YORK is booming. House prices have soared. People queue for hours to snap up luxury riverside apartments.

In the city centre, builders construct yet another new hotel, which will service a tourist trade buoyant enough to overcome last year's floods, foot and mouth and the strong pound combined.

Shoppers are spending money in York's retail heart and at the expanding out-of-town centres.

It is a good time to live in this ancient city. For most of us.

But for some, York is not a good place to be. Its most vulnerable residents, the new children born into homes of poverty and deprivation, see nothing of the prosperity. Some of them do not even live long enough to learn the name of the city that has failed them.

That has left York with an infant mortality rate higher than that of Leeds and surrounding North Yorkshire towns. It is a shaming statistic which reveals a real problem.

Hugh Bayley MP, an expert in health economics, says the higher infant mortality rate is traced directly to the poorest corners of our city. These also harbour the highest rates of heart disease and lung cancer among adults.

It was a York humanitarian who was one of the first to identify the link between ill health and poverty: Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, whose investigations shocked the nation.

That was 100 years ago. And yet still, even in these abundant days, some of York's children are dying in penury.

Mr Bayley's Government has made an admirable commitment to eradicating child poverty.

The working families' tax credit plus large increases in income support and child benefit have helped to lift countless families above the breadline.

But more needs to be done at a local level.

One reason York has a higher infant mortality rate than Leeds may be because we have been slower to accept that real, grinding poverty exists amid our affluence.

Mr Bayley is right: this rich city urgently needs a poverty strategy.

Updated: 10:38 Monday, September 17, 2001