Policy Briefing: Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010

Policy Briefing: Indices of Deprivation 2010

Summary

New national and local deprivation data has been published which indicates that Islington is less deprived than three years ago when the last index of deprivation was published.

It shows that Islington is now the 14th most deprived local authority area in England. This is a relative improvement from three years ago when Islington ranked 8th.

Islington’s ‘deprivation score’ has also fallen from nearly 39 to just under 36 compared to three years ago, which suggests actual as well as relative improvement. Small but complementary improvements in income, employment, crime and housing deprivation have all contributed.

The data also indicates, however, that deprivation is still widely distributed across most of the borough with relatively few ‘hot spots’.

Background

The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 has just been published by the Department of Communities and Local Government. It is the first update for three years. The indices show relative levels of deprivation in small areas of England called Lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs). LSOAs are ranked according to how deprived they are compared with all the others nationally.

The deprivation data is grouped into seven broad ‘domains’ of deprivation. These are based on 38 indicators of deprivation (see Appendix 1 for more detail). The domains of deprivation measure:

- income deprivation

- employment deprivation

- health and disability

- education, skills and training

- barriers to housing and other services

- crime levels

- quality of living environment

The overall measure used to assess deprivation nationally - the Index of Multiple Deprivation – is a combination of all seven domains of deprivation.

The scores for each ‘domain’ are weighted and combined to calculate an overall score for each of the 32,482 LSOAs in the country. In Islington there are 118 LSOAs (about seven per ward). The borough level figures are based on a weighted aggregate of the LSOA scores in each local authority area.

Although the indices are just published most of the data uses statistics from 2008. Some data is older than that.

Key points

• Islington ranks as the 14th most deprived local authority area in England (out of 354) and the 5th most deprived borough in London (see Table 1 below).

• In both cases Islington is relatively less deprived than it was three years ago[1] when it ranked 8th most deprived nationally and 4th most deprived in London.

• Islington’s overall ‘deprivation score’ of 35.87 is significantly lower than in the 2007 index when it was 38.96.

• 53% of Islington’s population lives in a deprived LSOA[2]. Only ten other authorities have a higher proportion of their population living in deprived local areas.

- this is down from 62% of the population in the 2007 deprivation index.

• Deprivation is not as deeply concentrated in distinct “hot spots” in Islington as in several other areas (such as Blackpool which has the highest concentration). Islington ranks 68th on this measure, which reinforces the perception that deprivation is relatively evenly distributed across the borough.

• A sixth (19) of Islington’s 118 LSOAs rank in the 10% most deprived LSOAs nationally, and over half (61) are among the 20% most deprived LSOAs nationally.

- this is significantly fewer than in 2007 when 31 and 77 LSOAs were respectively among the 10% and 20% most deprived nationally (see Table 2).

• Islington’s most deprived LSOA is in Caledonian ward. It has a score of 59.11 which ranks it as the 899th most deprived LSOA in the country (out of over 32,000).

• An Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI) has also been calculated. Islington ranks as the second most deprived district in England on this index with 48.6% of children living in income deprived households.

• Islington also ranks as the fourth most deprived nationally on a measure of income deprivation affecting older people (IDAOPI). Over two fifths (41.4%) of older people in Islington are income deprived according to the index.

Discussion

The above is an initial analysis only. Islington’s improvement appears to be ‘real’ in that the borough’s deprivation score is lower than in 2007 IMD. However most of the other highly deprived authorities’ scores have fallen since 2007 too – though not by as much as Islington. This suggests that past interventions have – to some extent at least - been effective.

Borough level data for the seven domains has not been published. However the number of Islington LSOAs among the most deprived 10% of LSOAs has fallen for five of the seven domains.

The two most significant domains - income deprivation and employment deprivation - show modest absolute and relative improvement since the 2007 IMD. Fewer LSOAs feature among the most deprived for each of these domains in the latest data. This may well reflect the impact of targeted interventions to increase employability in particular, and the relative buoyancy of London labour markets before the recession began to really bite.

The crime domain takes account of numbers of reported crimes (see Appendix 1). The improvement in this domain appears to reflect success in reducing crime rates in recent years.

The ‘barriers to housing and other services’ domain includes measures of overcrowding, homelessness and barriers to owner occupation. This domain has seen the greatest change since 2007 (see Table 2) but it is unclear why the improvement has been so marked. The overcrowding figure is unchanged from the previous IMD (as it still draws on 2001 census data) and homelessness did not substantially improve in the period 2005-2008. This makes it difficult to understand why such a significant improvement has been registered in this domain in Islington since the IMD 2007. This is being further investigated with DCLG.

In Islington the health domain has got slightly worse since 2007 with more LSOAs among the 20% poorest on this measure nationally. This is consistent with other published data.

The data reinforces the view that although it has been argued that there are “two Islingtons”, in terms of affluence and opportunity, they are not in geographically distinct areas.

Finally it should be added that neither the recession nor the recent public sector funding cuts has affected these figures as the data relates to the period up to end 2008.

Further work is needed to fully understand the policy implications of this data, and the extent to which interventions in the past have materially impacted on the IMD scores in Islington.

Summary tables

Table 1: Most deprived local authority areas in England

Table 2: Comparisons between IMD 2010 and 2007 for “domains” of deprivation

Table 3: Range of rankings and scores of Islington LSOAs by domain

References

The English Indices of Deprivation 2010, Communities and Local Government - http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/statistics/indices2010

Contact:

Alistair Smith, Policy Team, Strategy and Partnerships.

T: 020 7527 3480.

E:

Appendix 1:

Domains and individual indicators in the Indices of Deprivation

The component elements of the Indices of Deprivation are set out below. In all cases the data takes account of the size of the population or number of households living in each area. In some cases data as old as 2001 census is used.

Source: Annex B, IMD 2010 Guidance Document, http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/statistics/indices2010guidance

Policy Briefing: 28 March 2011

[1] Index of Multiple Deprivation 2007, Communities and Local Government.

[2] Measured by the “extent” of deprivation in the ID2010 datset.

[3] Average IMD score of all LSOAs in the authority area, weighted by population size of each LSOA.