The Guardian’s view on deprived neighbourhoods: incomes and places need a boost | Editorial
WWhat does it mean for a neighborhood to be poor? Since the 1970s, the UK government has regularly sought to answer this question by collecting a range of statistics about the people who live there. The aim is to enable funding to be targeted where it is needed most, and to make place-based initiatives available alongside those targeting individuals or families.
For a Labor government that trails the UK Reform Party in opinion polls, the latest data – which focuses on income and employment, but also includes health and education outcomes – should serve as a wake-up call. In fact, all areas of England, either trapped in the ‘most disadvantaged’, or rising through the ranks to join them, are located in the party’s urban or post-industrial heartlands.
A neighborhood in the Jaywick & St Osyth area of Tendring, near Clacton in Essex, has achieved top spot in the list, known as the Multiple Deprivation Index, for the fourth time in a row. Seven of the top 10 neighborhood-packed places in Blackpool. Middlesbrough, Birmingham, Hartlepool, Hull and Manchester also feature heavily. Similar mapping exercises are being conducted in the devolved States separately. While the tools and vocabulary of policy-making around deprivation have become more sophisticated, the reality is that millions of people still fall into the same old trap.
Work to liberate them has accelerated under this government after the failure of the settlement strategy. Analysis by the Independent Neighborhoods Commission shows that investment in the North East during this Parliament will be… Seven times higher than was the case under Boris Johnson, if current trends continue. Labour’s successor scheme, Pride in Place, will see 169 communities in England receive £20 million each. Its goal is to bring about the kind of tangible improvements – youth clubs, thriving high streets, and so on – that will boost confidence in politics as well as morale, and help reduce the appeal of anger-fueled populists.
Such spending is urgent and necessary if Labor is to demonstrate its commitment to a renewed public sphere. Similar programmes, including the New Deal for Communities (under New Labour) and Super Localism, funded by the National Lottery, have achieved some good results in the past.
But the warning in the updated index should not be ignored. Deprivation at the neighborhood level is very difficult to change, which is a relative and much broader measure than poverty measured by income. The biggest change in Official numberscompared to six years ago, mostly due to the decision to calculate income after housing costs rather than before. The effect is to underscore the devastating impact of rising rents in areas including inner London. The result is likely to be higher funding settlements for some affected councils. If this helps focus minds on the urgent need for affordable housing, and supports family finances in the meantime, that will be helpful. But new priorities should not replace old problems in post-industrial and coastal regions – such as those featured in the Guardian series Against the Tide.
Schemes such as Pride in Place can strengthen civil society as well as physical infrastructure. But we should not see it as an alternative to income-targeted policies in these places. If neighborhoods that have been disadvantaged for decades are to have a chance, the children in them must have opportunities. The latest deprivation data strengthens the case for removing limits on benefits imposed by the Conservatives, including the two-child benefit cap.