For four weeks in 2008, aged 24 and an unemployed graduate, I tried to claim housing benefit. I had just moved to London with my then partner from Yorkshire via a postgraduate training course in Essex, and a stint living back with my dad and temping in a bid to clear multifarious student debts. Both my partner and I were interning, me for a national magazine, he for a think tank. Neither of us was paid bar minimal expenses. But since his internship was longer-term, DFSS somehow decided that constituted a job, a job that meant he could or should support me (despite the fact he was living on hand-outs from his parents) and which invalidated my claim for housing benefit after just three weeks. In the end his family (who lived in Cyprus) offered to lend me some money, and soon after I landed a minimum wage media database job.
I was relatively privileged. There was some housing benefit available to me, for however short a time. At the eleventh hour, there was someone to help out. If I’d gone back home to West Yorkshire I could have kissed goodbye to a media career in the capital and my autonomy, but I’d still have had bare means. Certainly more than my younger cousin, a carpenter by trade, married with two small children and who had lost his job twice in 12 months since the recession gauged a chunk out of the northern economy, relying on benefits to keep him and his family going until he finally found work again. Brought up in a two-up two-down terrace, moving back into his childhood home with his partner and two small children wouldn’t exactly have made for comfortable living. That my aunt had serious health problems and one of her daughters (admittedly over the age of 25), her partner and two small children living with them for a while too due to similar economic constraints would have made it untenable.
Give or take a couple of years and Cameron’s proposed policy would have seen my cousin and I, two prime examples of the ‘feckless’, ‘entitled’ under-25-year-old benefit scroungers he wishes to obliterate, pretty much obliterated before we’d had a chance to make adult lives for ourselves.
Where should my cousin have moved back to, exactly, Mr Cameron when there was no work for him, though he was desperate to graft, and when his family home was already overstretched? And shouldn’t I, along with thousands of other have been paid for working in the first place, so that there was no need to claim housing benefit? For me, housing benefit was a means of realising my ambitions and enabling social mobility; for my cousin, it was a matter of basic sustenance and pride. Neither of us wanted state support, but to be able to support ourselves. And that’s not even to mention the situations, needs, or desires of our parents, whom Cameron would similarly see encumbered by banishing us back home in his bid not to overburden the state.
In Cameronland, it’s either spare bedrooms and free use of the second car, or gutless work-shysters who dream of a shabby, free flat on a sink estate. There may well be some 18-year-olds that plot a trajectory from their parents’ council house to their own, but for the majority of the 380,000 under-25-year-olds currently claiming house benefit, their circumstances will be as nuanced and complex as Cameron’s proposed policy is crude. You might want to look at some of those case studies, Mr Cameron, before being dazzled by the immediate cost savings. The sanctity – and sanity – of your so-called big society is at stake.
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