Last week my town made the news for frustrating reasons. As Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the second round of Levelling Up funding, here in South Shields we found out our bid had been rejected, again.
MP for South Tyneside Emma Lewell-Buck summed it up best on Twitter: “Freeports bid – rejected; towns fund bid – rejected; two levelling up bids – rejected. Levelling up is just an empty slogan."
The allocation of funds has prompted accusations that wealthier parts were awarded over the most deprived areas and that conservative voting constituencies benefitted the most.
This certainly seems to be the case for us, South Tyneside has the third worst employment rate, 13th lowest income and the sixth worst rate of absolute child poverty in England. It’s also the 26th most deprived area in England.
So why is it that the PMs own constituency of Richmond in North Yorkshire - the 251st most deprived area out of 317 in the country- was awarded £19 million while South Shields’ bid of £20 million, which would’ve massively transformed our dilapidated town centre rejected?
Overall the North East received the lowest amount of Levelling Up Funding, facing severe criticism from Labour as Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy said: “It takes an extraordinary arrogance to expect us to be grateful for a partial refund on the money they have stripped out of our communities, which has decimated vital local services like childcare, buses and social care.
“It is time to end this Hunger Games-style contest where communities are pitted against one another and Whitehall ministers pick winners and losers."
The North East was awarded just £108.5m, while the south-east will get nearly double that at £210.5m and London alone will receive £151.3m.
Retired psychiatric nurse Ian Taylor, 66, told The Mirror that South Shields was “the forgotten town in one of the forgotten regions of the country” and I have to agree.
I know what you’re thinking, this is a disability rights column, what does this have to do with disability rights? Well the news came on the day that ONS 2021 census data on disability was released and guess which region has the most disabled people? Bingo - the North East.
In England as a whole 17.7 per cent of people, or 9.8 million, said they had a disability. In the North East 567,000 people were disabled. That may not seem like a lot and certainly more regions have higher number of disabled people, but that’s 21.2% per cent of the population of the whole of the North East.
When asked if their household had two or more disabled people in, 7.8 per cent of households (92,000) in the North East said yes, compared with 5.1 per cent in the London.
If you zoom into South Tyneside, which the tories very much aren’t, 42023 people are disabled (22.1 per cent) and 7.9 per cent of households had two or more disabled people living there. This is whilst our hospital is constantly under threat and government funding for care and improvements is at an all time low.
I moved here just over five years ago from Sunderland and honestly, I love it here. There’s a huge community spirit, and an absolutely stunning coastline - which is just a short walk from my house- and our a gorgeous seafront which has benefitted from government funding.
However, walking five minutes into the town centre tells an entirely different story.
There are more empty shops than open ones. Of those that are open, the majority are charity shops and bookies, with local businesses struggling to keep up with rents.
If the pull of the seaside wasn’t enough the people here are some of my favourites ever. Shields folk are resilient, tough and more than anything kind. The community I’ve built here is always willing to help their neighbours and remind each other that we’ve just got to get on with it.
Though I guess that’s the spirit you have to have when conservative governments ensured your town’s livelihoods - coal mining and shipyards - were obliterated and you weren’t given any support to recover from that.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a place with one of the highest disability figures, child poverty and lowest employment and income is also a solid labour constituency. We’ve never recovered from what the Tories did to us in the 80s and now they’re hoping to ignore us into submission, or extinction.
The North East has been ignored for too long, we shouldn’t have to be resilient we should be supported by a government that wants all its people to not just survive but thrive - instead of just those who vote tory.
