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The residents of James Turner Street, a row of soggy terraces to the west of inner-city Birmingham, have done more to shape welfare policy in the past decade than any tenant of Downing Street. This stretch of unfortunate addresses was the basis of a 2014 documentary by Love Productions for Channel 4 called Benefits Street. The infamous show presented a pantomime view of Britain as a country of chaotic and feckless scroungers. It was the circus-tent apotheosis of public unease during the latter years of New Labour: over a “sick-note Britain” of strivers dragged down by shirkers.

It did much to stigmatise James Turner Street’s residents, who still feel its effects. So much so that the same production company was heckled out of town when it tried to film a successor documentary called Immigration Street in a suburb of Southampton later that year.

But it was perfect timing for the coalition government, which was at the time imposing a new benefits system called Universal Credit and a load of welfare cuts along with it. A TV show demonising claimants was a handy national watercooler moment for a government taking a lot of money away from them. Benefits Street’s protagonist “White Dee” (there was a “Black Dee” too, you see) was invited to a Policy Exchange fringe event at Conservative Party Conference. Benefits Street met Downing Street. The welfare bill was duly slashed by £30bn.

Well, welcome back to Benefits Street. The Tory leader Kemi Badenoch resurrected it in her response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget in the House of Commons, claiming: “This is a Budget for Benefits Street, paid for by working people.” The Sun, Mail, and Express used the term on their front pages the morning after the Budget. Even the BBC’s Amol Rajan on the Today programme used the word “scroungers” before hastily apologising. We’re back in George Osborne’s binary of workers and shirkers.

The problem with this narrative is that there is no binary. A full 70 per cent of the money from lifting the two-child cap (the Budget decision that led us back to Benefits Street) is going to children whose parents are working, according to the IPPR think tank. A third of Universal Credit claimants are in work, and a quarter are preparing, planning or searching for work. People claim benefits to top up their salary, to reduce their hours in order to bring up their children or care for a parent, to tide them over after redundancy or the collapse of their business, to see them through illness or injury. Very few cheat the system: the rate of benefit overpayment (which includes errors made by officials as well as fraud) is 3.3 per cent and falling.

“What Benefits Street obviously evokes in people’s minds is a culture of people gaming the system or as lazy, and just completely frames millions of people on Universal Credit, many of whom are working or can’t for whatever reason, in this way,” says Jonny Roberts, 38, a single dad of two who works part-time in a restaurant and claims Universal Credit. Roberts, of the Changing Realities low income project, won’t benefit from the two-child cap reversal, but will from the 6 per cent rise in the Universal Credit standard allowance next April.

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“The real-life consequence of this language is that it feeds immediately into the rhetoric in the workplace, and the streets, on social media – you see acquaintances or friends from the past or people you work with echoing these soundbites: ‘Oh, we’re working hard, but we’re just paying for layabouts.’ And it creates a real awkward feeling. Do I come out and say I’m on Universal Credit?”

This retro scapegoating may not be as fruitful as the last time round, however. It feels a little passé to me, particularly when out reporting I often hear immigration-sceptic voters imploring their government to “look after our own” and lament local levels of homelessness and hunger. “The Conservatives and right-wing press are recycling old, tired rhetoric,” as Ruth Patrick, a professor in public and social policy at Glasgow, puts it.

The pandemic exposed how fickle public opinion of the welfare system can be. Following the creation of the furlough scheme – a colossal extension of welfare in all but name – the proportion of people who felt benefits were “too low” overtook the proportion who thought they were “too high” for the first time in 20 years, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey. They had seen the safety net working as it should, and felt warmer towards welfare.

The British psyche is fixated on “fair play”, so the cliché goes. But this works two ways. Yes, the public will be uncomfortable if their taxes are going up as the welfare bill does. But they also don’t look kindly on whipping the safety net away as times get hard. Attitudes on these things are what the polling guru John Curtice once described to me as “counter-cyclical”: the more money is seen to be spent on welfare, the more public opinion appears to harden; the more welfare is cut, the more the public softens. As Curtice pointed out to me: “We’re still not as favourable towards working-age welfare as we were under Thatcher.”

Big state intervention of the Covid years, the scars of state retreat under austerity, and state-imposed price controls as inflation rocketed may not have fostered straightforwardly pro-welfare voters – but it has certainly made them wonder why the government can’t step in when things go wrong. The two-child benefit cap may still be popular in headline polls, but in the weeks leading up to the Budget, No 10 and No 11 were presented with a deeper public sentiment analysis suggesting voters would be most likely to punish Labour for rising child poverty when presented with hypothetical scenarios come the next election (even above longer NHS waiting lists, rising crime rates and higher immigration).

The Tories and their attendant commentariat may want to drag politics back to their comfort zone, but the country has changed a great deal since then. Benefits Street, it seems, runs two ways.

[Further reading: The Kirstie Allsopp theory of housing]

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