MELBOURNE: Howdon could be a case study in new poverty. The Tyneside suburb doesn’t look poor: the houses are decent and the streets safe. But for alcohol-induced hospital admissions, family breakdown, child self-harm and worklessness, it’s among the nation’s worst.
The standard trademark of this tends to be lost children: often out of school, not being looked after properly at home. Many find their way to the Howdon Community Hub, run by Julie Marriott. Her team are in the business of turning lives around, which usually starts by listening to what people have to say. And they’re picking up a very modern concern.
A growing number of young people are worried about being “labelled” or “statemented”: that is, diagnosed with a medical condition that prompts welfare payments but changes the way they’re perceived. And, they fear, setting them on a trajectory of failure.
“Children have talked to me about this,” Marriott said when we met in her office in the community hub. “A diagnosis might mean additional benefits. For some, it lets them abdicate any problem with their parenting. But the kids are telling us that they don’t necessarily want that label. They want to be seen for who they are.”
At first, this sounds bizarre: what’s not to welcome? A child diagnosed can bring their parents about £6,000 a year in child disability living allowance (DLA) and up to £4,500 in carer’s allowance. Quite a sum for a family on the breadline.
Uptake has almost doubled since lockdown. Learning and behavioural disorders are the main drivers. One in nine 15-year-olds is categorised as disabled, in a way that can unlock a £10,500 package for a parent. In places like Liverpool (and Howdon), it’s one in five. The welfare system is kicking in, providing extra resources — intended to level the playing field for later life. That, at least, is the theory.
But Marriott has some personal experience of the practice. “When I was at primary school, I was put into what was called the ‘remedial’ class. I had no learning difficulty whatsoever; I just learnt differently. But that label followed me through to my GCSEs. It told me that I couldn’t. It told me that I shouldn’t.”
This, she says, can sometimes — not always — be a net negative. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t put some structures in, or shouldn’t recognise that there are children who need a definition to get the right support. But do they then need to be defined by that for the rest of their life?”
Britain has always had provisions for children with special needs. But there has been a trebling of the number in the past 12 years, a status that may overlap with child disability but is run independently of it. As the number of categorised children surges, so does the evidence that they are twice as likely to end up not in education, employment or training (Neet) at the age of 17. Disengagement starts early: school truancy rates tend to follow child DLA awards.
The risk, Marriott says, is that diagnosis lowers expectations: for school attendance, performance and behaviour. “The minute they have a diagnosis, a small proportion of children — not all — will use it to be as disruptive as they can. Because they’ve got a reason to be disruptive, a reason not to conform.”
One boy put the perversity of it to her plainly. “He said: ‘When I was getting extra support, I got to see the therapy dog. The minute I didn’t need the support any more, they took it away. All the bad kids get to see the therapy dog. How come you get more if you’re naughty, and less if you’re good?’”
The incentives for parents are substantial. A typical child diagnosis for ADHD or behavioural problems pays £5,600 on its own or £10,100 if it triggers carer’s allowance. Part-time work in Tyneside pays less, and those who do work find the tax burden rising as thresholds are frozen. Disability benefit, by contrast, is tax-free.
Not everyone takes the money. Aimee Perry, one of Marriott’s colleagues, tells of a volunteer at the centre whose children qualified for additional needs. “Everyone was saying to her: ‘Go and claim carer’s allowance, you’ll get a bit of extra money’. And she replied: ‘I’m a parent, I’m not a carer. So why would I claim carer’s allowance for my child?’”
It is quite a lot of money for someone on a tight budget to turn down on a point of self-sufficiency principle. But this shows how the system tends to punish, not reward, those trying to stick to these principles.
Child DLA has now become a conveyor belt, taking teenagers into the world of welfare. At the age of 16, child DLA is retested as a personal independence payment (Pip) and paid directly to the teenager. The conversion rate is 80 per cent. There is no such thing as a child rate, so a sixth-former with a diagnosis living at home can be paid the adult rate aged 16. This typically means an average of about £8,800 a year for ADHD, behavioural disorder or learning difficulties. This is more than the premium of a typical university degree after five years. It’s paid regardless of work or study status.
The result is the economic rewiring not just of childhood and parenthood, but in the perceptions of the game of life. The premium on a diagnosis is far greater than that for learning. No one has ever released figures for this, but it will be obvious to children looking around them.
Marriott says that the welfare state now is full of perverse incentives. “We make people utterly reliant on systems, which leads them to think they’re entitled — and some end up thinking they’re powerless to do anything themselves. What’s shocked me is that some of the mums and dads now see their universal credit and their carer’s allowance as their salary. ‘That’s my wage,’ they say. That’s a cultural shift I don’t think was ever considered at the time, or comprehended now.”
A turning point early in her career was John, whom she helped after he emerged from the care system. “I’d worked really hard to get him a college place. I arrived at the house and told him: get up those stairs, clean your teeth, brush your hair, ten minutes. After a while I heard him sobbing. He looked at me and said: ‘I don’t know how to brush my teeth.’ I’d assumed he knew.” When people are not taught the basics at home, they can go through life never asking. What’s striking, she says, is just how long the list of basics now runs.
She hears the same from teachers now. “Years ago, a child might start school with the developmental age of a three-year-old, which was challenging. They’re now taking children in with the skills of a 12- to 18-month-old.” Such children, she says, struggle to share things, to sit for a story or keep themselves dry. She says the colleagues once handed out bags of potatoes from a food project, and the children asked what they were for. “It wasn’t until we said ‘chips, mash, roasties’ that they understood. They couldn’t correlate the potato to the food.”
If such foundations are missing, Julie argues, no amount of money poured on top will hold. She bristles at one phrase above all. “How would you like to be called ‘economically inactive’? It’s like me being called ‘remedial’ when I was a kid. It’s like being called a Neet. Being given a label can have a catastrophic effect.”
She has seen how the welfare system clings on to those who try to escape it. Her centre holds a council contract to get women into work. “We had a woman who secured a job: a little cleaning job, her first one. She’d applied, been interviewed, got it. She went down to the DWP, and they told her: don’t take that! There’s another benefit you’re entitled to. She had to write to us to say they’d told her she couldn’t take it.”
She is still angry about it. “Why are you investing £150,000 for us to get women into work when another part of the system tells them not to take the job?”
At the centre she has caterers called the “barefoot bakers”: mothers who a year ago had no job or life plan. Now they run the café and cook homemade meals for 90 children on youth-club nights as volunteers. The idea is to reduce the fear of work and combine this with coaching designed to change the mindset about sickness. Encouraging people to see it as something you can manage, rather than something that you’re imprisoned or defined by.
“My long-term aim is that, in three years’ time, those women will not be claiming benefits,” she says. “And their children will have seen their mothers go to work and be purposeful. And they will contribute to the system, rather than take from it.”
But here, as so often, the system is not helping. “It’s not the parenting demands stopping them working: it’s the benefits system. They are standing on a cliff.”
Carer’s allowance vanishes the moment a claimant’s earnings tip over £204 a week. It’s not so much losing the money that acts as the deterrent, but fear the job may not work out — so they would have to apply for carer’s allowance all over again.
She introduces me to Billie, her Howdon Community Hub health and wellbeing coach, who first arrived as a long-term sickness claimant who had never held a job. She tells me that her mum never worked. “I was getting money for being unwell, and it wasn’t bad money. I could live. I never believed people when they said a routine would help your mental health.” Eight years on, her sickness record is, in Julie’s words, “off the chart” — but in the right direction. “Her sick rate is now nil.”
Billie’s tale, says Marriott, points to the way out. “We do have people who want to work, but they need a job to go to. A job they can remain in. We need to make work pay. Give people the chance to build confidence, to make mistakes, to see themselves in someone who looks like them — and without losing their benefits for that period. Then, when they’re ready, get them into work and support them in it.”