You'll never "fix" poverty at all, I don't believe for a second you could, but when you take more than the briefest glances at the trends and dynamics involved you find being judgemental stops being quite so easy.
You said yourself, Sunderland is an unemployment blackspot. Why is that? What is it about Sunderland that stands out from Chelsea? Are the people there inherently inferior? Do they breed subhuman people with lazy genes?
The fact that you can point to specific geographical regions and isolate them as hotspots at all should give you pause for thought, those hotspots do not just develop in isolation, they are the result of complex and sweeping processes playing out throughout society and the economy. They will always exist, but as responsible agents of the state we have a duty to be aware of the causes and consequences, to reduce the human impact that results. We do not live in a Darwinian state, we do not and should not view the people living in low socioeconomic circumstances and assume they are all collectively to blame despite the overwhelming evidence they are not, especially when we can identify the causes and trends which result in swathes of the country suffering the sorts of inequalities in education, employment and social care provision we see.
To suggest whole towns have a culture of deliberately setting out to game the system is just ludicrous. People learn from experience, they act accordingly to the world they know, to the circumstances which define their context. Reliance on benefits, petty crime, drug use, these are cyclical symptoms of underlying problems, not causes.