Inequality between local areas
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Members' notes
Mark
VivienneInequality between local areas is rising with a growing gap between affluent and less affluent communities. At its extreme, this is underlined in the development of exclusive gated communities within areas of deprivation. These inequalities are likely to intensify with the agenda of neighbourhood empowerment and local decision-making (see localism agenda), as middle class and wealthy citizens increasingly identify with and shape local communities. On a larger scale there is a growing divide between London and the South East of England, and the rest of the country in terms of levels of affluence.
What are the implications?
- Potential increase in tension between socio-economic and ethnic groups
- Potential inequality in service provision between different areas (the ‘post code lottery’)
- Increased demand for voluntary and community organisations to meet gaps created by inequality in service provision
- A risk that pockets of deprivation, within affluent areas, get missed by funders and regeneration initiatives
- The voluntary and community sector's own resources (ie local funding and volunteers) may not always be in the areas of greatest needs
Moving forward
How might your organisation identify and respond to additional social and economic need created by local inequality?
How might you ensure your beneficiaries have equality of access to services in this environment? This could include lobbying and campaigning, providing different support to users to ensure that they are able to access the services.
National organisations, or organisations working across a large geographic area, may need to change how resources are targeted in order to address increasing local inequality.
Organisations working across an area which includes large inequality may wish to ensure that staff, volunteers or trustees are recruited from a more diverse local population.
Want to know more?
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Recent comments
Dhara
Written as Policy Officer at NCVO
it might be useful to note here that the Government uses the indices of multiple deprivation to analyse patterns of deprivation, identify areas that would benefit from special initiatives or programmes and as a tool to determine eligibility for specific funding streams.
Trevor
Does anybody know how accurate the 'indices of multiple deprivation' is? and how effective it is calculating the deprivation in smaller areas or rural areas?
David
NCVO Research TeamTrevor - I'm a research officer at NCVO and have had some experience with the indices of multiple deprivation, so may be able to help with your question.
The indices of deprivation are made by combining statistics across seven areas ("domains") including income, crime, employment. These domains are weighted to produce a combined score.
The statistics used are sourced from ONS and are national statistics - so based on large scale surveys of the population and administrative data. This makes it possible for the data to remain accurate even at quite small scales - ONS includes data to the level of "Lower Super Output Areas (LSOA)" which have populations of around 1,500. It's worth remembering that the data is generally from 2005 - the latest available.
ONS has some guidance on how they might be used.
You could think about combining these indices with the the rural statistics produced by DEFRA.
Hope this is some help.
Joh
The most obvious in-equality between areas is when the wages are so high and the living costs are so low and vice versa. Savings can be made by people and they can then retire to the more expensive living cost wise places, whereas the people in areas where living costs are high and wages are low cannot...
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