Scandalous inequality is holding back Bradford, we must recentre our communities - Yorkshire Post Letters

Having written to your newspaper previously about the scale of the challenges including poverty, unemployment and investment that face my home city of Bradford, I was alarmed to see the findings of recent analysis from the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods’ (ICON) Interim Report, spelling out a stark future for people living in certain areas of Bradford and across West Yorkshire.

The Commission's measure of hyper-local need comprises five dimensions which are broadly aligned to the government’s five missions for renewal, including employment and quality of jobs in an area, fuel poverty and energy efficiency of housing stock, crime rates, educational opportunities and outcomes, and health and social care needs and access to services.

Within the analysis, neighbourhoods are broken into three categories. The first and smallest, albeit most important category, Mission Critical - the focus of the report - consists of areas that “require the most urgent support,” containing just under a million people largely concentrated in the North of England, West Midlands and coastal regions, termed the 'mission million'. Meanwhile, the second category, Mission Priority, contains 8 million people, and the third category, Mission Support, contains the overwhelming majority of the population, 41 million people.

ICON’s analysis found that most people living in both Bradford West and Bradford East are living in communities with the highest level of need - over 9 in 10 (91 per cent) and 8 in 10 (83 per cent) respectively. Both Bradford West and Bradford East often feature at the top of unfortunate league tables - child poverty and poverty risk to name just two, the broader focus of this analysis perhaps calls for a more urgent response, with issues such as poor quality housing stock, crime rates and access to health and social care services also blighting the lives of residents in these areas.

Need in these areas is far greater than all other areas of Bradford District, with the proportion of areas having the highest levels of need being 73 per cent in Bradford South, 46 per cent in Keighley and Ilkley and 22 per cent in Shipley. When looking more broadly at seats across West Yorkshire, the proportion of areas with the highest level of need ranges from 71 per cent and 0 per cent in Wetherby and Easingwold, pointing to great inequality across the region.

When one uses the data to zoom in closer on the neighbourhoods, the challenge is even more stark for certain areas of Bradford.

The sheer levels of need across communities in Bradford and West Yorkshire should be at the forefront of the minds of our policymakers and politicians. If left unchecked, we run the risk of the issues which make up the measure drawn up by the Commission having serious, long-term consequences for our people and places, shutting people out from opportunities and limiting their life chances - potentially before their lives have even properly started.

If the level of need itself was not already alarming enough for our leaders, the inequality in levels of need between our places should concern them. The fact that, in some places across our region, almost everyone is living in circumstances which stifle their potential, while in others, no-one is impinged by these same challenges, is quite frankly scandalous, and is the product of successive decades of neglect and denial of the power of communities in changing lives and shaping destinies, both for their places more broadly and the people living in them. To turn the tide of such grave levels of need, we must recentre our communities and make a serious commitment to their renewal.