I was on the dole as a teacher – don't let anyone tell you this welfare crisis was caused by laziness

Needing benefits isn’t a shameful thing, but we are often made to feel that it is. As easy as it may be to blame this on being work-shy, the reality is more nuanced

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I recently stumbled across an episode of BBC Radio 4's The Fix that gave me pause. The programme, wherein the “country's brightest young minds gather to solve difficult social problems", had begun a three-part series on debt and poverty.

The first person I heard talking about their experiences was a single mother who worked a part-time, minimum wage job. She relied on the dole to make up the shortfall, but was finding it increasingly difficult to pay her bills.

It was a moving story, but I couldn't help but wonder whether it fit into a longstanding tradition of focusing on the same types of stories about claimants. Now, more than ever, it is important to keep in mind that a larger demographic also relies on Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA).

I’m currently a full-time journalist and in my previous employment, I was a teacher. But I have had stints on the dole and often I hear people say things that force me to keep it to myself.

“Why should I have to pay for people to sit on their backside all day doing nothing?” one person said to me with regards to people on the JSA. And it has filtered into my romantic life too.

While on a date several years ago, I told a story about an incident in the neighbourhood, using the traffic lights at the local dole office as a reference point. Her response was disheartening, to say the least. Visibly taken aback, she quickly turned to face me with a look of horror and confusion on her face. “How do you know where the dole office is? Have you ever been on the dole?” she said, as if it were a serious offence.

Needing benefits isn’t a shameful thing, but we are often made to feel that it is. I was certainly ashamed on that date. Stuttering the answer, I told her I was only on the dole because my job as a teaching assistant finished for the summer and I needed money before enrolling on a teaching degree in September.

I vividly remember signing on that summer. Unsuccessful in my job search, I had no choice but to go down to my local dole office.

I walked past the building several times, keeping an eye on the busy passing traffic. I felt anxious; I didn’t want anyone to see me enter.

As I stood at the reception desk after finally plucking up the courage to go inside, I realised a teacher in the school I'd been working in was right next to me. He was a substitute teacher and so was in a similar situation to myself.

I was given a ticket and told to take a seat in the waiting area. As I made my way there, I bumped into a friend, a fellow Queen’s University graduate. We exchanged small talk and I took a seat.

A few feet away, a man sat down and placed his young daughter on his knee. I could overhear their conversation. His young daughter said to him: “I hate coming here, dad.”

“I know, but believe me; you don’t hate it nearly as much as I do. Hopefully, this will be the last time we ever have to step foot in here.”

When I went to the booth to speak to an advisor, the same man happened to be the one beside me. I could hear him say: “I’ll literally take any work, provided it’s full-time.”

Many people, when they visualise a dole office, will conjure up stereotypes. But I can only speak of what I saw: a teacher, a university graduate and a parent who wanted nothing more than to find full-time employment without having to take desperate measures.

There is a crisis in the UK; 16 million people have less than £100 in savings and 15 per cent have no savings whatsoever.

It’s easy to say that people are on JSA because they are work-shy or frivolous with their spending. But the reality is more nuanced.

When I worked as a teacher in a school in Berkshire, I spent most of my weekends doing odd jobs through recruitment agencies; bar staff at sporting or music events and the like. I was always frightened that a student might see me, their teacher, doing this labour.

At one such sporting event, I was stationed beside a stay-at-home mother of three who worked these weekend shifts. She could do so and still be within the threshold to receive JSA.

Myself and the other employees were tasked with handing out water to the passing participants. It wasn't an easy task; we had to unscrew the lids of hundreds of plastic water bottles in rapid succession, quickly leaving our hands cut and blistered.

When we met for work, the mother of three asked if I had fare to travel. She had travelled by bus for three hours.

She said that when she accounted for the cost of travel, she would make around £25. Overhearing this, others said she shouldn’t have come, it was much too onerous a journey and a day’s work for just £25.

But she was in no position to turn it down, especially since she has three children. With the daily realities of people like her in mind, it’s laughable to describe jobseekers as lazy or work-shy.

It can be hard for rich people to understand the struggle that many people go through. They will never have to step foot inside a dole office and feel the shame that can come with it. They will never have to go scour the clearance aisles in shopping centres; rely on food banks and pound stores; deal with the crippling feeling of realising that you simply don’t have the means to pay your bills, or what it is like to literally be driven to tears due to a lack of money.

Instead, they complain about having to fund lazy “doleites”. They say that they are taxed dry when they are alive and taxed again when they die, ignoring the fact that an increasing number of people are unable to pay for funerals for their deceased loved ones in the first place. Even dying is too expensive for a good number of claimants.

Sometimes, the dole-shamers even seem prideful in their lack of understanding of the daily hardships of living in poverty. Perhaps that's the point. When you have the luxury of being able to avoid the daily struggle of relying on JSA, ignorance must be bliss.

Diarmuid Pepper is a journalist who lives and works in the border region of Ireland. Prior to a career in journalism, he was a Philosophy and Religious Studies teacher