Countryside Alliance - love the countryside

National indicators of deprivation should be changed to recognise pockets of poverty in rural areas, which currently go unrecorded.

National indicators of deprivation are used by government in order to measure the well being of a community and poverty. There is significant concern that these are urban-biased and do not reflect the pockets of deprivation and poverty prevalent in rural areas. Poverty and health inequalities in rural areas may be influenced by several different factors such as poverty, inadequate housing, transport, education and employment.

Between 2004 and 2006, the proportion of low-income rural households increased to more than 35,000 households, but figure is very deceptive and grossly underestimated. There are significant pockets of deprivation and disadvantage to be found in rural areas, which have remained hidden, as inequalities in rural areas manifest themselves differently to those in cities and towns. This is largely due to the way in which deprivation has been measured in the past. Calculation of indicators that have been drawn up to measure ‘need’ can be problematic when applied to rural areas, as they are usually standardised around urban values. Some of the indicators of deprivation for example have included car ownership as an indicator of wealth, which is known not to be appropriate in rural areas. The experience of deprivation for individuals in rural areas will be similar to the experiences of those living in inner cities but patterns of deprivation differ in rural areas. In rural areas individuals may also be classed as being deprived with or without a low income. The importance of improving the quality and reach of mainstream services to disadvantaged areas and populations is immense. Traditionally the majority of poverty cases have been thought to be a mainly urban problem and, as a result, funding streams have usually gone only to those areas of deprivation in metropolitan and urban centres and have not been distributed to those in need in rural areas.

In order to deliver appropriate services to local communities it is important that the make up and need of the population is understood. It is widely recognised that health status for instance is dependent upon the ‘wider determinants of health’, which are measured using indicators of deprivation. Pockets of deprivation can exist almost anywhere but appear to be more obvious when they are closely in juxtaposition with affluent areas. Neighbouring wards can often have totally opposite characteristics, you may get one ward characterised by large houses in leafy avenues. Yet immediately adjacent to it is another ward where the characteristic is very different, high unemployment, higher than average levels of life threatening diseases, high levels of teenage pregnancy and single parents, poor educational attainment and little prospect of breaking out of the cycle. When this is the case often the indicators used to identify poverty fail to pick up the less affluent ward as the mean income for the two wards would be above the level to indicate poverty. When this occurs communities will not receive the level of help and support as required and will not be recognised as a community in need.

The concept of the ‘rural idyll’ also serves to keep need and deprivation buried within the beauty of the rural landscape. This concept of rurality serves only to exacerbate and conceal poverty. The inflow of affluent people from urban areas also serves to hide deprivation in rural areas.

When the government produced the Index of Deprivation 2000, it was not rurally sensitive enough to measure deprivation within rural areas because, although one of the indicators is geographical access to services, it attracts a lower weighting than other indicators such as unemployment. There was a move to improve the rural sensitivity within the document as the update of the English Indices of Deprivation 2004 suggested that crow fly distances to services have been replaced with road distance to services. This change will serve to help to identify the actual time taken to travel to access services. Changes in measurement of need, to include those which are rurally sensitive, are vital in order that the rural population of England have the same equity of access to health services as their counterparts living in urban areas.