TV Review: Benefit Busters

Published on Thursday 20 August 2009 19:11

Benefit Busters Channel 4

THERE is an elephant in the room at A4E's Elevate confidence-boosting course for unemployed single mothers, and its name is Pauline. Anyone who watched The League Of Gentlemen cannot help but find Benefit Busters reminding them of the foul restart officer played by Steve Pemberton, with her thick make-up, insincere encouragement of the job seekers (or "worthless dole scum") and obsession with pens.

Yet Hayley Taylor, the workshop leader who is employed by the country's largest private welfare company to chivvy the women off benefits, would clearly see such a comparison as a sad example of a very negative attitude. Hayley talks a lot about "tough love" and "wake up calls" and "reality checks"; she declares that "positivity is the key to everything" and tells the women that they are caterpillars who could become butterflies.

Her strategy is to break them down – half are crying by the end of the first day – before building them back up again, which sounds like brainwashing to me. She orders them not to wear jeans, accuses one of being an alcoholic (it's not at all clear if she is) and threatens them with losing benefit if they are too ill to come to the course.

Over the course of this interesting programme, though, Hayley did at least seem to care about her "clients" – but only, it's clear, if they follow the rules she lays out for them. A4E's philosophy frames everything as personal responsibility: if they don't get work afterwards, it's not the fault of the course or due to external circumstances, it's their own failure. It was disturbing viewing, but very thought-provoking.

"If there wasn't (sic] companies like us, who's actually going to help these people?" asked Hayley, justifying her multi-millionaire boss's huge country estate, a different world from that of the women they're paid to berate. "Who's going to take the time to help them?" So why, you wonder, are we – through the government – paying a fortune to private companies to tell unemployed single mothers that they are caterpillars?

But what about the results? Well, after going through all that for six weeks, four of the women got unpaid work trials in Poundland. Three were taken on, but another was better off staying on the social as she had a few kids. Hayley was not happy about this, nor about the woman who turned down a job on the frivolous grounds that it paid less than the minimum wage and ended too late for her to even get a taxi home. What they did for child care was not mentioned (single mothers have to be looking for work now as soon as their youngest is seven).

She's peddling a 19th-century work ethic, where any job, even the most pointless, is morally uplifting in itself; where problems are just obstacles to be overcome by positive thinking, a professional appearance and clean pens. It's all very much New Labour, the "can do" mentality where poor people are just a social embarrassment for a shiny modern society, but these "benefit busters" date back to the last recession, when Margaret Thatcher's sink-or-swim philosophy left many to drown.

The women themselves, however, don't seem to feel like victims or resent it too much. They praised Hayley to her boss and said that they felt she was genuinely trying to help them. Then again, perhaps she told them their benefits would be cut if they didn't.