‘There’s work if you want it!’ Residents in left-behind English town urge locals to stop claiming benefits as Labour clamps down on welfare

Residents in a town left behind by deindustrialisation have called on a Donald Trump-style figure to “smash” Britain’s benefits bill.In a part of Stockton-on-Tees, an astonishing two-thirds of working-age adults are economically inactive, making it the area with the highest rate of worklessness in the country.According to the 2021 census, 67 per cent of adults in an area north of the high street do not work, dwarfing the national average of 16.6 per cent, excluding students and retirees.”Everything is easier if you go on benefits,” stay-at-home mother Chelsea Robinson, 28, who is not on welfare herself, told The Telegraph.”You get everything given to you. You get the same amount as you would working in a shop, if not more.”Car dealership manager Nicola Smith, 39, agrees. “It’s the biggest problem in Stockton,” she said. “Because some people just don’t want to work.”The census revealed that 43 per cent of people in this part of Stockton had no qualifications whatsoever – and only 11 people had worked in the previous 12 months.Of the area’s 321 residents, a staggering 163 adults aged between 16 and 64 reported they had never worked at all.Stockton boasts beautiful Georgian architecture and a proud industrial history, including the launch of the world’s first passenger railway in 1825.MORE LIKE THIS:Seaside town to be returned to former glory as £20million revamp given green lightFears small market town beloved by Charles Dickens to be ruined as ‘monstrous’ giant warehouses to be builtLocals in town set to have more asylum seekers than residents claim they have been ‘silenced’ for fear of facing a ‘woke backlash’But deindustrialisation has devastated Teesside’s once world-leading chemicals, steel and shipbuilding industries.Young people can no longer leave school and walk into apprenticeships that become jobs for life – and the town’s Norton Road, with its vape shops, takeaways and boarded-up pubs, serves as an example of just that.Pensioner Kathleen Atkinson, 77, blames industrial decline. “The industries that their parents had don’t exist any more,” she explains.John Duff, 55, an out-of-work construction worker, disagrees. “There’s loads of work if you want it,” he says.He warns that some falsely cite mental health issues to claim benefits, a claim mirrored by Labour’s mass benefits crackdown last week.The Government’s welfare reforms will reduce eligible PIP (personal independence payment) recipients by 800,000 – a per-person saving of £4,500 per year.Deborah Pitt, 63, who receives PIP and Universal Credit for arthritis and heart problems, is terrified.”It is scary,” she says. “They’re taking the pensioners’ benefits away, and now they’re going to take the disability benefits away.”At the General Election, Reform UK came second to Labour in Stockton North.And Ian Robinson, 55, an out-of-work plasterer, has heaped praise on Nigel Farage’s party.”Just smashing the benefits, aren’t they? No one wants Starmer, he’s a s***head. We need a Donald Trump, don’t we?” Robinson said.

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