Yorkshire’s ex-mining villages still blighted by poor health and housing, says report

The study, based on interviews with 350 people living in the coalfield regions of Yorkshire who were involved in the industry at the time of the 1984 strike, also reveals that 43% of miners are still unemployed 21 years later and a further 12% are on long-term sick leave. Among working-age men, 27% lost their jobs because of pit closures in Yorkshire between 1981 and 2004.

Of the 82 women surveyed, 40% said they suffered health problems such as lung disease compared with just 9% of women in a control group. The report, Gender Differences in the Long-term Impact of Industrial Struggle, is set to be published this summer.

Ann Smith, author of the study and community development officer at the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation in Yorkshire, said the study showed that many former mining communities were still struggling to regenerate themselves two decades after the pit closures.

Smith said many youngsters in the region had grown up with neither parent in full-time employment, leaving them with few aspirations, or opportunities, to gain long-term employment.

She said: “I visit a local school and they say: ‘We are from the pit village and we are not going to work. My dad worked the pit and my granddad worked the pit and there’s no pit therefore I’m not going to work.’”

Smith added that anecdotal evidence suggested that many youngsters were also failing to find jobs or affordable housing – leading to entire families living in poor-quality or cramped accommodation.

House prices in Yorkshire & Humber have risen an average of 18.6% in the last year alone, with the average price of a flat in North Yorkshire standing at £139,450, according to the Land Registry of England and Wales.

A report into the coalfield communities published last year by the House of Commons ODPM select committee suggested they continue to face “major housing problems”. The study added that the National Coal Board’s sale of its housing estates in 1986, in many cases to absentee landlords, had exacerbated the situation.

A further report into the economy of the coalfields, published last month by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University, revealed 60% of jobs lost from the coal industry since the early 1980s have now been replaced – but that there are still some 90,000 jobs that have not.

It also found that, 336,000 adults were out of work and claiming incapacity benefits in the English and Welsh coalfields in mid-2004.