A DISTURBING report on poverty in the North West today points to the biggest problem facing the new government's dream of a one-nation Britain - creating real jobs.

Using the number of children on free school meals as a gauge, the authors reveal the widespread gloom that lies beneath the surface of a sunny economy and officially falling unemployment.

And though frequent reports on poverty in Britain sometimes tend to exaggeration for political reasons, this survey by the Greater Manchester Low Pay Unit carries weight since the free school meals count is an accurate measure of hardship.

That is because only children from families on means-tested income support - the bottom-rung benefit - qualify. It provides a far better insight into actual poverty levels than the hitherto much-manipulated unemployment figures.

Worryingly, then, we find more than a quarter of children in Lancashire schools on free meals.

In the North West as a whole, more than 100,000 receive the dinners dole - a total that has risen by 13.4 per cent in the last five years. Indeed, in some parts of the region, half of all of children are shown to be living in poverty. And this telling insight into the social divide in Britain is backed up today by an EU report showing that 32 per cent of the country's under-16s are living in poor households - way above the 25 per cent average for the whole European Community and the biggest proportion in the EU.

Yet if this situation exists at a time when Britain's economy is hailed as the most robust in Europe, it highlights the enormous task that Tony Blair has in getting fewer families from being excluded from the growth in the country's prosperity.

For what is clearly revealed by these findings is a two-nation Britain, with a shockingly large proportion in the poverty zone.

Labour's pledge of a national minimum wage may be a first stride towards shrinking the divide. But even if it does not prove a brake on job creation, as its detractors claim, it will only marginally assist those already in work - when the real solution is the provision of not just more new jobs, but reasonably paid ones. Politically, governments bear the responsibility for that task and though they may assist with employment measures like the windfall tax-funded welfare-to-work programme that Labour has pledged for the young unemployed, ultimately it is only the economy that can create the real jobs that defeat poverty.

And worryingly, for a new government determined to cut the country's benefits burden, the EU report out today suggests that progress and economic growth alone are not the whole answer to reducing hardship, but must be combined with strengthened social provisions.

Thus, as Labour basks in its new dawn, the realities revealed by lengthening queue for free school dinners reveal the extent of the challenge that lies ahead for the government to build a better Britain for everyone rather than just some.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.