Listen love, I can't be applying for jobs day in and day out. You've got to have some 'me time': The brazen words of Jimmy, 40, to SABRINA MILLER in this shocking dispatch from the 'disability benefits capital of the UK' where 75 per cent are overweight
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Merseyside's metropolitan borough of Knowsley was once best known for being the home of Knowsley Safari Park, housed in the grounds of Knowsley Hall, the family seat of the Earl of Derby. When the 18th earl opened the park in partnership with circus impresario Jimmy Chipperfield in 1971, the area was on the crest of a manufacturing boom. People flocked to the area to find work and the population peaked at almost 200,000. But it's been downhill ever since.
![[A young man walks on crutches in the town of Huyton]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/23/01/93408377-14219197-A_young_man_walks_on_crutches_in_the_town_of_Huyton-a-2_1734917464912.jpg)
The safari park's lions, rhinos and giraffes are still in situ but tens of thousands of human residents left Knowsley as economic decline set in. Today, it is an unemployment blackspot in which around 25,500 people, or 27 per cent of the working-age population, are considered 'economically inactive' – meaning they are neither in a job nor looking for one.
![[A woman in a mobility scooter in the local shopping area]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/23/01/93408375-14219197-A_woman_in_a_mobility_scooter_in_the_local_shopping_area-a-3_1734917464913.jpg)
It also has the dubious distinction of being known as the 'disability benefits capital of Britain' because about 13,000 of its residents – 13.2 per cent, double the national average – are entitled to PIP (Personal Independence Payment). This is a non-means-tested UK government benefit paid to individuals who claim to have long-term physical or mental health conditions, and more people claim it in Knowsley than any other parliamentary constituency in Britain.
To make matters worse, it is ranked as Britain's obesity capital, with three-quarters of adults classed as clinically overweight. There's no better place to examine how this depressing situation came to pass than the town of Huyton, home of Knowsley's council headquarters.
