SHEFFIELD would be a lot better off without its richest suburbs, clustered together in the parliamentary constituency of Hallam.
It sounds a strange thing to say, but Brightside MP David Blunkett insists it's true.
If Hallam was suddenly to become a separate town, he argues, the rest of Sheffield would overnight be entitled to a wide range of extra Government grants aimed at tackling unemployment, disadvantage and regeneration.
In other words, the very wealth of Hallam is in some ways penalising citizens in other suburbs of the city.
"It's a paradox that the wealth in one part of the city precludes appropriate national recognition for the less affluent," Mr Blunkett says.
A Tale Of Two Cities, researched by Sheffield University's geography department, points out Sheffield is different from the country's other major cities, all of which have well-off satellite towns.
While Manchester has its Cheshire stockbroker belt, Leeds its well-off villages and communities around Harrogate and York and Liverpool the Wirral, Sheffield has no real equivalent.
True, some better off professionals may commute in from villages in the Peak District, but most stay inside the city boundaries and the vast majority of them live in Hallam.
Many other surveys have highlighted obvious social divides in Sheffield – such as research highlighting the number of university graduates living in Hallam compared with Brightside, one of the country's poorest constituencies.
But report authors Bethan Thomas, John Pritchard, Dimitris Ballas, Dan Vickers and Danny Dorling have amassed more evidence on the key issues than ever before.
"Our report shows in stark detail the inequalities that persist across Sheffield's neighbourhoods," said Bethan.
"It reveals how people's chances of health, wealth, education and dying vary greatly across the city depending on the neighbourhood in which they live," added Dan.
Statistics on health and life expectancy across the city tell a clear story but the team looked at a range of other indicators of Sheffield's wellbeing stretching back to 1971.
Hard times and government indifference in the 1980s made the rich richer and the poor poorer, and, while the situation stabilised in the 1990s, inequalities increased again in the early years of the current decade.
Differing standards achieved in schools on different sides of the city have been well documented but the university team found that children living in areas like Burngreave, Nether Edge and Gleadless Valley also had the lowest chance of going to the secondary school of their choice.
Over the 30-year period up to 2001, the number of people living in Hallam with a university degree rose from 10 per cent to over a third, while the number in Brightside went up from a lowly 1.3 per cent to 7.7.
The research team found a majority of teenagers in Hallam went on to attend a traditional university such as Oxford, York or Manchester, while in other suburbs a place at a 'new' university like Sheffield Hallam was more common.
In the south-east further education or an apprenticeship was the most likely outcome – while in the north-east the most likely destination was the dole, even before the current recession hit.
Rising unemployment also strikes Sheffield's poorest areas the hardest, widening the poverty gap. Jobless figures in the recent past have been three times as high in central suburbs compared with the south-west.
In 2004 average incomes in Hallam were £23,400, up by over £5,000 in just six years, compared with an average of £14,300 in Brightside.
Attempts to tackle Sheffield's social problems through direction of central government funding have made some impact over the last decade, the report's authors say.
The general rise in house prices also saw properties in poorer areas gaining value.
But, they add, almost all other social, economic and health inequalities have continued to increase.
Trends in Sheffield should not be seen in isolation, A Tale Of Two Cities maintains.
What has happened in the city is typical of what has been going on across the country, with the gap between rich and poor areas widening.
"Increasingly people in different parts of Britain, and people living within different quarters of its cities, are living in different worlds with different norms and expectations," the report says.
And Sheffield faces a gloomy future, the authors conclude, thanks to the current LibDem council abandoning Labour policies to 'close the gap' between rich and poor areas, and with unemployment continuing to rise due to the recession.
A likely new Conservative government and inevitable, huge cuts in the public sector are set to create a 'perfect storm' that will make social divisions in Sheffield even wider, they add.
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