Growth alone is bad for people and communities or Sustainability is a wider and more complex subject than one thought!

Too little has been done to reverse the long-term trend towards income inequality, according to government advisers. The Sustainable Development Commission argues that wide discrepancies in earnings between people in the wealthiest and poorest neighbourhoods have damaged the health of those in deprived areas and undermined social capital.

SDC wants to see maximum pay levels introduced along with a revision of income tax structures and improved access to high quality education, suggesting that major restructuring of the welfare state is at least as significant to change as area and neighbourhood approaches. But the commission urged government to improve the environment in deprived areas and to launch more crime reduction measures, even although many area based regeneration initiatives have attempted just that.

Creating more resilient communities was essential during a recession. New policies are needed to strengthen community-based sustainability initiatives, give residents more power over planning and to create better public spaces and parks.

SDC argues that reducing people@apostrophe;s working hours would improve people@apostrophe;s wellbeing by giving them a better work/life balance and called for more flexibility for employees in choosing the hours they work and new measures to tackle discrimination against part-time workers where they are denied promotion, training and fair pay.

Tim Jackson, report author and economics commissioner at the SDC, suggested that in developed countries including the UK, far from increasing prosperity, debt-driven consumption has created an unstable system which has put jobs and livelihoods at risk, as well as damaging many of us psychologically and socially.

Sustainable Development Commission, Prosperity without growth. 2009