A woman from York has on average a decade longer of healthy life expectancy than a woman from Doncaster 30 miles away – one stop away on the east coast mainline. It is an astonishing fact that 31 years after German unification, the per capita GDP of the North East of our country, Yorkshire, the East Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland is now lower than in what was formerly East Germany – and I remember going to former East Germany in 1990, just after the wall had gone down, and I remember being amazed at how far behind west Germany it then was a place of strange little cars with two stroke engines and fake coffee and yet we must be honest with ourselves – to a large extent Germany has succeeded in levelling up where we have not and it is vital to understand that these imbalances and inequalities are found within the regions of the United Kingdom– not just between them.
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There’s a glaring imbalance- or take university entrance- if you are a child on free school meals in London, you now have more than double the chance of going to university than a child on free school meals growing up outside London. Take simple life expectancy – even before covid hit, it is an outrage that a man in Glasgow or Blackpool has an average of ten years less on this planet than someone growing up in Hart in Hampshire or in Rutland why do the people of Rutland live to such prodigious ages? Who knows – but they do. We need to say from the beginning that even before the pandemic began the UK had and has a more unbalanced economy than almost all our immediate biggest competitors in Europe and more unbalanced than pretty much every major developed country and when I say unbalanced I mean that for too many people geography turns out to be destiny.
There are difficult days and weeks ahead as we deal with the current wave of the delta variant there will be, sadly, more hospitalisations and sadly there will be more deaths but with every day that goes by we build higher the wall of vaccine acquired immunity, a wall that is now higher and stronger in this country than almost anywhere else in the world, and with every day that goes by our economy is slowly and cautiously picking itself up off the floor, businesses are opening their doors, you will see the employment figures this morning, people are slowly coming back to the office and over the next few weeks more and more people will find themselves back on their daily commute and as Andy Haldane of the Bank of England has said – there is every prospect that this country is poised to recover like a coiled spring and it is the mission of this government to ensure that in so far as COVID has entrenched problems and deepened inequalities – we need now work double hard to overturn those inequalities so that as far as possible that everyone everywhere feels the benefits of that recovery and that we build back better across the whole of the UK. I wish I could tell you that this pandemic that we’re going through was over, I wish I could say that from Monday we could simply throw caution to the winds and behave exactly as we did before we had ever heard of COVID, but what I can say is that if we are careful if we continue to respect this disease and its continuing menace, then it is highly probable – and on this the scientists are almost all agreed – that the worst of the pandemic is now behind us.
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