Investigation
GRIM UP NORTH
Inside Britain’s worst benefits blackspot where drug gangs take over homes & kids suffer ‘Victorian’ levels of poverty
Life expectancy is 12 years below average
ON the youth club’s memorial wall, the names of 46 past members are immortalised on wooden plaques.
They bear witness to the tragic loss of young people aged 12 to 35 — but this is no war commemoration or tribute to those killed in a terrible disaster.
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It is the true cost of living in Britain’s worst benefits blackspot.
Among the names on the Shalom Youth Club memorial in Grimsby’s East Marsh estate are victims of 16 drug overdoses, six murders and five suicides — a tally of misery brought on by a toxic mix of unemployment, drink, drugs and gambling problems.
More than half the estate’s residents live on handouts, and life expectancy is 12 years below average.
The area is awash with “county lines” gangs — criminals who force victims to transport drugs across police and local authority boundaries, and who often “cuckoo”, or take over, the home of a vulnerable person to use as a base for their operation.
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Police had to rescue an East Marsh family with three primary school-aged children from the clutches of dealers who moved into their home.
Canon John Ellis, who has run a local youth project for 52 years, said: “I’ve never seen it so bad.
“People are being preyed on by drug dealers and gangs and spend what little money they have on drink and gambling.
“For the first time ever, we’re getting kids coming through the door who, when asked what school they attend, say, ‘I don’t go’.
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“The levels of poverty are Victorian.
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"We’ve all seen the statistics about the number of jobs available, but when a community sinks this low in its esteem, people go into a whole way of life.
"Employment is a big step because, let’s face it, it’s quite enjoyable to sit and just chill.
“This community needs to understand there’s no cavalry coming and they’ve got to try to help themselves.”
Grimsby, in north-east Lincs, has become synonymous with poverty and crime over the years and East Marsh, the centre of a once proud fishing community, is in the bottom three per cent for deprivation in Britain.
At The Rock food bank, a boozed-up regular downs his bottle of Carlsberg then picks up a bag of food, while outside, a drug user slumps on a wall, unable to stand.
Also in the queue for food is former heroin user Paul McPhee, who gets £328 a fortnight in Employment and Support Allowance, a benefit for the sick and disabled.
He has no rent or bills to pay because he lives in a supported housing complex.
In East Marsh, 33 per cent of people get sickness payouts, while 11 per cent are on Jobseeker’s Allowance and nine per cent get other benefits.
Paul, 54, told The Sun: “I used to work as a housing association support officer but I lost my job because they accused me of stealing from a client — even though no charges were ever brought and I would never do that.
“That was 2014, and I’ve not been able to get work since.
Death threats
"I’m clean now but I used to take drugs because I had really bad mental health issues.
“If I’d got the help I needed then, I might not be here now.”
The Rock founder Pam Hodge said the charity, which feeds around 600 people a week, is stuck in a “merry-go-round” of feeding people, most of whom have grown up in the care system and are in and out of prison.
At the nearby Salvation Army centre, the homeless Baccellini family — Amy and Dino, and their kids Kyle, 14, Kylie, 13, Lexie, 11, Carlo, ten, and seven-year-old Gino — sit waiting for their washing to dry.
This community needs to understand there’s no cavalry coming and they’ve got to try to help themselves
Canon John Ellis
They are living in three bedrooms in a guest house in nearby Cleethorpes after being run out of Grims- by’s notorious Nunsthorpe estate, where drugs and crime are rife.
The family have been shunted from pillar to post, living in temporary accommodation for three years — and none of the kids has been to school in that time.
They previously fled Leicester in 2021 after death threats from their wider family and lived in a series of temporary caravan accommodation in Skegness before being told they might have a better chance of a permanent home in Grimsby.
Amy said: “The local authority gave us a temporary house on the Nuns-thorpe estate and things were OK for a while.
"But they said the kids would have to go to four different schools, all outside the area, and we didn’t have a car to get them there.
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“We’ve had to home-school.
"We kept ourselves to ourselves on the estate and then a stupid rumour got around that we were in witness protection and people started calling us snitches, egging our house.
“Then Kylie was badly attacked by a woman who lived nearby and the council moved us out for our protection.
"We’ve spent the last two months living in a temporary B&B.
“The council says it will pay £600 towards a private landlord but they all want guarantors, and we don’t have anyone. It’s hopeless.”
In Skegness the family were placed in SEVEN different caravans, two bed and breakfasts and a holiday cottage between July 2022 and March 2023.
East Lindsey Council was probed by the Ombudsman over its treatment of the family.
It found the family had suffered delays in communication and ordered the authority to pay £500 for failing to protect property which was wrecked after they were forced to store it underneath a caravan.
The council told The Sun: " The ombudsman publishes the findings of cases they investigate.
"East Lindsey District council takes all feedback from the Ombudsman seriously and uses it to further improve council services as appropriate."
Although Grimsby is surrounded by upmarket villages, the town itself is blighted by shuttered, graffiti-covered shops, in neighbourhoods strewn with rubbish and populated by street drinkers and aimless youngsters.
It is the epitome of broken Britain, where 9.25million, or more than a fifth of the working-age population, have no job or are not actively seeking one.
Last month the Government unveiled its Get Britain Working programme, aimed at getting two million jobless young people into work.
But it will face an uphill battle in places such as East Marsh, where benefits have become almost a cultural norm.
Rev Kay Jones, who runs a social lunch and playgroup at St John and St Stephen church in East Marsh, said: “When this was a fishing area, how much you earned depended on the size of your catch.
'Too risky'
"But when benefits were introduced, many people saw this as a constant source of income, some stability.”
Most of those who work in the town depend on the dominant frozen seafood industry.
Jobs at Young’s, which supplies around 40 per cent of the fish eaten in Britain, are currently being advertised for £12.21 an hour — above the National Living Wage of £11.44 — but one agency is offering below, at £11.41.
It’s really draining to have to think about money constantly but I am not well enough to work
Serena
Rev Jones said many people feel it is “too risky” to come off benefits and start a job in case they don’t get enough work hours to qualify for Working Tax Credit.
In the church hall, Emily Gould, 31, is grateful just to have some company because her partner James, a 29-year-old electrician, works away during the week in Leeds, 62 miles away.
She said: “I don’t think it’s that people don’t want to work necessarily, but that they sometimes get more in benefits.”
Serena Donnelly, who is at the drop-in with her four-year-old son Alex, says she is unable to work because she has fibromyalgia, a condition that causes pain, fatigue and brain fog.
Serena, 31, who also has an 11-year-old daughter, gets £1,900 a month in benefits and is left with about £250 for food and clothing after paying her £570 rent, £130 gas and electricity, £44 council tax, water and Sky TV bills.
She said: “It’s really draining to have to think about money constantly but I am not well enough to work.
“I’m struggling to get the kids stuff for Christmas, and buying from sites like Temu and getting toys from the NSPCC to help.”
Close to tears, she added: “Sometimes things are so bad I just want to run away.”
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Grimsby is now betting its future on renewable energy, with some of Europe’s biggest wind farms generating power just off the coast.
Danish giant Orsted has a base in the town and small supply boats run from the docks, carrying engineers and equipment to the huge turbines out at sea.
But the work is highly specialised, and Canon Ellis said jobs are hardly ever advertised in the local Jobcentre.
He said East Marsh suffers from a lack of good educational opportunities after two schools shut, and added: “It forced kids to go to suburban schools where the teachers don’t understand them and they feel they don’t fit in.”
He continued: “Fishing was grim, grinding graft but it didn’t require the level of skill needed for these offshore wind jobs.
“A few ex-fishermen have got jobs driving the safety boats but there are few people in the community who can work in the sector.
“Many parents are on drink or drugs and we’ve got kids growing up here with no support other than the youth centre, and the only adults they see are police or social workers.
“They are rampaging about the place and when county line gangs give them a little attention, they respond and get dragged into it.
“Housing is poor and full of damp, and private landlords don’t care about their houses, leaving them to go to rack and ruin.
“They prey on people, along with the drug dealers and county lines.
“We’ve a regular who comes in, who is very vulnerable, and dealers keep moving into his place.
“We have someone who goes and throws them out but they are back in the next week.
“Gambling is a huge issue because people are just looking for something to give them a little bit of relief, or they hope they might win the lottery.
“If you imagine a street with vultures sitting on every roof, that’s East Marsh.
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“It’s going to take much more than a politician vowing to get Britain back to work for things to change.
“People here have heard it all before.”
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