By Carole Dennett
DH is at the annual Slush Puppy making championships. Points are awarded for speed, aesthetics and novelty flavours. He said he had something up his sleeve; we’re not sure if that’s the flavour he’s entering!
Somebody with nothing up his rolled-up sleeves is our MP, Bob Seely. It being an election year, he’s currently cramming seven years of work (he was elected in 2017) into seven months. It’s no surprise that in his whirlwind of activity he is ignoring the very real situation on the Island. Now I love the Island and hate it being talked down, but sometimes facts trump rhetoric.
Some of you may have noticed a new Facebook group called Island 625 pop-up, and using the correct amount of suspicion around social media, ignored it. I urge you to read it; it presents incredible detailed data on Island life. The sort of data that politicians should use as a baseball bat to smash improvements through the system. So to help you see the back of dry January, and thanks to Ian Boyd at Island 625, here are some of the issues.
The Island’s population grows at 200 to 500 people a year; great you say, stops us being overcrowded. The issue is the net gain is inward migration, and largely people over 65. No problem with that, until you see that our younger population (15 to 19) is shrinking. This isn’t the norm across the country and causes all sorts of problems in terms of workforce and the local economy.
Simply put, in time there won’t be enough people of working age to support the retired community. We have the highest percentage of non-working households in England.
In terms of businesses, something the Tory party claim to be good at supporting, there are 4695. Eighty-three per cent have a turnover under £500k, exposing them to the risk of an ageing workforce and around 30 per cent of people are in jobs that pay less than the real living wage (£12/hr), meaning we aren’t creating sufficient local wealth through well-paid jobs. The mean wage on the Island is £27k; nationally it’s £34k, and many of you, reading this, will earn much less than that, as our median average is just above £23k.
We’ve ranked lowest in the country for educational achievement for level 4 and above at GCSE and grade C at A level, in every year since 2018. Some good news, we are near the top for apprenticeship achievements. More bad news, we have a high rate of child poverty. At 34 per cent the impacts on opportunity, health and well-being is something that should worry us all. We are near the top of the league for self-harm and alcohol-induced conditions in under 24s. We top the chart for the percentage of pupils with SEN, and also for hospital admissions for mental health conditions in under 18s. We are failing our children.
So why do I tell you this? It’s not to cause a collective depression about our situation, but for us to realise we shouldn’t accept it as inevitable. What can be done? Well, instead of spending time stripping the Sussexes of their royal titles, we could set up an international school for creativity and the creative arts. Platform One already do a great job, but would do more if they could. Use the sea around us as a focus point for ecological research; Ian Boyd has great ideas on this. Support and invest in farming; it’s a lonely job, but none of us would be here without our farmers. There is much more.
The most important thing we can do, is prove to our younger generation we want them to have a future, something our MP and his government have taken a baseball bat to.