Families pay price for Covid crisis and absence of social reform – Jayne Dowle

Key to this is committing fully to the levelling-up agenda; this means balancing out the differences between North and South and healing the ever-widening chasm that rives the country.

Now, contrary to expectations, the Chancellor did announce modest increases to the National Living Wage. Better than nothing, it’s still not up to a standard which would cut reliance on in-work benefits and social help such as free school meals.

When Mr Sunak hands out his billions here and his billions there, he remains oblivious to this simple equation.

One in seven people using food banks are in employment, or live with someone who is, says the Trussell Trust.

It’s time that this Government accepted that the fragile financial situation so many people live in is a huge contributory factor to ill-health.

The evidence is staring them in the face. The pandemic has brought social inequality to the fore. Any responsible government spending plans should address this as a matter of urgency, not stand back and hope that somehow it will sort itself out.

Apart from the incompetence of those in charge and the flaws in delivery, much of the failure of the Test and Trace system can be attributed to people on low wages, in insecure or zero hours jobs, being obliged to carry on going out to work even though they are ill or supposed to be self-isolating. Put simply, they don’t have the choice, or the luxury, to work from home.

If your job is in a meat processing plant or a warehouse, you can’t do it sitting in front of a screen in the spare room.

The Prime Minister’s constant call to “work from home if you can” means nothing. This lack of understanding about how millions of people really live should be a huge concern.

Sheffield City Region Mayor Dan Jarvis says that as we count the cost of the coronavirus pandemic and start to look over the hill towards economic recovery the Government has been given a prime opportunity to show its commitment to the North, which after all, provided Boris Johnson with his majority less than 12 months ago.

He’s calling for an immediate extension or successor to the Local Growth Fund and a Shared Prosperity Fund to replace EU funding. “But replacing those two funding sources is only enough to leave us standing still,” he warns. “To deliver the levelling up change this government has promised, we need long-term investment on a much greater scale.”

And he’s right. However, levelling up is not a game of two halves. It’s about recognising the deeply-ingrained disadvantages and difficulties nationwide. Until this is addressed as a national problem, it won’t be solved.

Obviously, there is a clear divide between the many prosperous areas of London and the South East and the forgotten and often misunderstood towns and cities of the North.

Nothing highlights this more starkly than the Tier system of coronavirus restrictions, which has coloured the map into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ more vividly than anything else.

And indeed, if we look across England and Wales, we’ll see that there are also parts of the South West and South Wales which suffer from a low-wage, often seasonal economy, lack of decent and affordable housing and in the former industrial heartlands especially, chronic ill-health.

There are also deprived towns in Kent, for example, sitting next to some of the most affluent postcodes in the UK. The Medway towns, including Gillingham and Rochester, have some of the most challenging of social circumstances, heightened by tensions over immigration and Brexit.

A true levelling-up agenda would address all of these areas in detail and present a long-term, sustainable and carefully-costed plan to balance out disadvantage, address infrastructure, transport and health problems and invest in jobs nationwide.

As Mr Jarvis says, this is not a time for tinkering; we need a true transformation.

To borrow government parlance, Ministers need to 
really ‘drill down’ into the embedded causes of disadvantage, instead of throwing ever more mind-boggling cheques around.

With the current Prime Minister and the current Cabinet, none of whom appear to have a social reformist bone in their bodies, what are the chances of this happening?

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