Step up and face the challenges ahead

Oldham MP Jim McMahon

Oldham West and Royton MP Jim McMahon responds to Oldham being labelled the most deprived town in England

THE Office of National Statistics helped Oldham make the headlines after naming it the most deprived town in England.


I’ll take this as an opportunity to have an honest conversation about where we are and what challenges lay ahead.

Firstly it doesn’t say the whole of the borough of Oldham is deprived, which is helpful because of course it isn’t, and the towns and villages that make up the borough are quite distinct.

In some ways this makes the findings much worse, not better. If the surrounding townships are discounted, it shows 65 per cent of Oldham town is deprived.

We should look carefully at what it does say and not be defensive, even if we feel some elements of the study itself raise questions.

The town of Oldham has the highest number of communities living in deprivation based on a number of measures, all of which a fair-minded person would say are reasonable indicators, such as employment, education and health.

Government walked away from Oldham at the first opportunity back in 2010. School building projects, a new college, decent homes and health centres were all scrapped as the coalition government looked to free money for other parts of the country.

But worse still isn’t just that they took the cash and walked away; but they kept coming back to chip away at what was left. As budgets were slashed the impact was very real.

The overwhelming feature of the report was that for Oldhamers the biggest challenge is income and education, and of course the two are very much linked. You cannot hope to raise income levels unless you address the poor quality of education and skills in the town.

It’s true jobs are being created across Greater Manchester, but we also know that for every 10 jobs created in the south of Greater Manchester, only one is created here in the north of the city region.

So as Oldhamers compete on a larger stage, the competition for jobs is fierce. Many without the skills needed fall at the first hurdle.

The Oldham Education and Skills Commission was important. It set out the challenge facing our schools but critically put in place a set of recommendations to set us on the improvement journey.

Work is underway to free land for development of decent homes - important for the retention of families, who have real choice about where they live. This also rebalances the local housing market away from low value, low demand homes that are a feature of too much of the town.

It required everyone involved in working for a better Oldham, including the council and partners, to think differently. When others stepped back we had to step up.

That was easier for some than others - who didn’t understand why the council would spend time on things that weren’t strictly a council responsibility.

That might have been strictly true, but it missed the point. A cooperative council sees the council working alongside everyone else with a shared ambition.

It also required an attention to detail. This is not simply about “building stuff”, but more importantly about social regeneration and the creation of an Oldham we can be proud of.

Without that vision and attention to detail the mistakes of the past can be repeated: St Peters Precinct, anybody?

The foundations have been put in place, but they are just that. Foundations to build on, certainly not the finished new Oldham. Let’s have the courage to make the difficult decisions, the responsibility to step up and not wait, hoping someone else will come to our rescue.

And let’s not accept second best any more.