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Blunkett appeal over tackling poverty as wealth gap widens
FORMER Home Secretary David Blunkett has called on the Government to do more to tackle poverty after a study he commissioned found that the gap between the richest and the poorest members of society had increased.
The independent study, published today, looked at inequalities in Mr Blunkett's home city of Sheffield over the past four decades and found that the city has become more polarised in terms of poverty since the 1970s.
Mr Blunkett said: "Sheffield is a microcosm describing the divide that exists in England between health and wealth on the one hand and poverty and inequality on the other.
"It is vital that the lessons of Sheffield are learned. We have made the most enormous progress in the last decade, with huge investment in our schools, better health outcomes and social regeneration.
"The challenge now is to maintain that investment in people and communities and the raising of aspiration which has just started to gather pace, and for central and local government to stay relentlessly focused on extending programmes, not indulge in cuts."
Mr Blunkett, MP for Sheffield Brightside, commissioned a team from Sheffield University's human geography department, led by Prof Danny Dorling, to carry out the Tale of Two Cities project.
Their results highlight the vast disparity between the affluent Hallam constituency in the south-west of the city, which has an average household income of over a third higher than the Sheffield average, to the north-east of the city, where in some neighbourhoods life expectancy is a huge 13.5 years lower.
Between 1971 and 2001, for every resident of the Sheffield Brightside constituency with a degree, more than four people gained a degree in Sheffield Hallam.
And in the well-heeled Ranmoor neighbourhood, 98 per cent of expectant mothers do not smoke and almost the same number breastfeed their children – although in other parts of the city, the statistics are as low as 60 per cent in both cases.
Mr Blunkett says: "This is partly because it's taken for granted with the friends and family around you that that's what you do.
"For example, in the south-west of the city, whether you're wealthy or not, at school your children will rub shoulders with young people whose expectation is to stay on at 16 – it becomes a given.
"We've got to change that underlying culture, so that social mobility and aspiration really mean something."
Mr Blunkett has now made seven separate recommendations. These include changing the way in which grants are distributed so that money can be allocated specifically to deprived areas, rather than taking all areas of a city into account when deciding whether or not it qualifies for resources.
He also criticised the "perverse" approach to distributing resources used by Sheffield's Liberal Democrat-led council to the city's seven Community Assemblies.
Mr Blunkett said: "The North East Assembly alone comprises deprived wards such as Burngreave, Brightside, Shiregreen and most of Southey and Owlerton.
"Before the assembly was established, these areas received over 750,000, or 34 per cent of the locally determined, devolved funding.
"Now, they get just 468,000 – just 24 per cent of the total. Money has been taken away from the areas in most need."
One of the co-authors of the study, Dr Dan Vickers, said: "With the likely reduction in central Government intervention in the coming years and Sheffield Council's changed priorities, we fear that what improvements there have been may well be reversed in future."
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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