Member News
By Lisa Nandy MP - 25th October 2010
I am fortunate enough to represent an area that is designated a 'coalfield community'. Wigan and areas like it, across the North of England, Scotland, Wales and down to Kent are unique in a wide variety of ways – in their strong spirit of community and solidarity that their working and political history evoke and in the devastating consequences they suffer to this day in the wake of this very history.
The last Labour government recognised the unique character of the coalfield communities and the necessity to concentrate resources on these areas that cried out for regeneration, not only physically but also spiritually and of a culture that had been victimised by its predecessors.
It invested £1.5bn over the last decade, established the Homes and Communities Agency, which administers the National Coalfields Programme and formed the excellent Coalfields Regeneration Trust. These organisations are themselves almost unique in the genuinely multi-agency approach they take to tackling the multiple problems of the coalfield communities. Since the Trust was created, it has created 119 new community facilities, helped more than 17,000 people to find work and more than 115,000 to get skills and training for the future. It adopts a bottom-up approach, engaging communities and restoring resilience and pride that was so badly damaged in the 1980s.
In March of this year, my colleague John Healey, commissioned a review by ex-miner and previously formidable MP, Mick Clapham. The review recognises the positive steps that the last government took to tackle the enormously complex problems that confront coalfield communities but acknowledged that there was still much more to do.
In 1981, almost 200,000 jobs were lost as a direct result of the closure of the mines and as Mick notes, in communities such as Barnsley, the impact of this was as much as two private sector workers to every mining job lost. For mining communities are exceptional in the extraordinary dependence the entire locality had on the industry – engineering and transport businesses closed, followed by the impact on the retail and service industry as a result of decreased purchasing power.
In many of these areas, and certainly in Wigan, there has not been scope for alternative industries to take their place and it is now the public sector, which has provided the replacement as one of the largest employers. In the wake of last week's CSR, I fear for these areas which are most at risk from the coalition's attack on the public sector. Alongside the abolition of regional development agencies, the government has scrapped a number of training programmes that were designed to tackle the enormous skills deficit that exists between coalfield and non-coalfield communities. And as in the 1980s, the loss of public sector jobs will have a substantial ripple effect on the private sector.
I have called for this important debate on the regeneration of the coalfield communities because many of these areas such as my own still lag behind the rest of the UK in shocking levels of deprivation, mortality rates, unemployment rates and numbers of young people not in employment, education or training.
The people that make up these communities represent a great British tradition, once forming the backbone of our country's manufacturing industry; they are the last people that should pay for others' actions that led to the economic crisis. I am calling on the government to maintain its commitment to these communities and to accept Mick Claphams' recommendations in recognising these areas as both uniquely disadvantaged and uniquely deserving.
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