Inner-city deprivation was ‘discovered’ in the 1970s when the Heath government commissioned the influential inner area studies. What followed were decades of social policy, funding and infrastructure all aimed at stamping out this urban problem. The Britain of today has evolved since then and there has been a profound shift in the pattern of deprivation away from cities and towards coastal areas.
So why are we still talking about the North-South divide? Why have the many problems facing coastal communities been overlooked in media, academic, policy and political accounts of deprivation in modern Britain? Why do these coastal communities continue to be ignored in a national policy that is ostensibly committed to ‘levelling up’ opportunities and outcomes, but that understands this challenge as a north-south problem as opposed to a peripheral one?
This is not a 2021 problem, nor is it a COVID problem. For nearly two decades, I, alongside Dr Alex Gibson have been raising concerns about the allocation of funding for the NHS and more recently English public services. Our research has found that although peripheral coastal and rural areas have older populations and are grappling with higher crude burdens of illness and disability, they received less funding per capita for the NHS and were more likely to be showing signs of organisational stress, through high deficits for example.
Reassuringly, some NHS funding formulae have increasingly responded to the needs of deprived coastal areas. However, in other public services areas there remains a glaring divide in per capita allocations between metropolitan and coastal areas. Take education, where school funding allocations remain the highest in London, despite being the best performing region. In 2013-14 Tower Hamlets received £2,650 more per pupil than Â鶹´«Ã½, a gap which remains alarmingly high at £2,239 in 2020-21. In some London boroughs, average GCSE performance of Free School Meal (FSM) pupils is higher than that of non-FSM pupils in coastal and inland towns on the periphery. So, is the funding distribution ‘fair’?
Children in the capital are also exposed to a vast array of social, economic and cultural opportunities that are likely to s