Chapter 2: Signing on & Settling In

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he house on Grigson Road was a modest, three bedroom, end of terrace affair with décor and furnishings faithful to the slum-landlord minimalist school of interior design – twenty year old paintwork, carpets so worn and stained that it was impossible to guess their original colour and with no one item of the hideous furniture matching any other. But at the very least I had my privacy and I wasn’t subject to the half-baked philosophising of a bunch of idiot hippies all day long.

The place was located a mile or so to the west of the city centre and about four fifths of the way up one of the seven hills on which Sheffield is built. In practical terms this meant it was a quarter of an hour downhill stroll into town and a thirty minute drunken crawl back should I not have enough money for a cab - and I rarely did.

My bedroom window looked out towards the dry ski run a mile and a half away on the far side of the valley which separates Crookes from the Parkwood Springs area of the city. For the first few days, and from such a distance, I couldn’t figure out what this was and thought the off-white matted slopes must be some kind of chalk carving - like the white horse in Wiltshire. It was only when I noticed figures hurtling down the thing that I figured it out.

There were two other occupants of the house, neither of whose names I can recall - but we’ll call them Bill and Ben.

Bill, a guy about the same age as me, held down a job somewhere, lived on take-away food and tended to lock himself away in his room as soon as he got in from work. We exchanged words on maybe two or three occasions and all I ever really saw of him was a pair of legs sticking out from underneath the cars he spent his weekends renovating in the back yard.

Ben was middle aged, messily divorced and unemployed. He looked a lot like the character 8 Ace in Viz, with lank, oily hair, a Jason King moustache and the most impressively nicotine stained fingers I’ve ever seen. When dole day came around he would don his threadbare, one size too small suit and head off to the local WMC (alone) to drink as much as his cheque would allow before coming home (alone) to stumble around his room swearing and bumping into things and then sobbing himself to sleep. The rest of the time he would be slumped in front of his ancient black and white TV watching horse racing – which he seemed to be able to find twenty four hours a day.

Ben had that unmistakable whiff of the dole queue about him, a fetid mixture of stale rolling tobacco, yesterdays sweat and last nights beer. Now that might sound horribly snobbish but when you’ve flirted with inner-city poverty for long enough you do learn to associate certain smells; the tang of cigarette smoke and too much cheap perfume in bus shelters on a Friday night; the cocktail of shit, puke and piss all thinly veiled with weak disinfectant in the corridors, lifts and stairwells of tower blocks; the mildewed fug of grubby bed-sits where nobody stays for long enough to bother cleaning the place; the rancid stench of chips being fried in lard and so on.

But Ben was harmless, if a little irritating – especially when he’d come crashing into my room drunk and try to start a conversation - and to be honest I suppose I did pity the poor, lonely old bastard. My friends and I may have been in much the same boat where aimlessness and irresponsible boozing were concerned but there was a certain joie de vivre in the way we conducted ourselves and somewhere inside we knew this was a transitory phase rather than our lot.

When Ben drank he was simply blotting out the existential wasteland that was his life.

Having found somewhere to live I then had the unenviable task of re-registering my dole claim in Sheffield, something which probably took a lot more time and effort than getting a job would have done.

Tom Sharpe once remarked that the British welfare system has a central paradox in that the people it benefits the most are those who don’t really need it. For the middle classes, crooks and literate slackers who can identify and exploit the loopholes it’s a convenient piggy bank to be raided at will. Yet for the poor and needy it supposedly safeguards it’s a confusing and often humiliating Gordian Knot of red-tape and bureaucracy.

He got that right, exactly right.

I absolutely hate dealing with bureaucracy and petty officialdom, on top of it being so frustrating and time consuming by its very nature I have the additional handicap of a name that no one can ever get right. I know Bescoby is a bit unusual but it’s spelt phonetically and I don’t have particularly scruffy handwriting or an impenetrable accent so I could never understand the problem. It would really wind me up when, after giving my name and spelling it out three times in a row to someone they still wrote it down wrong.

“Next please.”

“Hi there, I’ve got a query about my benefit claim, my name’s Dominic Bescoby - that’s B-E-S-C-O-B-Y - and my address is 116 Grigson Road.”

“Sorry, your name is…?”

“Mr Bescoby, B-E-S-C-O-B-Y.”

“D-E-F…?”

“No, Bescoby, B-E-S-C-O-B-Y.”

“B-A-F-T…?”

“NO, YOU CLOTH-EARED IDIOT, Bescoby, Bescoby! B-E-S-C-O-B-Y, B-E-S-C-O-B-Y!”

Awkward pause…

“…okay Mr Bestobell, how can we help?”

Over the years I’ve been addressed as, and have received correspondence addressed to, Mr Benson-Lee, Mr Dempsy, Mr Bestobell, Mr Bescott, Mr Getzgotski, Mr Bresco, Mr Bescombe, Mr Bistomby and – my all time personal favourite, which I have no idea how they arrived at - Mr Braxham.

Eventually I got so sick and tired of this that I decided to start using my middle name instead. When I moved into a council flat in 1999 I arranged for a phone line to be fitted and gave my name as,

“…Mr Martin. Dom - that’s short for Dominic - Martin.”

The first bill arrived addressed to Mr Donald Marsden.

But I digress.

Basically speaking there were three governmental/official departments you had to deal with when making a dole claim in 1990, the unemployment benefit office, the department of social security and – if you were living in rented accommodation - the local council housing benefit department.

Before we go any further let’s clarify what we mean by ‘the dole’. When we talk about ‘dole money’ or ‘the dole’ we’re using it as a blanket term to cover a range of handouts available to the unemployed. Which of these you actually got depended on your circumstances but most people received either one of two living allowances: unemployment benefit or income support.

Unemployment benefit, which was about £40 a week back then, was handled - amazingly enough - by the unemployment benefit office and eligibility was dependent upon having paid sufficient national insurance contributions during your last period of employment. Unemployment benefit was paid for the first six months out of work after which you automatically switched to a benefit called income support.

Income support, which was slightly less money than unemployment benefit, was dealt with by the Department of Social Security (DSS) and didn’t depend on national insurance contributions. This was available to any able bodied person who was out of work and who didn’t qualify for unemployment benefit.

The unemployment benefit office was also where you went to ‘sign on’ once a fortnight, a ritual central to life on the dole which involved declaring you had done no paid work during the past two weeks and signing a form to that effect. Two days later your dole money, whether that be income support, unemployment benefit or whatever, would drop through the letterbox in the form of a giro cheque that could be cashed at a nominated post office.

The actual day and time you signed on could be anywhere between Monday morning and Thursday afternoon. If you landed the Thursday slot it was a real pain in the arse as it meant your cheque arrived on Saturday and you had to get out of bed before the post office closed at midday. Should your giro arrive in the second post for some reason then you wouldn’t be able to cash it until Monday and you’d have a really crap weekend.

If you were homeless or lived at an address deemed ‘unsafe for delivery’ – both of which were pretty fluid criteria - you were dealt with en mass on a Friday afternoon when you queued up in the unemployment benefit office with a vast throng of shuffling deadbeats and were handed your cheque over the counter. This was usually followed by a frenzied stampede to the nearest post office to cash the thing and then to either the pub or the bookies to dispose of it.

Other benefits you might be eligible for, all handled by the DSS, included incapacity benefit which you received if you were physically or mentally unfit for work, child benefit, which should be self-explanatory and one-off payments such as crisis loans which were intended to cover emergency expenses and were paid back in instalments deducted from your fortnightly giro.

During the initial stages of a dole claim you would spend an enormous amount of time dealing with the DSS on a face to face basis at one of the dozen or so offices they had dotted about the city. Which one of these offices handled your case depended on the district you lived in and I was lucky enough to fall within the catchment area of one that also handled the city’s dodgiest housing estate. This meant that the public waiting area was always teeming with the sallow faced bottom feeders who eked out an existence in the cesspools of Thatcher’s Britain.

When visiting the DSS office you’d take a ticket from a wall mounted dispenser and go sit down until your number was called. It was nothing unusual to be waiting an hour or more before you were seen - much less dealt with - and this could get incredibly annoying. It could also be quite intimidating given the company you were obliged to keep and, not surprisingly, the staff who handled the enquiries conducted their thankless task through hatches in the wall protected by metal grilles. You had to be particularly heartless not to pity these front line personnel (as they were called by their colleagues) for having to put up with the threats and torrents of abuse they were subjected to day after day.

Frustrating though all the hanging around was it could sometimes be rather entertaining - in a warped, voyeuristic kind of way - to sit back and observe the goings on. You could just about guarantee that some pissed up Rab C Nesbitt look-alike would be refused a crisis loan and would kick off during your visit, screaming and swearing and threatening to kill everyone in the office. On other occasions you’d get people chaining themselves to the radiators and refusing to move unless they were given money.

Mostly though, it was thoroughly depressing. Glancing around the waiting room and listening in on the consonant-heavy, obscenity-peppered conversations it became very clear, very quickly that a hefty proportion of these people weren’t so much unemployed as unemployable. They would never contribute anything to society and would be living off state handouts, the proceeds of petty crime and the hospitality of the prison service from the moment they entered the world to the moment they left it, simply because there was nothing else they had the capacity – let alone the inclination - to do.

It was nigh on impossible to maintain a liberal mindset during these moments and without realising it you’d find yourself turning into a horrible, fascistic snob. When the place was full of foul-mouthed teeny mums and their enormous broods of hyperactive infants it rather hammered home the fact that the one thing these people could do well was to reproduce – and at a terrifying rate. So much so that you got the impression they must breed in litters and develop fully functional sex organs while still in the womb. Musing on such matters it often struck me that cradle to grave welfare systems effectively sling a spanner in the works of natural selection by nurturing maladaptive gene pools that would otherwise die out. Indeed, it was tempting to wonder whether society wouldn’t be better served by a programme of enforced eugenics than by the provision of living subsidies to certain sections of the population.

But then one of the kids would smile at you, you’d see the innocence in their eyes and feel an unsettling pang of guilt for following a train of thought which ultimately steams into a camp surrounded by birch trees and equipped with gas chambers and crematoria.

Unlike unemployment benefit and income support, which were paid from central government coffers, housing benefit arrived courtesy of the local council1. This was a payment that subsidised your rent to the tune of about 85% of the total (although a lot of landlords with unemployed tenants would obligingly tell the council the rent was higher than it was in order to make up the difference). The payments arrived via cheque every two weeks and you had the choice of whether it was sent to you or directly to your landlord. Landlords who dealt with the unemployed – including mine - were usually shrewd enough to insist the cheque went straight to them.

A colossal amount of paperwork was involved with every aspect of the social security system and each department would present you with a stack of forms the size and weight of a Sunday newspaper. Deciphering and filling in these forms was a major headache. There was the same question asked over and over again in slightly different ways, other questions you couldn’t understand the possible relevance of and questions that looked suspiciously loaded - for example, the first thing the unemployment benefit claim form asked was:

Are you able to work?

Hmm, a bit of a tricky one that.

The second question was:

Are you willing to work?

Like you might answer, ‘No’.

Should you make a mistake - or not give the answer you were supposed to - they would post the things back to you which could lead to serious delays in processing your claim. Experience had taught me that the safest bet was to take the forms to the relevant office and fill them in under the nose of a member of staff, clarifying ambiguities as they arose.

Another major irritation was the constant buck-passing. Whenever you had a problem with your claim nobody wanted to deal with it; you’d be sent from the DSS to the unemployment benefit office, who would tell you it was the responsibility of the housing benefit office, who would then send you back to the DSS and so on and so forth until you were just about ready to kill someone.

At this time unemployment was still at such a level that shirkers like my gang could go largely unnoticed among the vast throngs of legitimately jobless people - particularly in the north where it had hit hardest. There was a kind of tacit understanding that provided you played by the rules, didn’t take the piss and were punctual when you signed on then the powers that be wouldn’t really hassle you too much about getting a job. After all, did it really matter who took the few available vacancies? It wasn’t like there was a shortage of applicants and at the end of the day there would still be the same number of people out of work.

Immediately upon making a fresh dole claim, and every three months thereafter, you were summoned to attend what was called a ‘Restart’ interview. This was a formal discussion conducted by an agent of the employment service where you were obliged to demonstrate that you had been actively seeking work, which was a prerequisite for claiming dole money. It was part of the aforementioned understanding that you turned up to these things and showed willing.

I had this totally sussed out. When notification of an interview was imminent I’d rustle up the local papers from the past few weeks and clip the situations vacant columns, circling the jobs I’d supposedly applied for. I’d also call in the Job Centre and apply for positions I had absolutely no chance of ever getting (on the rare occasions when I was granted an interview I’d just not bother turning up to it). The rejection letters, which were always pre-formatted and never went into specifics, were filed in the same box as the newspaper clippings. I’d also keep hold of the information slips the Job Centre provided whenever you inquired about a vacancy and when I got to the Restart interview I would present this lot as evidence of my endeavours.

Okay, I probably should point out that I did feel quite guilty about doing this, particularly when, as often happened, the interviewer’s face would light up with all-too-rare job satisfaction and they’d congratulate me for making such a commendable effort.

“I must say Mr Westerby, it’s refreshing to encounter someone who’s trying so hard. Between you and me (voice drops to a whisper), there’s rather too many people who just try to fob us off with lies.”

Should you not be as convincing as I was then you would trigger the next level of the system and be ‘encouraged’ to go on a Restart course.

A Restart course was normally attended by between ten and fifteen people and was supposed to teach job seeking skills to the more chronically unemployed and galvanise their efforts in that direction. These courses, the running of which was contracted out to the private sector, lasted two weeks and consisted of supervised morning sessions, where you would be taught interview techniques, how to prepare a CV, how to fill in application forms etc and afternoon job search assignments.

Like just about every project the employment services dreamt up, Restart courses were a total and utter waste of time and resources.

The kind of people you got on a Restart course tended to fall into three distinct categories. Firstly, as you might have expected, there were total spanners; functional illiterates who spent the entire time hunched over their desks, mouths hanging open, and wearing gormless befuddled expressions. To all intents and purposes this lot were write-offs, well beyond the kind of help a two week course could provide. This put the tutors in something of an uncomfortable position as they were obliged to encourage the involvement of these people even though they might as well have been trying to teach job-seeking skills to a tin of corned beef.

Then there were men in their forties and early fifties who’d been made redundant by pit closures and the systematic dismantling of northern England’s heavy industries and who, through a combination of age and inexperience, were unlikely to ever work again – at least not in a job that provided anything like a living wage. They also had more than enough sense to realise this and gumption enough to see what a joke Restart courses were.

The third group consisted of people like me, intelligent layabouts who understood that this was a necessary inconvenience to be suffered every now and again in order to maintain our indolent lifestyle. For the most part the tutors who conducted these courses were right-on social worker types who you just knew read The Guardian and who seemed to go out of their way to dress the part. There was always an air of what P J O’Rourke called ‘that dreadful glum earnestness of the left’ about these people and they were forever going out of their way to stress their caring-sharing liberal credentials, pointing out that they voted Labour, had been unemployed themselves and empathised with our plight.

Occasionally, and as a stark contrast, you would wind up with a totally unsympathetic ogre who made no attempt to disguise the contempt they felt for their dole-scum charges and who was constantly threatening to suspend everyone’s benefit. In a nutshell Pauline Campbell-Jones from The League of Gentlemen TV series. To get a brilliantly observed overview of the sheer pointlessness of the whole Restart system you couldn’t do much better than to watch the sketches featuring this character in the first series of the show.

But for all the hassle of being sent on a Restart course it wasn’t that bad, it only lasted a couple of weeks and it got the dole people off your back for the next three months. Were you really unlucky they could send you on an Employment Training scheme.

The Employment Training Scheme - or ET as it was more commonly known - was introduced in September 1988 to replace all the various adult training schemes with a single programme. This was the latest attempt by the Conservative government to give the impression they were doing something to address the crippling levels of unemployment (that is apart from changing the way the figures were calculated, which happened at least twice a year during their 1979-1997 tenure). Under the auspices of this marvellous new regime people who had been out of work for over a year would, we were assured, ‘have the opportunity to acquire new skills’ and for their efforts trainees would get a bonus of ten pounds on top of the social security benefits they already received – which led to it being widely remarked that ET stood for ‘Extra Tenner’.

I remember the publicity campaign heralding the scheme’s introduction. Posters suddenly appeared in benefit offices and job centres - along with full page adverts in the tabloids - all bearing the caption: ‘Can’t get a job without experience? Can’t get experience without a job? Vicious isn’t it?’ which was written in a circle around a picture of some disgruntled looking youth. There were the TV ads too, which showed people with determined expressions striding purposefully around offices and factories floors and making asides to the camera to announce that they were ‘training for a real future’ and other such nonsense.

The idea behind the Employment Training Scheme was a partnership between government and the private sector whereby employers who signed up would be given a hefty subsidy to provide on the job training to unemployed people for a period of either six months or a year. Upon completion of their course trainees would be presented with a certificate (which was of dubious worth) and in some cases taken on permanently, although official sources tended to be pretty vague about the chances of that (once in a blue moon as it happened). To compliment the private sector’s contribution the employment service set up workshops in old factory buildings and purpose built centres where approved third-party agents would organise and run vocational courses which consisted of a mix of ‘formal directed training and work placements within the local community’.

The reality of ET became apparent all too quickly and was a far cry from the rosy picture painted by the publicity material. Unscrupulous employers would invariably take on ET placements rather than casual or temporary staff and, leaving aside any ethical considerations, why not? It made perfect economic sense.

The workshop based courses soon descended into an equally ridiculous farce. Given the number of potential trainees it didn’t take long before finances were stretched to the limit. As there was still a significant shortfall in the number of people the government had intended to get on the scheme something had to be found for them to do - something that could operate on a shoestring budget. In Sheffield and the surrounding areas this meant repairing dry stone walls, of which there were thousands upon thousands of miles worth in the nearby Peak District.

Call me a cynic but I could never see how this constituted ‘training for a real future’. As it happened neither could anybody else and the only people who ended up doing it were, as I referred to them earlier, total spanners. On week day mornings fleets of mini-buses would ferry people out to the countryside to spend the day doing what basically amounted to carrying stones from one pile to another. ‘The Spaz Convoy’, as it was known locally, passed through some of Sheffield’s more affluent western suburbs on its way in and out of the city and to the people living in those areas it must have given the impression that spiralling rural property rents had forced every village idiot in Northern Derbyshire to move into town and commute to work.

Dodging the ET draft wasn’t that tricky, you just had to keep convincing the powers that be that you were genuinely seeking work. Restart officers were obliged to ask about Employment Training as part of the interview procedure but provided you explained calmly and sensibly why you didn’t think it was appropriate for you they would rarely pursue the issue. Like I said, pragmatism dictated there was a kind of tacit accord on these matters. Admittedly, a few people I knew were press-ganged into doing ET schemes on pain of benefit suspension but they soon found ways of making it pay - like one guy I knew who used to steal tools and materials and sell them in the pub and my mate Twiggy from Lincoln who spent his entire joinery course constructing a stage set for his band.

The bluntest and definitely the most politically incorrect critique of the Employment Training scheme I ever heard came in an outburst from Tony Wilkins, the mulleteer computer salesman we met briefly in the previous chapter.

The first time I signed on from my Grigson Road address I had bumped into Tony on the way out of the unemployment benefit office.

“Alright mate,” he said, “fancy popping in the Yorkshireman for a pint?”

I explained to Tony that I’d only just signed on and wouldn’t have any money until Friday.

“That’s okay,” he replied, “I’ve got a few quid, I’ll stand you a couple of drinks – just hang on while I get this pain in the arse Restart bollocks out of the way.”

Tony reported in and was summoned to a desk in the open plan office space adjoining the reception area where his interview commenced and I stood around waiting for him. He was being quite unnecessarily hostile with his interviewer (which I think was intended to impress me more than anything else) and when asked if he had ever considered going on an ET scheme, Tony stood up, leaned across the desk and in a loud and steady voice explained why he hadn’t.

“You can fuck off if you think I’m gonna work with niggers and spastics.”

Whoops! We seem to have gone galloping ahead of ourselves again! Where were we? Oh yes, re-registering my dole claim in Sheffield.

As I was technically making a fresh claim I had to attend a Restart interview straight away and, not having had chance to prepare, I had to wing it. When I was asked why I’d moved over from Lincoln I thought I’d be very clever and announced that it was to find work; before I knew what was happening I’d been talked into joining a Job Club.

Job Clubs were perhaps the one worthy entry in a vast catalogue of ill-conceived initiatives. They actually worked and as a result were heavily oversubscribed. Because I had been so convincingly sincere at my Restart interview strings had been pulled to find me a placement.

I still wonder whether that was a case of tragic irony or poetic justice.

You would attend a Job Club for an initial period of four weeks, the first two of which was like a kind of hot-housed Restart course but in much greater depth and with more capable tutors. After that you spent the rest of the time with minimum supervision, perusing the situations vacant sections of local newspapers as well as having access to Job Centre vacancies before they were publicly displayed. On top of this you were given unlimited access to a telephone, were provided with all the stationary and postage stamps you needed and were actively encouraged to go through the Yellow Pages cold-calling and writing to companies on the off chance they might be recruiting. Should you not have succeeded by the time your four weeks were up you could drop in on a part time basis for as long as it took. Obviously Job Clubs didn’t increase the actual number of posts available but they did give bona-fide job seekers a clear advantage over their competitors.

As it turned out the Job Club I was assigned to, which was based in a suite of rented offices in the city centre, lasted less than a week. On the Thursday morning our tutor came in to announce that they had gone so far over budget during the last quarter that they couldn’t afford to run any more sessions until the start of the next financial year.

What had actually happened was that one of the groups preceding mine had included a pair of chat-line addicts. These two, whose attendance and enthusiasm had been exemplary, spent seven hours a day, five days a week for the best part of three months taking advantage of unlimited telephone access by calling chat-lines all over the world at tariffs several orders of magnitude beyond peak rate. Between them they had succeeded in running up a phone bill that financially crippled the firm administering the course.