Worthing could be next town to declare a 'cost of living emergency'

Worthing Borough Council’s new Labour administration has also pledged to develop a plan to address poverty in the town.

It comes as inflation hits its highest rate in decades, with both energy and food bills increasing.

Labour officially took over from the Conservatives on Monday (23 May) after making gains at the local election.

A motion to declare a poverty emergency was voted down by the previous administration last year.

Carl Walker, deputy leader of Worthing Borough Council, said: “The honest truth is everybody knows we’ve got record numbers of people struggling to feed their families and pay rent.

“We’re still going to declare some sort of emergency – we want to maximise support for people in the town.

“We have some really good relationships with local networks, such as the Adur and Worthing food partnership, so it’s about how the council can work with them to support people as much as we possibly can.

“We hope this is something we’re going to be doing much sooner rather than later.”

Mr Walker – who also teaches at The University of Brighton and researches social inequality – said the council has to do more than ‘just making a statement’.

“It’s not just going to be a letter to the Government, not that that isn’t a valuable thing in and of itself, but it has to be an actual plan for our residents that makes the most of our resources.

“It’s got to be about an actual cast iron action plan but one that is achievable.”

The deputy leader says that such action could extend to improving salaries for council staff, such as those in the refuse and cleansing service who recently took strike action.

Data from 2019 (before the pandemic) shows that 15 per cent of children aged 0-19 were living in ‘relative low-income families’ in Worthing. The England average was 19 per cent.

In 2018, nearly eight per cent of Worthing households were living in fuel poverty – above the South East average – and 2015 data suggests that 3,800 older people were living in poverty.