Rich and poor live in different worlds, says report
The poorest people with the greatest need for good health care, education and jobs actually have the worst access to services and opportunities, a new report says.
Ten new studies for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation point to the “inverse care law” – where those with the greatest need actually receive the poorest services.
One of the researchers, professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield, said it was disappointing that opportunities still depended on where people lived – sixty years after the founding of the welfare state.
“Perversely, people living in the poorest neighbourhoods with the greatest needs are often the least likely to have access to the services and support that would help them improve their lives and life chances,” he said.
Dr Ben Wheeler, also from the University of Sheffield, said that while progress had been made over sixty years, the rich and the poor “continue to live in two different worlds”.
But the government said it has made progress in tackling inequalities across the country, although it acknowledged more work needed to be done.
The report uses data from the latest census to analyse the areas of health, education, housing, employment and poverty – designed to mirror those areas of deprivation the welfare state was meant to tackle.
A report on education finds that areas with the greatest proportions of young people with no qualifications have the lowest availability of teachers per head of population.
A separate report on health says areas with the highest levels of poor health have the lowest numbers of doctors working there, although they have greater concentrations of nurses.
And one on housing says areas with the most overcrowded homes have the least numbers of homes with spare rooms.
The ability to get a good job also depends on geography, one report notes, with high-status jobs being concentrated in London and the south-east.
The Conservatives said the report showed the government’s attempt to tackle poverty had led to “patchy” results.
Shadow work and pensions secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, said the answer lay in expanding “the role of voluntary and commercial enterprises in helping the sick and unemployed into work”.
However, a Department for Work and Pensions spokesman told politics.co.uk that the government had made “significant progress in tackling poverty”, and there were signs that income inequality was starting to fall.
“But more needs to be done if we are to achieve our ambitious target of eradicating child poverty by 2020,” he continued.
He also said the government thought work was the best route out of poverty, and programmes like the New Deal were “contributing towards record employment levels with initiatives like the minimum wage and tax credits ensuring that for those who can, work pays”.
The reports were launched at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference in London.
They were undertaken by researchers from the Universities of Sheffield, Bristol and Edinburgh.
