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Posted on June 12, 2025

                  Left-behind communities deserving of ministerial focus - The Yorkshire Post says

It comes to something when a Labour veteran such as Sir Stephen Houghton is suggesting to his party leaders and the Prime Minister that they ought to appoint a Cabinet member for “leading, supporting and recovering” left-behind communities.

The leader of Barnsley Council, though, makes some important points in today’s column.

“Listening to those working people is all too often branded as populist and wrong,” he says. “The distance between them and their elected representatives has got wider and wider, with the political consequences now staring us in the face.”

People have been making this case for a long time but now, amid the continued charge of Reform UK, he adds that “the Government needs a clear vision and a narrative to demonstrate that it understands the challenges facing people in areas like mine. A story of a better future.”

The research of the York-based Joseph Rowntree Foundation is instructive: in March the organisation’s modelling suggested that the poorest families were forecasted to see their incomes fall around twice as fast as middle and higher earning families.

These “left-behind communities” are plain to see – we only need to see areas of Yorkshire affected by poverty such as Sir Stephen’s own Barnsley, inner-city Leeds, Bradford or Hull to see what he means.

But the very fact of his intervention today is a damning condemnation of successive failures – of Labour and Conservative governments, and of the societies they have led – to fully appreciate and act on the needs of people who have the least.

This newspaper successfully campaigned for a ministerial post for the Northern Powerhouse and, relatively short-lived though it was, its existence in government was a sign of progress.

So we support Sir Stephen’s sentiment that these communities are in need of ministerial focus.

You can read the full article here.