Back for a new seven-part series, the critically-acclaimed and award-winning The Secret Millionaire returns with a new batch of wealthy benefactors seeking to change the lives of others for the better.

Each week a millionaire leaves their luxury life behind, takes on a secret identity and lives undercover in a deprived area of the UK for ten days. Living on a limited budget with no mod-cons they must forge their own way in the community – working and volunteering alongside the locals and finding individuals and projects who they think deserve a cut of their fortune.

On their final day, the millionaires come clean and reveal their true identity to the people they have chosen, surprising them with overwhelming gifts of thousands of pounds to improve their lives.

Through this unique experience, extraordinary people and heart-wrenching situations inside deprived communities are revealed. As well as highlighting the positive financial and emotional impact of modern day philanthropy, the programme also draws attention to some of Britain’s social problems in a touching and personal way.

This new series tackles even grittier issues, including gang culture, gun crime, disability and homelessness, in some the country’s toughest areas. The deserving causes range from a struggling brass band in a former mining town to a choral society for the homeless, and the series sees the biggest gift in the history of The Secret Millionaire .

The first programme in the series sees one of Britain’s highest-flying young entrepreneurs coming face-to-face with street crime in ‘the Asbo capital of Britain’, Manchester. James Benamor is Managing Director of The Richmond Group, which looks after the financial needs of people who have been refused credit. “Two or three years ago I could have walked away with enough money to have me sitting on a beach for the rest of my life. The reason I’m still here is because I want to be the best.”

At 30, this competitive businessman is worth over ?70 million, but only a few years ago it seemed more likely his name would crop up on police charge sheets than the Sunday Times Rich List. “I was taking a lot of drugs…became a petty criminal really…I was a nightmare, I was a nightmare for my parents, I was a nightmare for anyone that knew me… There were several occasions when I could have ended up in prison, there were several occasions where I could have ended up in intensive care.”

But James’s own misspent youth has given him a passion to help disaffected young people get their lives back on track. “What turned me from a criminal into a member of society was believing that there is a place for me there, and I’d like to be able to open those doors for someone.”

Leaving behind his wife and four children and swapping his treasured Lotus Elise for a clapped-out Nissan Sunny, James will live in Moss Side, an area with a reputation for knife and gun crime. While he’s living undercover he’ll volunteer as a youth worker.

Determined to find individuals and projects working to help young people at risk of either turning to crime or becoming the victims of crime, James wastes no time taking to the streets of Moss Side to meet the local youth and find out what the problems are. As one passer-by says: “The kids ain’t got nothing to do no more…it’s hard for the kids now, they’ve got parks and that, but it’s not really enough.”

His search gets off to a bad start: suspicious of the cameras, some locals are reluctant to either speak out about their community or give James the leads he’s looking for – and he’s even accused of looking like a ‘fed’. “It’s just little knockbacks, you know, that kiddie saying that I was well dodgy, that I was fed, that no-one should talk to me…and I think, yeah I am fucking dodgy, I’ve got a camera crew, how the fuck can’t I be dodgy?”

After a difficult start, James finally gets results when he works as a classroom assistant at the Manchester Settlement, a place for kids who don’t fit into mainstream education. James’s advice that gaining qualifications will mean money in later life initially falls on deaf ears: “You went through school yeah…and done all your GCSEs, and you ain’t earning lots of money cos I’ve seen your car.”

But James begins to realise that the situation these kids are in is different to the problems he had when he was a teenager. One boy tells James that if it wasn’t for the Settlement: ‘I’d either be in prison or dead.’ For James, the realities of life on Manchester’s toughest streets begin to hit home and he begins to realise how different his children’s lives would be if they were growing up here.

The message is reinforced when he meets members of a local pressure group set up by women to campaign against gun and knife crime. Mothers Against Violence is a group of Manchester mums whose children or loved ones have been the victims of street violence. James is introduced to Miranda. Her 19-year-old son Justin was shot dead five years ago and while she tells James about her life before and after the death of her son, he ends up in tears: “I’m just thinking of my own son…I’ve got two boys…I don’t know that I could cope.”

James’s search eventually leads him to a quiet, respectable, retired couple, Ann Panks and Terry Panler, who have opened up their home as a hostel for homeless teenage boys, many of them with criminal pasts. One says: “If these wouldn’t have let me live here at the time when I desperately needed somewhere to go, I would have gone to jail straight away.”

By the end of his stay, this tough entrepreneur is surprised to find his decisions about who to give money to are emotional rather than purely business. “This money is spent differently to how I first imagined. Some of it is going on gut feel, who has moved me, who has touched me. I didn’t expect it to be like that, but there are some people that we have met that have blown my expectations out of the water.”