And so the big questions are: Will this ‘residential gap’ continue to widen? And how does it affect people’s life chances now and in the future? And what policies might slow, or even reverse, its progress?
Well before we meet the social scientists who’ve been studying these areas, I just have one little question for my two politicians:
You’ve both been in Government. I mean to what extent, when you’re in Government, do you look to social research in order to answer some of the policy questions which are facing you, Frank? I mean do you actively go out and say, well, what’s research been doing in the last few years?
F.F: I think generally speaking that doesn’t happen – sadly. And no way is that built into the system so it should happen. What does occur occasionally is a piece of research starts to get covered in the media, starting perhaps with the Today programme, and then there’s a God-Almighty rush to brief the Minister in case there’s questions asked on it. So there are some researchers who, by accident or design, are very clever in getting their research into the public debate. But most of it is, the research community is like a secret society as far as Ministers go, that they’re not brought into it, nor do many of the researchers want to share those results with Ministers.
L.T: It does seem a slightly extraordinary state of affairs, doesn’t it? I was just looking at the amount of money, for example, the Economic and Social Research Council – here’s a publicly funded council: £80 million a year being spent on social research. I mean, David, how much are you aware, when you’re writing your social policy papers, of all this research going on out there?
D.W: I do try to keep in touch with research, and a lot of it is fascinating. But Frank is right: there is, in general, a very serious gap in which I don’t think politicians and their advisors reach out enough to the research community. But it has to be said, I think, there are people in the research community who don’t reach out enough to politicians and think the whole question of how these policies, or how their ideas are implemented as policies, are all rather vulgar and not for them.
L.T: Anyway, let’s now try and remedy the sort of situation by turning to this ‘residential gap’ and bringing in, on the line from Sheffield, Danny Dorling, who’s Professor of Human Geography at Sheffield University and the author of a major report on social inequality called ‘Poverty and Wealth Across Britain: 1968 to 2005’.
Hello Danny. Can I just start by asking you to just talk a little tiny bit about how wealth is geographically divided in this country?
D.D: Okay. Well this report is a good example of a long-term piece of research. It took about ten researchers in three universities about three years to bring all this together. Essentially wealth is largely driven in Britain by housing wealth, for most people. When the housing market is up, it is about half of all wealth is in that form, and what we’ve found is that, increasingly, that wealth is concentrated, or else it rises, it’s concentrated in a smaller number of areas, particularly around the Home Counties, and if you were to, if you like, try to redistribute those people in a kind of theoretical model, the proportion of people who’d have to move across the country to create equality has risen every decade since the 1970’s.
So the areas which are poor – relatively poor – have become larger and there are now large parts of cities in Britain where over half the population, in the poor parts of the cities, now fall into this category. And at the same time, perhaps most interestingly really, wealth has coalesced. There used to be a scattering of rich places all over the place, and there would be a rich house at the end of a village and so on. Now, really, there are only three large areas of England with wealth: The huge area of the Home Counties, and then small parts of Cheshire and then an even smaller part of North Yorkshire.
L.T: It’s interesting as well that you talk about the persistence of deprived areas. A deprived area, they simply go on being a deprived area for year after year?
D.D: Yes, we’ve done a number of studies. The most telling one is comparing maps of London drawn in around about 1890 with the pattern now, and we tend to find that the streets which were poorest then tend to be poorest now. Most remarkably, areas which were rich then – Notting Hill is the classic case, which went downhill - kind of came back up to their original position. Also nationally, we find places like Salford and Oldham, which had some of the worst health, say, 150 years ago, have a similar kind of poor health now with a completely different population. The interesting thing is that the areas themselves – not the people, the areas – seem to carry an advantage or stigma and that’s maintained as the population moves around the globe and moves around the country.
L.T: And this isn’t affected by some of the sort of policy ideas of bulldozing the estate – just simply knocking down the estates? This doesn’t turn out to be a solution?
D.D: Well it may be partly a solution, because what doesn’t happen in this country is we don’t abandon areas. So in a way the map – the relative map – stays looking the same because when an area really goes downhill we do dramatic things, such as bulldoze and rebuild. We put in huge amounts of money – this is over the course of the last century – into area regeneration, and I think it’s very hard to measure the positive side of this, and part of the positive side of this is that we do not see areas develop such as have developed in Detroit in the United States. We also do not see the kind of excesses of wealth that have developed, say, around Santa Barbara in the United States. So our maps don’t appear to change because we put a lot of effort into trying to at least stop the gap getting very, very, very wide.
L.T: So would you want to say that there was an argument for abandoning certain areas, for simply saying because this area’s been consistently a deprived area, we should just simply abandon, leave the area, get rid of the area?
D.D: No. No, that has been tried – and County Durham is where it was tried first – and absolutely disastrous results from each way (0.08.07). And also in the context of being one of the richest lands on earth, and one of the most, well not that crowded, but crowded enough, it seems to me the final argument about why you just must not abandon areas, apart from the huge damage it does to families and communities, is that the cost of the infrastructure there, and the environmental damage of abandoning the sewers and the roads, is so high now that it really isn’t an option.
L.T: How far is living in a deprived area causal in relation to these life chances? How much is it that people who go to live in those areas are already people with decreased life chances?
D.D: I think the areas have an effect. I think the best way to see that is to look at the areas into which young men from Pakistan were encouraged to come in the 1970’s. These young men (0.08.51) had get up and go who came to our northern mill towns. The problem is they walked into a situation where they were being invited because we could no longer get people to work the night shift at the mills, and the situation was dire. So I think in many, many cases, to my mind, it is the area that has this effect. However, having said that, being poor in a very rich city such as London is a particular disadvantage also, simply because the cost of living is so very high.
L.T: Okay let me turn to David and Frank for some comments on that, or they might like to question you further about that…?
D.W: Yes, I think, however that the first thing we need do is just to test the argument, and Danny Dorling has put his finger on one of the great dilemmas in public policy, which is whether you think about people or about places, and the extent to which people move to tough places, when they’re poor, or whether places themselves help to make people poor. Ten years ago when the Government came in they were heavily influenced by the argument of area-based poverty, but then they realised that they were in danger of forgetting poor people who were spread across the country and weren’t necessarily concentrated in the poorer areas.
So I would say, if anything, the direction of policy in the past ten years has been slightly to rein back from a preoccupation with the areas that were poor because of the recognition that you missed out a lot of poor people in the process. And some of the evidence that I’ve seen has suggested that, for example in the middle of our cities, we’ve had a big increase in the number of more affluent people, so that cities have got a greater mix than before. So I think the first question any politician has to ask Danny Dorling is: Is there counter-evidence? And what about the poor people who aren’t in the poor areas?
L.T: Danny?
Transcription ends: 0.10.25
Notes:
0.08.07: The word ‘way’ is slightly slurred and so questionable.
0.08.51: ‘These young men had get up and go when they came to our northern mill towns’. The verbatim transcription of this would have been: ‘I don’t think these young…these young men had get up and go when they came to our northern mill towns’. The transcriber has had to make a decision here as to whether or not the young men in question had or had not 'get up and go'.
A poor transcriber would guess, which is wrong. Any doubt should be accompanied by the audio marker so that the client can check for him or herself. However, in this case, the context of the whole paragraph makes clear the intention of the speaker. His point is that the place affects the person. If the young men had not had ‘get up and go’, then the place couldn’t be said to have had an effect and therefore would not have been an example of the point the speaker was making. This is an example of how good transcription requires intelligence, experience and discernment.