Directing jobs towards Britain's left-behind areas can help cure nation's ills: Andy Brown

That is a staggering contrast and goes a long way towards explaining why so many people in our inner cities and less prosperous small towns seem to be voting to express anger. They are getting 20 years fewer years of enjoyable life.

What is even more disturbing is that the figures aren’t improving. They are getting worse.

One of the main reasons for this is the stress of an insecure low wage job. If you live in a damp flat and are trying to heat it on the proceeds of a zero hour contract you are not going to be as healthy as someone who lives in their own home in a garden suburb and has reliable professional employment.

Many of the services that less well off people used to be able to rely on no longer exist in their community. Getting an NHS dentist has become a rarity and the cost of private dental care can be brutal for someone on a low income. Good quality council housing at an affordable rent is a distant folk memory of a bygone age for most.

Back in the days when Britain had successful manufacturing companies in virtually every northern town the jobs may have been hard but they came with a degree of reliability and community.

Factories provided lots of opportunities to work alongside others and to forge friendships and support networks. Shared experiences at work were often continued outside of work with people sharing leisure activities such as the local dance club or standing together on sports terraces. There were trade unions fighting to secure working conditions and workplace collections to support those who experienced tragedies.

Modern employment is much more isolating and individualistic. Delivering parcels under time pressures on behalf of a multi-national corporation which will sack you if you fall behind on targets doesn’t come with the same friendship networks or sense of shared experience.

The loss of those factory jobs brought many towns and cities across our region to their knees and wherever they were not replaced by modern light industry or opportunities for good quality service jobs communities have really struggled.

The key factor driving this change has been an insistence on letting markets determine events without government interference. Many politicians including Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage were enthusiasts for that.

Too many jobs got exported because it was cheaper to make things abroad. The communities which used to rely on those jobs have been left with the feeling that a distant elite didn’t care about the impact on them.

In such circumstances it is all too easy for irresponsible politicians to stir up hatreds and resentments but entirely legitimate to articulate the unfairness and to try and put forward alternatives that offer the prospect of success returning to the places that most need it.

It is most unlikely that it will prove possible to bring back heavy manufacturing or textile jobs but it is realistic to try and increase opportunity in more varied and specialist forms of manufacture and in services.

That requires strong regional policy which deliberately fosters the long term recovery of long neglected communities. Britain is quite capable of being a world leader in the manufacture of health products, in several forms of specialist electronics and in creative industries like game content generation.

At the moment most of that type of employment is sited in prosperous areas clustered around successful university towns where knowledge industries are interacting with ambitious and talented business brains.

Siting more job opportunities in the areas that most need them requires conscious and deliberate government planning. Cheap land with good transport facilities in attractive business and science parks doesn’t get created in deprived areas by the hidden hand of the market.

The facilities that bring in successful business need to fostered by strong local government working to an effective long term plan.

The most successful country at creating manufacturing jobs over the last 50 years has been China. It did this partly by allowing private enterprise to prosper. Yet it wasn’t afraid to use the power of central and local government to create facilities and plan change. Government and business worked together to create facilities and an atmosphere that facilitated success.

At the heart of our problems is that we have been sold a myth that we have to rely on markets to make decisions when all too often those markets direct jobs away from the places that most need them. Markets are indeed very useful things but they are not perfect.

We need much more determined and thoughtful planning and a deliberate drive to improve economies and living conditions in our neglected communities. Before the justifiable anger of those forgotten places finds expression in some very unpleasant ways.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley.