Sussex children join ranks of the deprived

2:41pm Friday 21st November 2008

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Parts of Sussex have been deemed as impoverished as London sink estates by a children’s charity.

The Children’s Country Holidays Fund, which sends deprived children from London on trips to Sussex, said it is now working with children here too after a rise in poverty across the county.

Established 125 years ago, the Hassocks-based charity said the move was something it had never envisaged and was prompted in part by shocking figures released recently by the Campaign to End Child Poverty.

The campaign says that 72% of children in East Brighton, 70% in Moulsecoomb and Bevendean and 54% in Hollingbury and Stanmer live in families struggling to make ends meet.

In Newhaven, 44% of children live in families with financial difficulties, in Peacehaven the figure is 40% and in Lewes it is 40% in two of its three wards.

Lydia Davis, chief executive of the charity, said: “Until now, Hassocks has hosted predominantly deprived young Londoners. However, we have been made increasingly aware that there is another side to Sussex.

“We have identified pockets of innercity deprivation from Hastings to Hove, Worthing to Crawley, as severe as any in the London sink estates and poor inner-city boroughs.

“There are hundreds of children on our own doorstep equally disadvantaged by single-parent families, physical and mental abuse, drugs, bullying, exclusion and lack of safe play space, as well as poverty.”

Des Turner, MP for Brighton Kemptown, said he was saddened but not surprised by the comparison.

He said: “This is something that those of us on the ground in Brighton have known for a long time. There is an awful disparity between the comfortably-off in Brighton and the less comfortably-off.

“A lot of people are struggling at the moment because there is not a complete spectrum of jobs available.”

Darren Snow, manager of the Crew Club youth centre on Brighton’s Whitehawk estate, said: “It’s always been an issue but poverty is not just about money, it’s about access to services and other factors.”