Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
THE SATURDAY BIG READ
All that has changed, and rarely for the better. Babies may not get tuberculosis like I did but youngsters today are battered with images of plenty their parents simply can’t deliver: smartphones, computer games and the latest trainers costing a small fortune. Things they don’t really need but feel they should have as slick marketing tells them so.
Arguably, poverty is worse now, more difficult to bear because kids are more aware of their deprivation. “It’s not envy, it’s longing” explains Nathanya Laurent, development manager at Leeds South-east Food Bank. “Children feel isolated because they see wealth only a few minutes away.
“They see high-rise glass buildings and they feel they are not welcome. They don’t come into the city because they feel is isn’t for them. And poverty is far harder now. Children are under pressure from their peers to have the latest something and parents have to make difficult choices as to what they can provide.”
This is why the Daily Mirror’s Give Me Five campaign – calling for an immediate boost to child benefit – is so important. Just a £5-a-week increase would see families gain £340 a year on average and lift around 200,000 children out of poverty.
Backed by the End Child Poverty Coalition, charities, politicians and unions, we also want the Government to restore child tax credits, scrap the two-child limit and axe the benefit cap.
From where they live, the children of the poor can see the wealth of booming Leeds: a tantalising glimpse of luxury flats and gleaming office towers marching across the skyline. But it’s not for them. They live in a “two nations” city, the finance capital of the North that belongs to somebody else.
They might as well be in the Third World. In fact, too many of them are.
The palace of opulence, the Harvey Nichols store, sits almost cheek by jowl with foodbanks.
The statistics are revealing. Poverty is estimated to affect 173,000 people and 20% are children – almost 34,000.
And two-thirds of them live in a household where at least one parent is in work.
They are concentrated in inner-city neighbourhoods, where Leeds was once the ready-made clothing capital of Britain and manufacturer of engineering goods for export to the world. To its shame – or credit, depending on your point of view – the city is now home to 29 foodbanks. Of those seeking help and on Universal Credit, 41% were awaiting their first payment, 43% were having deductions and 34% were in rent arrears.
One in four is no better off under UC and demand has gone beyond food to toiletries, sanitary products and school uniforms.
Project manager Wendy Doyle goes into schools to educate children about managing money. “In one primary, I asked them, if they had £100 to spend, what would they spend it on. They said the first priority is the mobile phone bill. If they could only pay one bill? They said – the phone.”
No wonder young people are confused and succumb to mental illness. When that happens, help is virtually unobtainable. “Getting access