On Location

Not Andromeda House

I've been back in the borough that inspired Severe Discomfort et al, catching up with friends and family.  I've also been wandering around my former home village and the neighbouring city, reminding myself of the atmosphere and architecture as I get further into the first draft of a story with homes and housing very much in the spotlight.

Looks like the Construction Co-op have been at work!

In particular, I needed to refresh my memory of the local ex-Council housing.  Northern estates have different brick colours and house shapes; more brick walls but fewer hedges, garage blocks and owner-occupiers.  It helped to get another look at the type of house where Lyn and Terry muddle through their lives together, with Stu and Linda next door and Susan up the road.  Their crescent of houses isn't a real road, but if it did exist I know exactly where in the borough it would be.  



Who lives in a house like this?



It wouldn't be Netley Abbey, where I grew up, though Netley's housing, past and present, does inspire some of my characters' homes.  Houses like Hilary's fine old Victorian villa - only with the misfortune to stand in less auspicious locations than the prosperous environs of Winchester - have fallen beneath the tracks of JCBs, having decayed through multi-occupancy and low-budget care home use over the decades since they ceased to be sought after by officers from the old military hospital. 

New flats in a variety of shapes have sprung up in their place, many blessed with the fake balconies so detested by Sally Archer (she knows a crap building when she sees one), leaving parts of the village feeling claustrophobic, but a few gems such as the one at the top of this post remain - for now.  Netley's Station Road also has some larger classic 'thirties semis' of the type where Mike, Lorraine and their children reside, though their home isn't sited anywhere near here in its imagined version. 

It's possible, however, that someone will end up in one of these trendy terraces along the 'front of the village' before the end of the current tale.  No spoilers!

I also needed to remind myself of the streets of more modest semis in the suburbs that ring Southampton, as a couple of intrepid first-time buyers are trying to settle in just such a neighbourhood.  Having picked my location based on memory, I was able to note a few new features of the area that will be crucial for a pivotal scene I'll be writing very soon. 


Southampton Semis



In fact one reason (among many) making me feel I should move on from my current cast and location after this story is the rapidly changing face of the area where it is set.  Even since I last checked out the Woolston area for a cameo appearance by Weston Shore in Limited Capability, a vast number of new flats have sprung up on the site of the former Vosper Thornycroft shipbuilders' with yet more under construction.  Both Southampton and Eastleigh have inexplicable new road layouts and strange new buildings in prime locations, new industries and new communities since I last worked there.  Unless I decided to travel back in time and meet the cast at an earlier stage in their lives, I fear their world and mine are drawing further apart.

If it feels as if it's time to move north for locations and characters, there's no shortage of material.  Daphne has a backstory and two notebooks of draft adventures for a start.  Alternatively, having read and thoroughly enjoyed Hilary Mantel's short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher in the Guardian last weekend, the field of alternative history beckons.  Perhaps we might go back to 2002 and watch as a broken old television set falls from the third storey window of an Easterhouse tenement onto the balding pate of a failed Tory Party leader...?

I need a Tardis - right now!

Why I write what I write

I had planned something light-hearted for this post, but events have overtaken 'Plan A' so apologies in advance if this comes across as something of a ranty one - more Martin Connolly than Toby Novak, for those of you familiar with my characters.  It's all Atos's fault - naturally.  Or perhaps it's the Daily Mirror's fault - yep, that is Mirror not Mail, this time.  See what you think. 

What's got me riled is a story doing the rounds of various social media disability rights and anti cuts groups (several of which I support) which has recently been published in the Mirror.  Headlined "Humiliated blind woman asked by ATOS benefits assessor: 'How many fingers am I holding up?' " it describes a fairly typical Work Capability Assessment - typical in that the probably under-trained and inappropriately qualified assessor stuck to a standard script rather than tailoring the assessment to the obvious impairment of the claimant.  Discourteous, humiliating and arguably in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.  Maddening - but that's not what's making me seethe.

My problem is with the alleged quote from the subject of the story.  According to the Mirror:

'Natasha said: "There are so many people receiving benefits that they don't really deserve, people who don't want to work.  And yet people like me who have genuine disabilities, many much worse than mine, are being forced to do humiliating tests like this.  Benefits Street is being filmed a couple of miles away in Stockton and programmes like that give people the impression benefits are being handed out to everyone.  I listened to the first series and there was someone on there with 11 kids who didn't seem to want to work.  And yet I'm told I have to find a job based on tests I am still struggling to understand."'

Natasha may very well have said just that.  People naturally lash out when they're angry.  My former clients often did - so often, that there were times I could have hurled someone's appeal papers at them for being so damned self-righteous.  It's what we're all told: it's what Benefits Street exists to tell us.  But the Daily Mirror proports to be a left-wing, or at least a Labour, newspaper.  I don't expect the same old, same old.  I expect proper analysis and truth.  If this is a journalistic licence version of what she said, shame on them.  Even if it is what was said verbatim, I fail to see how it helps the story to incite ill-feeling towards other benefit claimants who are already frequent victims of hate crime.

Proper analysis of this story wouldn't be asking readers to vote on whether Natasha should be reassessed either.  You could reassess Natasha a dozen times and, if you followed the regulations, you'd get the same result.  Seriously.  'Atos' are not the problem here.  Yes, their assessor was clumsy, insensitive and sceptical, but a paragon of good practice would also have to give 9 points because, since April 2011, that is the law.  I know this, because I wrote a minor character with an identical degree of visual impairment and mobility into Limited Capabilty to make that very point (Linda Jenkins - ebook Episode 2).  She got 9 points from one of the 'good' assessors at my fictional assessment centre; there were no solid grounds for her to appeal.

Unless the actual Work Capability Assessment is changed - or scrapped - the real Natasha's and Linda's will keep being found fit for work.  Arguably, they are - the DWP itself had a blind Secretary of State in 2005!  But they are also quite obviously of 'limited capability for work' in any meaningful sense of the phrase since many roles and professions would be precluded by thier disability and many others by the unsuitability of too many workplaces and inflexibility of too many employers.  Benefit entitlement should surely reflect this.

Finally, I'm not at all sure where the Mirror got their numbers from, but I sincerely hope they haven't gone away without telling Natasha about PIP (if she isn't already getting DLA - high rate mobility, low rate care?) and that in fact her JSA wouldn't be a basic £72.40 at all, but should include a disability premium of over £30 a week. 

Sorry - does that count as a spoiler?