Daniel Blake, 59, has worked as a joiner most of his life in Newcastle. Now, after a heart attack and nearly falling from a scaffold, he needs help from the State for the first time in his life. he crosses paths with a single mother, Katie, and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie's only chance to escape a one-roomed homeless hostel in London has been to accept a flat in a city she doesn't know some 300 miles away. Daniel and Katie find themselves in no-man's land caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy as played out against the rhetoric of "striver and skiver" in modern day Britain.