Counting sheep, buses and cashpoints

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How to evaluate rural deprivation is a key issue in Lottery funding. Lynn Watkins, data and information researcher at the Countryside Agency, explains the agency’s recent work and some of the dilemmas involved

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To measure rural disadvantage is difficult – not because it doesn’t exist but rather it looks very different from your stereotypical run-down inner-city estate. Often poor and disadvantaged households are scattered among affluent neighbours in attractive surroundings. Or people are faced with specific problems such as lack of affordable housing or transport to essential services. The Countryside Agency has been at the forefront of developing measures capable of reflecting the reality of rural deprivation in England, in order that policies and programmes may be based on sound evidence. Last autumn we produced a draft set of 12 indicators using a variety of data sources to map disadvantage in rural England (see table 1). A draft national summary report and eight draft regional reports simply containing maps (rather than summary statistics or tables) for each English region were produced in limited numbers for consultation, through our regional offices. They show the spatial pattern of disadvantage that people face in rural areas and help those developing policies or delivering pro-grammes to target resources and action. The indicators are based on the best available small-area data and some include valuable data that has not previously been available.

Our regional offices have been consulting with regional partners to validate the indicators against the practical knowledge and experience of people working in the area. We hope to make the indicators available more widely in the summer. Of course to measure rural disadvantage requires us not only to understand and define what disadvantage is in a rural context, but also what is rural – neither issue is simple! The indicators are designed to map out differences within rural areas, rather than differences between urban and rural areas, and therefore we have excluded urban areas from our calculations. Our definitions of rural are based on administrative boundaries (such as local authority boundaries), because these are the areas for which the data is available. So far, we have had to use three different definitions of rural in the indicators depending on the spatial scale and administrative unit for which the data is available. Most of the indicators use a definition of rural based on 1998 ward boundaries developed for us by a research team at Oxford University. But for others this has proved impossible. A major consideration, in defining rural, is the need for consistency. To date, the available data has limited us to the sole option of using administrative boundaries as the basis for a definition. It is not ideal, though, because using such a broad measure excludes some areas that are clearly rural and includes some that are clearly urban.

The Rural disadvantage indicators

As a result we are considering better ways of defining rural, along with the DTLR’s successor departments, DEFRA and the Office for National Statistics. In addition, the results of the 2001 census and ONS’s work on neighbourhood statistics should improve the way data is collected and reported – eventually removing the need to rely on administra-

tive boundary classifications. As an interim step, responding to feedback from our consultation, we have revised our previous ward definition of rural, and will use this in our future mapping work for indicators.

Area-based indicators have been criti-cised because they fail to highlight rural disadvantage for precisely the reasons given above. To make matters worse, administrative areas such as wards tend to cover a larger geographical area in rural localities because of their smaller populations. However, area-based indicators are the best tool available at present to poli-cymakers to highlight spatial differences in disadvantage. With care in their interpretation they can indicate broad patterns of disadvantage in rural areas.

We have not attempted to combine the individual indicators into an overall index of rural deprivation. In part this was because the statistical procedures require so many subjective decisions There would also have been confusion about when to use the Government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation 2000 and when to use a rural index. Instead we prefer the approach where single indicators or domains highlight a particular aspect of deprivation such as health or income. Whilst we haven’t used the overall IMD, we have drawn on some of the domains of the indices where we feel these are appropriate for a rural context; we have supplemented these with other data where possible to highlight particular aspects of rural disadvantage.

For the future, we will be closely following developments in the neighbourhood statistics initiative and the updating of the IMD 2000. When new data become available, particularly from the census, we will also be drawing on research undertaken for us by a team at Cambridge University to develop new indicators to cover other aspects of rural disadvantage such as quality of employment.

Lynn.Watkins@countryside.gov.uk