Below The Breadline in Liverpool

[Zaune]

The Guardian

Thomas Bebb cranes his head out of his living room window to assess how many of his neighbours are unemployed. He counts the number of flats in this three-storey, brown-and-grey pebbledash block (12) and pauses to calculate how many contain people in work. There are two: a scaffolder and a nurse. Looking across the courtyard at two other blocks opposite and to the left, he can't think of anyone with a job there either.

The high numbers of workless households on this estate help explain startling figures produced by the GMB last week revealing that nearly one in three households in Liverpool have no one in work. It is the legacy of historic industrial decline in this area, suddenly worsened by the recent round of public sector redundancies and a new, downturn-related disappearance of retail and manufacturing jobs.

For Bebb, who lost his short-term job as a parks gardener and grounds maintenance worker in November (because of cost-cutting by Liverpool city council, which is in the process of shaving 28% from its budget), the result is that he is living substantially below the poverty line. In practical terms, this means he has only the seven pound coins, plus 30 pence in smaller change, jangling in his tracksuit pocket to last him for the next 10 days, until his benefits are paid again.

He is anxious to find new work and is assiduous about searching for openings. Once a week he has been volunteering with his old employers, because he enjoys his work and wants to be the first back in if there's an opening, obligingly doing his old job for free.

But, with seven unemployed people in Liverpool for every job vacancy, looking for work is a dispiriting process. Local government cuts have led to widespread job losses throughout the city, where almost 30% of all work is public-sector funded. Inconveniently, the cuts have also led to the shrinking of resources available to fund many of the community centres and training courses that might previously have helped him and his neighbours back into work.

Years on the dole

Because unemployment is an experience shared by most of his friends, family and neighbours, Bebb, 45, finds nothing remarkable in his situation, and his description of how he gets by is not an appeal for sympathy, just a neutral account of reality.

His two eldest children, who are 21 and 23, haven't found work since they left school at 16, although they are looking. He remembers the years spent on the dole when he left school in a similarly bleak economic period in the early 80s – around the time that Margaret Thatcher was considering abandoning Liverpool to "managed decline", having been warned by her advisers that to try to save it would be like attempting to "pump water uphill".

But Bebb wonders if his children will find things harder. "It's normal for their generation. It's like that for every family around here, very few of their kids have got jobs," he says. More than a third of Liverpool council wards have youth unemployment rates twice the national average, according to council figures.

The nearest shopping parade to his flat on the Tees estate in Kirkdale, north Liverpool, reflects how little money people here have to spend. Two of the local pubs are shut, and of the first six shops on the street, four have recently closed. Along the street, it's not bright signs and awnings that make the facades distinctive, but the range of different materials used to board them up – sheets of wood, corrugated iron, metal shutters.

He sees old school friends in the jobcentre. "It's not a good way to meet them, but it's nice to see them anyway," Bebb says. By contrast with many of them, he thinks he's been lucky to have previously had steady work with the council, and then with a number private companies that were contracted to take on parks maintenance for the council, for much of his working life.

Losing his full-time grounds maintenance job two years ago was "the end of the world": for a while he found it hard to get out of bed and didn't want to talk to people. His mood lifted when he got a contract job working in the parks, but the work only lasted a few months.

He gets about £67 a week as jobseeker's allowance, but £15 is instantly deducted in child maintenance for the three of his five children who are under 16, none of whom live with him. Another £10 a week is also currently being deducted at source to repay a historic crisis loan that he was given by the jobcentre to tide the family over when he lost his job on another occasion about a decade ago, leaving him with just over £40 pounds. Out of that he is paying back a credit card debt of around £1,000, which he ran up when he first lost his full-time work 18 months ago, and he needed money to tide him over. (He went to his bank to ask for an overdraft facility to help him through that difficult time, and was told he wasn't eligible for one, but was invited to apply for a credit card instead.)

Bebb is paying this off at a rate of £33 a month, which he often finds very challenging. He spends £14 a week on recharging his gas and electricity accounts, so just under £20 is left for food, clothes, bus tickets and everything else. His rent is currently paid by housing benefit.

This is manageable, but only because he has radically changed the way he lives and eats. He goes once a fortnight to one of two local shops that offer heavily discounted food – packets of buy-one-get-one-free frozen burgers for a pound, two-for-£1 ice-cream tubs for his younger children who stay with him at the weekend, a bag of frozen chips, which, if he rations it correctly, he can get four meals out of. When that runs out he eats rice and pasta which he gets for 25p a pack at Tesco. "Sometimes you have to eat crap."

For breakfast now, he has toast rather than Weetabix. If this seems an unremarkable shift, he explains the subtle financial calculations behind the change: a loaf of bread contains, say, 30 slices, and costs around 40 pence, while a packet of Weetabix costs nearer £2 and only has enough for 12 breakfasts, so is less economical. Because he's not eating cereal, he buys less milk, and has switched to getting a litre of longlife so that he can eke it out for as long as possible without it going off. "You've got to think like that when you're shopping."

Unaffordable luxury

Bebb can't afford to smoke so he doesn't, and he says beer is an unaffordable luxury: the last time he got drunk was the day he was made redundant from his permanent job two years ago. "I was shocked, I was drowning my sorrows." He hasn't been to a football match since he was a child ("too dear") or to the cinema for years, hasn't bought new clothes since he lost his job. To relax he takes his younger children fishing on the canal, which has the advantage of being free.

The corner shops and chippy survive on the high street, but the discount store Bebb uses is further away and he hasn't bought his children a takeaway meal since he lost his permanent job two years ago (£10 is too much to blow in one go, he explains). "It's a struggle; it gets to you more mentally," he says.

Bebb looks healthy, but admits he sometimes feels wobbly when he does the 45-minute walk to the job centre (a £3.80 day bus pass is usually unaffordable), because he hasn't eaten enough. "Sometimes I've had to stop because I've had the shakes, dizzy."

He is happy to speak frankly and dissect his budget in unembarrassed detail because he thinks people have a distorted idea of how generous benefits are. He has noticed that the new government's tone has become more hostile to claimants, and thinks ignorance may be part of the problem. He doesn't expect empathy from a prime minister whom he describes as a multimillionaire. "If the prime minister can go out and spend £100 a night for his dinner and I don't get that a fortnight, where's the justice in that?"

For the moment, the doors of the Kirkdale Community Centre remain open on the high street, providing a place for local unemployed young people to spend time. At the front desk, Sheena Orton, who helps run the centre, explains that because of funding cuts, they are no longer able to offer courses in IT skills and CV building for the unemployed, the centre has lost 13 members of staff in the past year, and is struggling to stay open. She is still working full-time, but there's only enough money to pay her for 10 hours a week, so she does the rest for free. "It's the 18-24-year-olds who are angry. They want what everyone else has got – they all want a car, they want a phone, they want trainers. Some of them resort to crime and you can see that in the burglary stats," she says.

She is also worried about her own children; three of her four sons, aged between 20 and 38, have recently lost their jobs. "I don't think you could be more motivated than my sons and they can't get anything."

Nick Small, the Labour councillor responsible for employment within Liverpool city council, says the figure of one in three workless households comes as no surprise: "We realise that we have got a very tough situation in Liverpool. In some areas 40% of households are workless. This creates additional barriers to finding work. There's no culture of finding work in the community, no role models. It can be quite disempowering."

Through its Liverpool Into Work scheme, which has a centre on the Tees estate, the council is trying to assist the hardest to reach communities, but Small concedes that "if there aren't the jobs to go into", then helping with CVs and motivation was only part of the solution. "We need to do all we can to stimulate demand," he says.

Kim Griffiths, head of employment with the Liverpool in Work programme, said the combined effect of the downturn and public sector cuts meant that there were fewer jobs available in the care sector, in security, hospitality, tourism and manufacturing. "A lot of the jobs are part-time and funny shifts. There are a lot of people who really want to work. It is really soul destroying to keep getting knocked back. We are not thick scousers who want to sit on our arses all day. That is not the case. We are talented, creative people who really want to work."

Bebb is being helped by the programme: advisers are impressed by his "employability", and hopeful that new work could be found for him. In the meantime, to qualify for benefits payments, he is obliged to apply for at least two jobs a week, to phone at least two employers a week and turn up, speculatively, at the door of two potential employers every week.

Later his six- and eight-year-old sons are dropped off for him to look after for a while. They slide across the floor of his flat on their stomachs, cheerfully eating ice-cream and watching television. He is optimistic that things may be easier for them when they leave school, and hopes that they will learn a trade – electrician or gas fitter.

The children have other ideas. The younger boy wants to be a pirate, and the older one says his teacher has told him he is clever enough to go to university. He'd like to be a professor.

This is what austerity looks like.

[Mayabird]

It sounds to me like the real assistance these people would need is whatever would be necessary to get them the hell out of that city and go somewhere that isn't a rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland, not just keeping them meagerly alive in said dead-end.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ok, shit's bad, but what else can we do? The money just isn't there for anything more.

[Dartzap]

It sounds to me like the real assistance these people would need is whatever would be necessary to get them the hell out of that city and go somewhere that isn't a rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland, not just keeping them meagerly alive in said dead-end.

And go where precisely? Everywhere is in the doldrums, theres no fucking point moving anywhere else.

[Zaune]

Ok, shit's bad, but what else can we do? The money just isn't there for anything more.

Well, then the money must be acquired from somewhere. Preferably in the form of a sustainable, reasonably loophole-free tax system, but if we have to create aggregate demand with borrowed money in the short term then so be it. The alternative is too appalling to contemplate.

It sounds to me like the real assistance these people would need is whatever would be necessary to get them the hell out of that city and go somewhere that isn't a rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland, not just keeping them meagerly alive in said dead-end.

And go where precisely? Everywhere is in the doldrums, theres no fucking point moving anywhere else.

Actually, she does raise a good point. Even six or seven years ago, when anyone able-bodied who spoke even a few words of English could walk into a temping agency and have something within weeks, it was incredibly and needlessly difficult to go further afield than maybe ten miles away in search of a job.

[Broomstick]

It sounds to me like the real assistance these people would need is whatever would be necessary to get them the hell out of that city and go somewhere that isn't a rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland, not just keeping them meagerly alive in said dead-end.

If you moved everyone from the "rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland" to the few areas where there are still jobs you'd quickly glut the job market there, resulting nearly the same number of unemployed who are now uprooted and cut off from what family and community support they had before.

The problem is that there are not enough jobs for everyone who can and wants to work. Sure, there are some hard-core unemployed, but right now, world-wide, there are millions who are educated, skilled, want to work... and can't find a job.

[madd0ct0r]

It sounds to me like the real assistance these people would need is whatever would be necessary to get them the hell out of that city and go somewhere that isn't a rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland, not just keeping them meagerly alive in said dead-end.

Liverpool's a pretty small city by UK standards, about 1 million people. Of that, only a few areas are "rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland" while up to a few years ago the rest of the city was booming, finally recovering from Thatcher.

When i was last there it was a damn vibrant, young and creative city. The docklands had been redeveloped into city centre apartments, the university was expanding again, there were tower cranes and construction everywhere and it was a good place to be.

about ten years ago my dad was working with a charity business based in Speke, which was on a par with Teeside for unemployment. One of those viable models that has a steady stream of heavily unemployed people coming in, being trained as mechanics ect for a year whilst working and then farmed out to other companies. I remember my dad's face when he got a guy a job at the Jaguar factory. This was the first job this guy had had, and it'd be the first job in his family for three generations. And he wanted to work.
I don't know if they're still running but I hope so.

[tim31]

My mother was born and raised in Liverpool(Huyton, to be more specific) and if not for the sudden death of her father at the hands of a motorist, she may well have remained. But instead she arrived in Australia in the late sixties when Liverpool's two last big industries - shipbuilding and the Beatles - had packed up and moved elsewhere.

So all they've got now is Liverpool and Everton FC and an increasingly tenuous grasp on past glories, combined with one of the best accents/dialects in the country. I'd call it the Detroit of England but you could argue the same of Sheffield.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

This is going on all over the country, and I can't see a way out.

The essential problem is that the UK not only has a massive national debt, but a huge budget deficit too. If we were running a surplus then there wouldn't really be a problem, since we would just shift some spending into debt repayment. But no, we have instead a deficit of £163 billion (http://www.parliament.uk/documents/comm ... eficit.pdf). If Britain is going to get out of this mess, that deficit has to become a surplus, meaning that we somehow have to either cut spending or increase revenue (or combination thereof) to the tune of over £163 billion. Either way the deficit has to go, or we have to keep on borrowing and the problem keeps on getting worse. But for the life of me I can't think where that kind of money's going to come from.

[NoXion]

Here's a crazy idea; instead of aggravating the recession with cuts that encourage people to spend even less money, why not say, double the amount of money given to those most likely to spend it rather than sit on it (for example, JSA claimants)? If millions of people can afford to splash out a little on new clothes, more and nicer food, and maybe even take a trip to the local cinema or something like that, surely such a thing would have a good effect on the economy - companies would profit from the extra liquidity of a not insignificant proportion of the populace, and the government also would be able to benefit through taxes. I'm pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that for every dollar a government spends on welfare, they end up getting slightly more than a dollar back. I wish I could find that again.

Although I will admit it it's an impossible ask for a country with the sort of yellow tabloid press that loves to imply if not state outright that anyone receiving benefits is a useless scrounger. This results in much ignorance and distortion among those who've never claimed, who's only exposure to benefits are stories like this, which to my mind are clearly intended to stir up enmity against benefit claimants.

[Zaune]

Here's a crazy idea; instead of aggravating the recession with cuts that encourage people to spend even less money, why not say, double the amount of money given to those most likely to spend it rather than sit on it (for example, JSA claimants)? If millions of people can afford to splash out a little on new clothes, more and nicer food, and maybe even take a trip to the local cinema or something like that, surely such a thing would have a good effect on the economy - companies would profit from the extra liquidity of a not insignificant proportion of the populace, and the government also would be able to benefit through taxes. I'm pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that for every dollar a government spends on welfare, they end up getting slightly more than a dollar back. I wish I could find that again.

Why not spend it on hiring people to build stuff? There's a long-standing shortage of residential property in the UK, particularly the kind aimed at individuals or young couples, and our railway infrastructure is going to need some major capacity increases with the way oil prices are going.

[NoXion]

Why not spend it on hiring people to build stuff? There's a long-standing shortage of residential property in the UK, particularly the kind aimed at individuals or young couples, and our railway infrastructure is going to need some major capacity increases with the way oil prices are going.

Sounds like a reasonable idea, which is probably the reason it won't happen.

It seems like our "leaders" have fundamentally lost interest in building stuff or being remotely progressive.

[mr friendly guy]

Giving people more money to spend ala the stimulus package is only a short term thing. Presumably people hope the rest of the economy will have picked up after the stimulus spending's effect has faded. Australia did this type of thing.

Infrastructure building will most probably stimulate the economy longer as it takes time to build up said infrastructure. We also did this, although some of the things that got build were useless. Another country stimulating its economy by building infrastructure is China. Even then a lot of what was spent was something they had planned to spend anyway, they just brought the spending forward so it coincided with the downturn.

[NoXion]

Giving people more money to spend ala the stimulus package is only a short term thing. Presumably people hope the rest of the economy will have picked up after the stimulus spending's effect has faded. Australia did this type of thing.

I think the effects of what I'm proposing, namely a permanent increase in the income of a certain segment of society most likely to actually go out and spend their money, would be different to a one-off payment.

Infrastructure building will most probably stimulate the economy longer as it takes time to build up said infrastructure. We also did this, although some of the things that got build were useless.

There's plenty of shit being used now that could do with repair, replacement or upgrading. Obviously infrastructure buildup has to be on useful stuff rather than boondoggles, but it's not like it's impossible to work out the difference between the two, surely?

[mr friendly guy]

Giving people more money to spend ala the stimulus package is only a short term thing. Presumably people hope the rest of the economy will have picked up after the stimulus spending's effect has faded. Australia did this type of thing.

I think the effects of what I'm proposing, namely a permanent increase in the income of a certain segment of society most likely to actually go out and spend their money, would be different to a one-off payment.

I am a bit ambivalent to this myself since this is highly dependent on how well someone manages their money, ie it could encourage more risky financial behaviour. Giving the money to some financial guru who actually made his money following his own philosophy most probably will lead to stimulating the economy without too many problems. Giving it to a problem gambler (to use another extreme) will lead to social problems. Some of our problems like the use of NINJA loans came back to bite us because people had too much money (ie credit was cheap because of low interest rates) but lacked the knowledge / discipline to use it. Giving people more money to spend, will have the same effect as having low interest rates as both leads to, well more money to spend.

Of course I can't generalise everyone, but statistics can give us an average on how people behave. When people save NEGATIVE cents to every dollar earned (Americans I am looking at you), lack of spending doesn't seem to be the problem. Its lack of saving and money management, causing people to be in dire straights. When people save high amounts of their income eg Korea, China, then you can make a case that lack of spending is a problem there, and moves to stimulate the economy in this manner, will have the desired effect without too much social / financial problems down the track.

There's plenty of shit being used now that could do with repair, replacement or upgrading. Obviously infrastructure buildup has to be on useful stuff rather than boondoggles, but it's not like it's impossible to work out the difference between the two, surely?

Correct. Which is why I used the example of Chinese infrastructure building as well. They are building things which are useful to their economy like roads and bridges. We also used it for good stuff too, but somehow also ended up building rooms for schools that didn't need them and stupid school signs.

[Simon_Jester]

At the moment, the US and a lot of other countries are having problems with demand because of the contraction in wages at the low end of the scale. I know that in America, U6 (a measure of how many people are not working, as opposed to those who can't find a job) has gone up something like 10-15% in this recession, and for each person who is now making no money, but is still somehow supporting themselves, there's a probably a family whose standard of living dropped to help keep them alive.

When you add it up, I think reduction in demand probably does contribute to the ongoing depression of the economy, and persistent long term increases would help. Long term, of course, isn't the same as one-off windfalls that have no long term effect on hiring decisions or the like, because no one expects them to last.

[DoomSquid]

It sounds to me like the real assistance these people would need is whatever would be necessary to get them the hell out of that city and go somewhere that isn't a rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland, not just keeping them meagerly alive in said dead-end.

If you moved everyone from the "rotting post-industrial dead-end wasteland" to the few areas where there are still jobs you'd quickly glut the job market there, resulting nearly the same number of unemployed who are now uprooted and cut off from what family and community support they had before.

The problem is that there are not enough jobs for everyone who can and wants to work. Sure, there are some hard-core unemployed, but right now, world-wide, there are millions who are educated, skilled, want to work... and can't find a job.

You wouldn't gut the job market in the 'good' areas of the country, the reason being that it's already gutted. I live in the South East, the richest and most well off part of the country, and the job market in this area is also terrible. It's not as bad as up North, and there are far fewer unemployed, but there are also very few jobs available. Essentially, the number of people and the number of jobs more or less match up, but if you are unemployed and you don't happen to have a very specific skillset (if you're a teacher or a nurse, you're set, likewise if you're a welder or can speak a foreign language), you aren't getting a job, because there are vanishingly few vacant positions. You end up with five hundred plus people applying for a single admin job as a result.

It doesn't help that a lot of the positions that would be available as temp work in supermarkets and the like are filled up with 'volunteers' more or less forced to work for free for two months by the Jobcentre. Since there's all that free labour available, said chains aren't actually hiring anybody for entry level positions. I was one of I think three actual temps hired over Christmas in my local ASDA; all the other seasonal workers were 'work experience' people.