In this Red Wall town Labour’s worklessness fixes look hopelessly flimsy
Britain is not merely stuck in a “doom loop”; it is approaching the point of freefall. Such is the conclusion that I have come to after spending time in the Red Wall town of Hartlepool to investigate the nation’s worklessness crisis.
Like many places across the country, determination and despair battle for supremacy in Hartlepool. The former shipbuilding centre’s marina, which is being revamped, is a beacon of sparkling hope, yet the high street is like something out of a film set during the apocalypse. As you walk around the deprived estates, the houses have tulips in the windows and rubbish-strewn lawns. In a town where breakdowns amid rising rents and debt have become common, the bookies’ is symbolically sandwiched between the estate agent and Santander.
The most serious of the vicious cycles that Hartlepool is battling is mass worklessness. It has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Many locals are on the dole, a situation that demolishes their self-esteem and sense of agency. The national framing of everyday struggles as a “mental illness” appears to be feeding their sense of impotence.
This has rendered many borderline incapable of seeking and holding down work. Many, though cruelly disparaged as “shameless”, are trapped in a “pride paradox”. While they have few qualms about depending on the impersonal state, which processes them as numbers in a system, they are too proud to tap their communities to get their lives together; as queues snake for the Citizens Advice Bureau, charity workers are dismayed at the low take-up for free cooked meals.
A culture of inactivity is seeping down to the next generation; children on the estates are growing up in households that in the words of one resident “don’t understand the concept that if you work hard, then you can get on.”
Britain has been dysfunctional for so long that we’ve almost grown complacent. But we are now approaching a tipping point. The country has no choice but to force people in places like Hartlepool into work. As the economy stagnates, we cannot afford to pay for people to stay at home. Nor can Westminster absorb the political cost any longer. In the wake of the immigration backlash, if Labour fails to get Britons to fill roles in sectors like social care, it will simply be ejected from power.
And yet the political class lacks the guts and ideas to grasp the nettle. This week, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Liz Kendall, will unveil a White Paper to get places like Hartlepool out of their benefits rut. Her interventions, from revamping Jobcentres to boosting mental health support, seem hopelessly flimsy.
This is because they don’t confront the elephant in the room: namely that, for many, a life on benefits is a logical, if cynical, decision. One welfare support charity worker confessed to me: “People think, ‘if I’m only getting another £5 a week what’s the point?’”
More might be willing to overlook weak initial incentives if the jobs on offer had good prospects. In reality, options are often limited to bar work and care jobs. News that Kendall will push the NHS to enlist inactive people to fill non-clinical health roles has gone down like a lead balloon.
This lack of motivation to work has fused with the increasing medicalisation of ordinary human emotions. The number of mental health benefits claims has tripled since Covid. Yet Kendall isn’t reforming disability benefits. Instead, she has pledged “targeted help” to young people diagnosed with the likes of anxiety and ADHD.
Attempts to push more people into work, by making it slightly tougher to claim, won’t work. Worklessness is now so entrenched that when the system is tightened, recipients simply deteriorate physically and mentally to the point where they qualify for unconditional support; some might fake, or exaggerate, their illness. The last “clampdown” led to an explosion of disability claims.
Britain needs to get to the bottom of the issue. Clearly, deprived areas are crying out for better jobs. Several years into the “levelling up” experiment, we are beginning to understand how underrated towns with strong universities and a crop of good schools can blossom. Down the road from Hartlepool, Middlesbrough is thriving as a tech hub, helped by the talent graduating from Teesside University’s tech programmes. But we’re not allowing nearby areas, which are less dynamic, to share in that success. It is not a simple case of replication; there is no point babbling about “science clusters” in a town like Hartlepool where the education and skills simply aren’t there.
Dauntingly, Britain may also need to overturn 30 years of accumulated professional wisdom in the field of mental health. While the movement to tackle stigma has done untold good, it has overreached; too many people who find life difficult are being classed as mentally unwell.
A small, brave movement is galvanising itself against the status quo. Disturbed by what they see as the “pathologising” of everyday struggles, a group of GPs and psychologists are organising in the Tees Valley area to reframe the “mental health epidemic” as a crisis of “human distress”, in order to shift the emphasis from expert medical solutions that “reduce agency” to “preparing people to deal with ups and downs”.
They have their work cut out. As one of its champions, Dr Iain Caldwell, chief executive of the mental health charity Let’s Connect, said to me: “Any time I try to raise this type of conversation, [I’m told] it isn’t appropriate for this meeting”.
Still, a quiet revolution may be possible. A recent shift in the World Health Organisation’s position on mental health against the “perverse incentives” of pharmacology and a “Western reductionist approach” to mental wellbeing hints that it is feasible to take on the system in compassionate, liberal-friendly terms. Nor do reformers necessarily need to go to war with the experts. Encouraging a shift in research within the field of psychiatry, from managing medication to understanding the functions of the brain in different environments, could go a long way.
Yet there is little prospect of Labour addressing any of this. Its White Paper is a sticking plaster. The country, then, is heading either for a populist revolt or an economic meltdown. What will follow is anyone’s guess.