Focal point of Scottish poverty

from The Herald

IN 1832, when a cholera epidemic swept Glasgow, the majority of its 3000 victims could be found in the poor communities living east of Glasgow Cross.

Nearly two centuries later, the major causes of illness have shifted but the city's health inequalities remain stark: in 2002, the death toll from heart disease in this area was 56% above the Scottish average, while one-third of its residents were suffering a long-term illness.

The perspective was offered yesterday by Professor Michael Pacione, chairman of geography at Strathclyde University, as a example of how stubbornly inequality and poverty in Scotland's biggest city have persisted.

While major efforts have been made to regenerate Glasgow and find a new economic role after the decline of heavy industry, the poor health and lack of opportunities for people living in some of its most impoverished communities remains.
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Prof Pacione was speaking at the Transcending Poverties Conference, which sought to bring some fresh perspectives to an age-old problem. The event, organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and sponsored by The Herald, had three broad aims: to set Glasgow's problems in a historical perspective, to define the make-up of poverty in the city and to shape the debate around future policies and strategies to tackle it.

Though poverty exists across Scotland, the choice of Glasgow as a focal point for the conference was significant. Not only does it suffer some of the worst poverty and ill-health in Europe but it has also seen a concerted effort to regenerate itself by attracting inward investment and targeting government spending on those most in need.

Steven Purcell, Glasgow City Council leader, pointed to the investment in schools, housing and public services as evidence of momentum gathered in transforming the city's fortunes.

"I have no hesitation in saying that we can never tackle the problems of long-term poverty that too many people still face - not least poverty of ambition - if we don't get more people into work," he said.

But he also stressed the importance of offering cultural opportunities to young people and of giving community bodies a greater role - the "next logical stage in devolution", as he described it.

For Professor Ray Hudson, director of the Wolfson Research Institute at Durham University, the inequalities Glasgow faces are a legacy of the same capitalist forces which made it the second city of empire, one of the key "workshops of the world".

Even at its industrial peak, he pointed out, Glasgow's economic success depended on the low wages and harsh living conditions of its workforce.

More worryingly, Prof Hudson warned that efforts to redress the city's post-industrial economic decline have been notably doubled-edged: while it has succeeded in attracting inward investment, many of the jobs created in call centres and service industries have been low-paid and dead-end.

Similarly, Prof Pacione argued that the slum clearances of the 1960s and 1970s had merely shifted the problems of the urban poor away from inner-city areas such as Gorbals, Bridgeton and Cowcaddens and inner suburbs such as Possilpark, Blackhill and Springburn to the outlying schemes of Drumchapel, Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Pollok. Moreover, the city's poorest 10% are now increasingly concentrated in these areas.

The suggestions on how to remedy these problems ranged from economic strategies over jobs and training to community involvement and cultural transformation - possibly a reflection of the diverse range of people now involved in regeneration.

Professor Stephanie Young, senior director of skills and learning at Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, said the key to turning around the city's economy was not simply about providing jobs, but "good jobs".

At the moment, Prof Young argued, spending is focused on those at the periphery of the job market, people who can be helped, prodded and persuaded into work. But little attention, or resources, is given to people once they find work or, at the other end of the spectrum, those in long-term unemployment.

As a result, people at the bottom rung of the employment ladder find it easy to "cycle" in and out of work, usually in the form of low-paid jobs that offer little or no opportunity for promotion or long-term security.

Good jobs, she said, were those which "offer people the opportunity to progress and offer the kind of wages and salaries they can raise families on". She added: "It's okay to get people into entry-level jobs but our aspiration needs to be to move them on from that."

David Webster, of Glasgow Council's development and regeneration services, argued that the east and north of the city needed to attract development to catch up with the more affluent western and southern corridors. "Existing projects and programmes will begin to address the problems, but there is a real question whether these by themselves will be enough given the very strong development pressures in the west," he said.

Another crucial element to reversing the fortunes of these communities was addressing the family breakdowns that have occurred as men lost their traditional role as breadwinners working in the heavy manufacturing sector.

The point was echoed by Professor Phil Hanlon, an expert in public health at Glasgow University, who claimed that addressing the growing gap between rich and poor would require a shift away from "materialistic" ways of viewing the problem to a perspective that takes in people's emotional and spiritual experience. Reversing Bill Clinton's famous dictum, he quipped: "It's not the economy, stupid, it's culture."

Where you survive on benefits and die younger than others in the same city
17,000: The number of new jobs created in Glasgow over the past year

66%: Glasgow employment rate, up from 55% in 1999 but still lower than the 75% Scottish average

57,000: The number of people on Incapacity Benefit

51,000: The number of people on income support

40%: Earnings of males living in the most deprived 15% of Scotland are 40% lower than in the rest of the country

£83,915: Average house price in the east end of Glasgow in 2005, compared to £151,975 in the north/west of the city

46.4%: The proportion of families in Glasgow with lone parents, compared to 25.7% across Scotland

One in four: The number of Scottish children living in poverty, officially defined as those living on less than 60% of the average income after housing costs are met

54: Life expectancy of males in poorest parts of Glasgow, compared to 87.7 in the most affluent areas

One-third: The proportion of Glaswegian males aged between 16 and 49, excluding students, who were out of work in 2001

Eight years: The gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Scots in 2001, up from 6.5 a decade before

One-third: The proportion of murders that take place in Glasgow