Levelling up failures of this Government are leading to children suffering in poverty - Jayne Dowle

Born in 1923, Smith’s own childhood was overshadowed by never having enough to eat and moving regularly between rented properties, forced to ‘flit’ from private landlords when the rent couldn’t be paid.

His father, a coal miner, lost his job. His sister Marion died of tuberculosis. At seven, he was working as a barrow boy for a beer bottler in Bradford, financially supporting his entire family.

I followed Smith’s writing with a thudding sense of recognition, often brought to tears by the visceral detail of childhood suffering and stunted lives.

My maternal grandmother, born in an almshouse in Tickhill, Doncaster, in 1910, grew up poor too. Her family ‘tramped’, moving from place to place across south and west Yorkshire, before eventually ending up in Barnsley, where her dad found a job in a coking plant.

A lifelong Labour supporter, she knew what it was like to go without shoes, to lose siblings in childhood, to suffer because there was no free healthcare. Contracting measles as a little girl, she was left with bad eyesight for the rest of her life. She ended up leaving Yorkshire in her teens, to work in service in Northamptonshire, before joining the women’s ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) at the outbreak of the Second World War.

Saving money to travel on a boat to France with her friend in the 1930s - an unheard-of adventure for girls like her – my grandma’s plans were quashed. Her brother, Ezra, needed false teeth. Those carefully-hoarded savings had to be sent home. She never went abroad in her life. Her later years, married to my grandad, a coal miner, gradually eased her burden. When she used to tell me about her early life, I could never imagine the poverty she grew up with coming back.

Like Harry Leslie Smith, she would have been appalled to see the latest report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

A quarter of families in Yorkshire and the Humber are now living below the poverty line, the third highest rate in the country after London and the North East. In her lifetime – she died in her late eighties – grandma saw governments rise up to the challenge of directing and supporting a healthier, employed nation, providing free healthcare and education, decent housing, fair wages.

She would be disgusted that all this progress would go into reverse. It would have seemed inconceivable that in 2023, infants in York would be admitted to hospital with hypothermia as families cannot afford to heat their homes, as public health director Sharon Stolz warned last week. And children are starving.

How can it have come to this, when we’ve had Conservative politicians telling us for several years that they are committed to a ‘levelling-up’ agenda that will stamp out regional inequalities and bring forward a fairer country for everyone?

How can it have come to this, when we have a current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who actually lives here, but seems entirely and blinkingly oblivious to the terrifying chasms between rich - he’s married to the daughter of a billionaire - and poor. That hospital in York where those babies were admitted suffering from hypothermia? It’s only about 30 miles from his £1.5m Georgian manor house in the Richmondshire village of Kirby Sigston.

And the government’s initial response to the Joseph Rowntree report? It came from a ‘spokesperson’, not even a junior minister, beggaring belief in the scale of its denial and obfuscation: “We recognise that families across the country are facing financial pressures as a result of Putin’s war in Ukraine and the aftershock of Covid; that’s why we are committed to halving inflation this year to ease the cost of living.”

If that’s levelling-up, we’re not just flat-lining. We’re falling dangerously off the edge.