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Tuberculosis, serious vitamin deficiency, and shortened life expectancies are on the rise, a damning report titled, “After Grenfell: Housing and Inequality in Kensington and Chelsea” showed.
Labour MP Emma Dent Coad said the issue has been festering for years, with local authorities neglecting to manage the serious overcrowding and homelessness which was behind June’s Grenfell fire.
“This has been brewing for a very, very long time. Children were coming to school with loose teeth and I spoke to some dentists in the area and they explained, 'It’s not sugar, it’s not eating too many sweets. It’s malnutrition',” she said.
According to the report, childhood poverty varies in extremes from one street to the next, with some of London’s poorest sectors registering 58 percent, while others in the most wealthy areas only face 6 percent. The report also showed the average wage difference is nearly double within the borough.
“It’s malnutrition in the womb, perinatal malnutrition which causes the babies to be born undersized and without enough calcium in their bodies. We have had some children collapsing at school,” Dent Coad said, who attributes the poor health to poor political decision-making and financial mismanagement.
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“There is no trickle down, if it existed we wouldn’t have people with their teeth falling out from such a young age, if we can’t even feed children in Kensington then you know we have to stop pretending that trickle down exists,” she said.
“Most politicians don’t actually look at the way health is affected by government cuts, wage freezes, all the things that have been happening over the last few years that force people to economize on everything – like buying their children cheap filling food that is not nutritious.”
According to Dent Coad, the only means of tackling the issue would be through “political will” as a legacy for the Grenfell fire victims.
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