benefits system. Unlike the average doom-and-gloom documentary we might expect from Panorama or newsnight, this one had warmth, humour and an indomitable community spirit.
The film company behind it, Love Productions, was already enjoying stellar success on the BBC with The Great British Bake Off. now it had another hit on Channel 4.
If network executives were elated down in London, the novelty was soon wearing off in Brum. Within days of the first episode, strangers began turning up in the street to hurl abuse, or rubbish — or both. Left-wing commentators accused the producers of peddling ‘poverty porn’.
Yet, the residents of James Turner Street had, unquestionably, been part of a broadcasting landmark.
In recent weeks, there have been several ‘where are they now?’ retrospectives on the series and its legacy. So I have come here to see what life is like now in a working-class enclave which, in early 2014, was even more celebrated than that other great Tv terrace, Coronation Street.
And a few things stand out. First, most residents are in work. Second, everyone who featured in the programme has long gone. Third, no one brings up politics. not once.
Life is tough, people say, and, yes, there are quite a few people of working age in the street who live on benefits, some of them migrants, some ex-prisoners and some incapable of working by dint of health or addiction.
Alarming new figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility show that working-age inactivity is now at an all-time high of 9.3 million (700,000 above pre-pandemic levels), with predictions of an extra 600,000 claiming incapacity benefit over the next five years.
no sooner have I alighted at the nearest tram stop than I walk into a foul-mouthed, drugrelated showdown between two semi-coherent men in their early 40s who might charitably be described as having mental health issues.
The most common complaint round here, though, is the rubbish. everyone has something to say about that, especially as the city’s near-bankrupt Labour council is about to reduce collections even further.
Yet no one talks about the Tories or Labour. Politics, it seems, is a far-away game for other people.
My own attempts to contact the local MP, Shabana Mahmood, come to nothing.
The overarching theme of Benefits Street was of a community on an eternal downward spiral. We were not quite encouraged to laugh at characters such as former prisoner-cum-serial shoplifter, Danny, or his drug-addicted sidekick, the hopeless Fungi, but most people did.
‘I knew Fungi. he was a lovely lad and we tried to help him,’ says roofer Steve haywood. ‘I even thought about giving him a job to help him, but I couldn’t take the risk of him falling off a roof.’
Sadly, Fungi died in 2020, apparently from a drugs overdose following a cancer diagnosis.
Steve, who still has a yard on the street for his building materials, moved away in 2020 but has happy memories of life here. he well remembers both the filming of Benefits Street and the aftermath.
‘I didn’t want to be part of it because you had no control,’ he recalls. ‘I think they hoodwinked the people who took part and made out that everyone was a
scrounger. Having said that, I don’t suppose it would have been very interesting showing people like me getting up in the morning and going to work.’
HE LAUGHS as he recalls the level of media interest in the street at the time: ‘There was one reporter from a tabloid who paid £300 just to stay in our house for one night so she could say she’d lived on Benefits street,’ he says.
steve sold his house to a landlord who has since converted it into multi-occupancy bedsit accommodation. I find one woman there who does not want to talk and an eritrean man who has only been there three days and doesn’t speak english.
There is no one at home in most properties. Razia Bibi who has lived in the street for five years explains that most people are at work.
‘a lot of people have delivery jobs, taxi jobs, warehouse jobs. You see a lot in yellow jackets,’ says Razia.
she works part-time at a local school while her husband is a taxi driver and her daughter is studying to be a vet.
life in James Turner street, she says, is good and nothing like the depiction in Benefits street. ‘Most people have a car and you can’t run one of those on benefits,’ she says.
Over the course of a day, however, a clear picture starts to emerge.
ali Hussein, who works on the railways, and his wife, samira, have lived here for eight years and like it very much.
‘It really does have a community spirit. Come here in the summer and you’ll find lots of kids out in the street,’ says samira. ‘But the TV programme got it all wrong. This is mainly an asian street, and yet you saw hardly any asians in Benefits street because they were all out at work.’
It is certainly a very diverse area. In the course of a day, I meet just two white British residents of working age. One, who looks not unlike Fungi, sticks his head out of the door to tell me to ‘ **** off’.
The other is Tom, a married father of three. aged 28, he works in healthcare while his wife is a teaching assistant. ‘I’ve lived here eight years and it’s very mixed but everyone gets on well,’ he says. ‘People still call this place Benefits street but most people work, though they might still be claiming some sort of additional benefits.’
He concedes that the programme did him one favour of sorts when he arrived — a rent reduction ‘because no wanted to live on Benefits street’.
The most noteworthy change has been the local primary school, the Oasis Foundry academy.
‘We took it over at the start of January 2014 and it was in a real mess,’ says the Rev steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis group of 54 academies. ‘and the first episode of Benefits street came out just six days later.’
He points out that the school and street sign feature in the opening credits. ‘Then someone stole the sign,’ he recalls. ‘There was this voyeurism as people would turn up and drive down the street shouting. The children even stopped going out to play for a while.’
His response was to call a community meeting immediately after the first episode. ‘People were very angry about the programme. It only focused on nine characters.’
Mr Chalke says that the real James Turner street was very different, and that the new staff of the school and the residents set about proving the programme wrong. local volunteers have turned a previously derelict patch of land into a school garden, which now sells produce to locals.
Over time, the Oftsed rating kept rising. The latest salutes ‘this wonderful school’ as simply ‘outstanding’.
‘You can’t build a good school without a strong community,’ says Mr Chalke.
Finally, I track down Deirdre Kelly, aka White Dee, on the telephone. Of all the characters in Benefits street, the mother-oftwo, now 52, was the stand-out star in 2014. she went on to appear in Celebrity Big Brother later that year, by which time the public attention meant that she no longer felt safe in her old home.
she has since moved to neighbouring Handsworth and works with a charity called Birmingham says NO, combating knife crime and youth violence.
so does she regret that she ever took part in the programme?
‘It’s a bittersweet thing,’ she says. ‘That was my home for a long time and I lost all that. But then there’s the flipside. Would I be running this youth organisation now if I hadn’t done it?’
SHE is still irked by the way the series painted the street. ‘They were here for 18 months and filmed everyone on that street, including people who were working. But they weren’t interested in them. and they didn’t tell us it was to be called Benefits street. I look back and think how naive we were.’
The producers insist that every effort was made to ensure all the participants in the series knew what was happening.
‘We did a great deal of research. We wanted to look at Birmingham because it was so often overlooked,’ Kieran smith, executive producer, tells me. ‘It was a proper observational documentary at a time when benefits were being cut.’
He accepts that people did not know the title at the outset, because it had not been decided, but says it came as no surprise to anyone.
‘We weren’t saying that everyone was out of work but we knocked on every door in that street and most people were claiming some sort of benefit. We could only film those people who wanted to be filmed. The thing that turned people against us was the reaction afterwards.’
The film received a Broadcasting Press guild award and hefty ratings for Channel 4, which commissioned a follow-up, set in the North-east.
It also shone a light on what remains an insoluble problem: the increasing numbers of workingage people who either cannot or will not work.
after 14 years in charge, the Tories have simply watched the numbers grow. labour has no clear plan beyond shadow Work and Pensions secretary liz Kendall’s warning that ‘if you can work, there will be no option of a life on benefits’.
Yet no one expects much change here on Benefits street anyway. The one thing they can say with certainty, however, is that they will not be taking part in a sequel.