After a decade of denial, politicians must face reality
A DECADE of austerity summarised by the mantra ‘‘we can’t afford it’’ has taken its toll on the region’s public services.
The county has suffered – particularly poor families and the elderly living in deprived communities – as services such as Sure Start, community hubs, leisure centres, social care centres and libraries have closed.
The basic fabric of our welfare state has shrunk to overworked schoolteachers, GPs, police officers and hospital A&E departments.
One might borrow a phrase from a former prime minister – ‘‘Broken Britain’’. Austerity has broken the county’s public services from strategic level through to the frontline.
Teachers, GPs, nurses and police officers dedicated to public service are leaving as the welfare state has reduced to a withering shadow of its former self and we ask why we cannot get a GP appointment.
Our paramedics queue up to transfer the frail and vulnerable on to trolleys to lie for hours in A&E, our police officers are unable to be resourced to tackle crime, and schools are dealing directly with poverty through breakfast clubs and the impact of wider social fallout.
At strategic planning level, government offices have closed while local authorities shed skilled leaders and workers by the bucketful to try to maintain essential services.
We are living in a region that has suffered heavily at the hands of austerity: cities such as Leeds and Bradford, towns like Barnsley, Doncaster and Wakefield, and seaside resorts like Scarborough.
And large swathes of the county have been blighted by rising poverty – particularly inwork poverty, poor education for our children and a rising number of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) with homelessness doubled across the board.
But with a General Election looming, suddenly ‘‘we can afford it’, with the main political parties throwing money at our schools and wider public services overnight as though nothing has happened.
It may be Christmas soon, but can Santa rebuild our region on promises of money? A generation of young people has been written off, as has the infrastructure that supported our communities.
Paul Johnson from the Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned the main political parties are not being ‘‘honest’’ with voters with regard to their spending plans. But it could also be said that the implementation of their spending plans is also fundamentally flawed. One cannot rebuild overnight what we have lost. It is far too simplistic – we need more than the political fairy dust proposed in these promises of a better county tomorrow.
Let’s look at the facts: we do not have a ‘‘school system’’. Instead, we have a fractured, broken-by-the-market approach, accompanied by ad hoc policy development linked to crises as they emerge and become concerns voiced by the general public. This situation is replicated throughout almost all public services across the region.
We have no coherent approach to support children, young people and their impoverished families – instead we have increased numbers of children entering the care system and more young people involved in serious crime.
We have a lack of skilled strategic leaders and, on the ground, a lack of experienced professionals to implement much-needed service improvements as politicians throw money at the North.
Alongside the promised bags of gold, we need to get real. We have to rebuild the capacity in
It may be Christmas soon, but can Santa rebuild our region on promises of money?
the region and this requires an honest evaluation of where we are at present coupled with careful long term planning.
To build hospitals or improve our decrepit school stock, it takes skilled people to be trained, similarly to build new community facilities such as youth centres, libraries, Sure Start provision also draws on the same scarce resources.
To staff these buildings it takes time – a minimum of three years to train teachers, nurses, doctors, early years and youth workers. This is without factoring in the time it will take to redress the demise of our communities and the shameful lack of quality affordable housing across the county.
If our national politicians are to be considered credible to the people of our proud county, perhaps they should face up to the fact that it needs a united localised concerted effort to put right a decade of denial and decay so our communities can once again thrive.