Scotland Fair Funding table

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New data allow us to present our first Scottish lottery v deprivation analysis 

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Contrary to our assertion in Lottery Monitor last month, we are able to present, for the first time, a Fair Funding league table for Scottish local authorities, thanks to the publication on 27 February of a new Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD 2003). 

The Scottish IMD
The new index is the work of Professor Michael Noble’s team at Oxford University, which was also responsible for devising the current England, Wales and N Ireland deprivation indices. The Scottish Executive commissioned Noble to prepare its version after a prolonged dispute with local authorities about the inadequacy of the previous set of measurements, the SADI (Scottish Area Deprivation Index). SADI was drawn up in 1998 but never fully endorsed as an authoritative measuring tool. The most obvious difficulty with the SADI was that its basic analytical unit was postcode districts, which are large enough to mask pockets of deprivation (particularly distorting in rural areas) and not aligned with local authority boundaries. The new SIMD 2003 uses five categories (domains) of deprivation at ward level, and has a version scaled up to authority-wide level. The five domains are: income; employment; health and disability; education, skills and training and geographical access to services. The housing domain used on the English version has been omitted, as there is no sufficiently up-to-date comprehensive data available at ward level. Because the Scottish Executive wanted a very quick turnaround on producing the new index, the research team, led by Gemma Wright, had to avoid using census-based material, as the 2001 data will not be available until this summer. Instead, they have mainly used administrative data for April 2001 from the Department for Work and Pensions, including, for the first time, information about people on working families tax credit. Another innovation is that in the ‘geographical access’ domain, the team was able to use actual road distances instead of ‘as the crow flies’ calculations. This matters particularly to rural localities, where road distances may be much greater than direct map distances. It should therefore reduce one factor of urban bias.

The SIMD 2003 is, however, an interim measuring tool. It was always the intention of the Scottish Executive to carry out a research exercise to produce a long-term strategic framework for deprivation analysis. This project is being undertaken by Glasgow University’s Scottish Centre for Research on Social Justice. The team there has just completed a first round of consultations, and will be publishing an interim report before the end of April, which you will be able to download from www.scrsj.ac.uk/deprivation/. There will then be a further consultation round during May. The team is exploring the analytical framework for future deprivation indices, so this is an ideal opportunity to air grievances and comment on long-standing discontents about all aspects of how deprivation is assessed. 

The Fair Funding table
Because this is the first year that we have been able to map lottery grants to deprivation, we have resisted the temptation to apply the figures retrospectively and create a 2001 table to set alongside those for England and Wales. The main effect of this is that we are unable to see how well or badly the distributors have done during 2002 with Fair Share authorities. You’ll have to wait until next year for that. But Fair Share authorities are shown in the Fair Funding league table in blue, and you can see that – as with our England and Wales tables – Fair Share authorities are not necessarily the worst-off by our calculations. The main figure upon which our rankings are based is an index of the difference between how deprived a local authority area is (reached by averaging the average scores for each domain) and how much lottery funding it has received. So the higher up the table, the bigger the gap between your deprivation score and your lottery funding. The basis for Fair Share is rather different. For a start it pri-oritises funding from the Community Fund (see article opposite). For this reason, areas that are highly disadvantaged but which have also done well out of CF grants, would have been excluded. The scheme is also based on the previous SADI data.

Ranking table