A ‘STRATEGIC ALLIANCE’ will be created in Dorset to tackle social mobility.

Councillors say it is shameful that some parts of the county are amongst the most deprived in the country.

The South Dorset constituency is ranked the lowest in the country for social mobility with the area having more children coming into the care of Dorset Council than anywhere else in Dorset.

Weymouth and Portland also suffers from low wages, often seasonal, child poverty and poor health outcomes.

Weymouth councillor Pete Barrow has called for a sense of urgency in developing plans to tackle the area’s problems, which is likely to include a multi-agency team developing a response to the problems.

Dorset councillors were told that End Child Poverty released a report in May 2019 on children living in poverty across the UK. In it Weymouth and Portland was said to have 30% of its children living in poverty, with particularly high levels in Weymouth East (39%), Melcombe Regis (39%) and Underhill (40%).

The GMB union says that 6,500 residents in Weymouth and Portland are working for less than £9 an hour.

Weymouth councillor and Green group leader on Dorset Council Clare Sutton told a full council meeting on Thursday evening  that the statistics should bring shame on everyone – and said that it was likely that the problems could get worse with a nine per cent increase in house prices in the area this year, pushing more people out of the market.

She said many young people had also lost their jobs because of the pandemic and were suffering poor mental health.

But she said it was positive news that Dorset Council, unlike the previous Dorset County Council, was taking the issue seriously, although she pressed the council to adopt a real living wage strategy for its own workers.

Said economic development brief holder Cllr Gary Suttle: “It is disgraceful that we are bottom. I could not believe that. As an affluent county we should do so much better.”

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He promised to look at the economics of adopting the real living wage.

Weymouth councillor Louie O’Leary also welcomed the strategy: “It’s about getting people with the skills and skills for the people. We still do have a thriving engineering sector – but we also need to get other non-seasonal skilled jobs, which will help solve our areas of deprivation,” he said.