White teenage boys are the new poor in Labour's Britain

from the Daily Mail

By STEVE DOUGHTY

White boys from sink estates are the new poor in Labour's Britain, an official report said yesterday.

It said the teenagers are being left behind while their black counterparts, who were once at the bottom of the educational heap, are forging ahead.

The state-sponsored report on wealth and equality pointed to other groups who have failed to benefit from rising incomes and living standards over the past 20 years.

Among the losers are families with stay-at-home mothers, who were found to make up a growing number of the poor.

The report also pointed to the sicknote generation of disability benefit claimants.

Drawn up by the Office for National Statistics, the analysis showed that most Britons are better off than they were 20 years ago in terms of wealth, health, education and employment.

Working women have closed the pay gap with men by a quarter over the last ten years, it found.

In education, more than half of black pupils achieve five or more good GCSEs compared with a only a third five years ago.

Among the rest of the population, the figure has risen from half to around six in ten.

But the report, intended to be the first in a series of annual snapshots of the state of British society, picked out the plight of the new poor.

"The most persistent low achievers are white boys from poor backgrounds," said Joe Grice, a spokesman for the newly-independent statistics agency. "Our evidence is consistent with findings by others."

Pupils receiving free school meals have half the chance of getting five good GCSEs as other children, the report said. They are twice as likely to truant.

Figures in the report also show that the one in four children who live with single parents no longer dominate the poverty charts.

Around 1.1million of them count as poor because their homes have less than 60 per cent of the national average income. But 1.7million children with two parents are also below the poverty line.

Critics say that Gordon Brown's tax credit benefit system has done little to help the latter families, who mostly have stay-at-home mothers.

The ONS report also pointed to poverty and deprivation among the disabled.

It said that as the country has become wealthier, the proportion of those saying they have a disability has increased.

In 1975, 15 per cent of the population reported a long-standing illness or disability but by 2006 the level had risen to 19 per cent - one in five.

Some 2.7million people now claim incapacity benefit or other disability handouts. The proportion who blame stress or another mental disorder for their disability has grown to four out of ten.

Among 19-year-olds, those with reported disabilities are three times more likely than other teenagers to be NEETS - a buzzword meaning "not in employment, education or training".

The report concluded: "We are better off on average but inequality persists. There is some evidence of gaps closing, for example equal pay for women and educational attainment for some ethnic minority groups.

"But inequalities persist as shown by educational achievement measured by free school meal eligibility and employment rates for disabled people."

A study for Tory leader David Cameron by senior party MP Iain Duncan Smith identified in 2006 the growing failure among white boys.

It said family breakdown, family indifference, drink and drug abuse by parents and peer pressure was holding them back.

On the other hand, black Caribbean boys, long regarded as the group likely to do worst, were in fact doing better.

Last year, academics from the London School of Economics delivered similar findings for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a research group highly respected on the political Left.

The foundation said half of children who leave school without any good GCSEs are white British boys.