Deprivation in your area - search and zoom

After making a new website when the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation 2012 was released, I've been looking at some of my old English IMD web pages and tools and so have decided - in anticipation of the next update to the IMD - to add a 'search and zoom' tool so that anyone who is interested can find out what deprivation is like in their area - or any other area of England you are interested in. Like my previous versions of this kind of thing it's based on Google Maps but in the version seen in the screenshot below you can simply enter a place, neighbourhood, postcode or address (or even an organisation, like Centre for Cities) into the search box and it will go straight there after clicking 'search'. Click the image or the link below to use the tool.

IMD Search and Zoom

As usual with these kinds of maps, if you click on an area the pop-up will give you more information. The next update of the IMD was to have been in 2013 but I'm not sure if that is still going to happen. However, I've updated this tool just in case so that I can add in the next update whenever it becomes available. The Scottish version of this tool is on this page, but I have not yet done the same for Wales or Northern Ireland.

IMD 2004, 2007, 2010 - Change Over Time...

This is the last deprivation-related post in a while. I promise. I've been experimenting with English IMD data from 2004, 2007 and 2010 and have finally found a moment to do to it what I did to the Scottish IMD data, where it is all online and clicking an area produces a chart showing change in rank through time. In this new example, I've also added in the change in rank between 2004 and 2010, as you can see below. The rank change doesn't tell you if an area became more deprived in absolute terms, only that it is less or more deprived in relation to the other 32,481 LSOAs in England.

You can see in the example above a case of a quite large change in rank. This is for an LSOA in London. The maps are quite basic because I don't have time right now to build a more sophisticated site but the colour scheme is based on quintiles, with red most deprived, yellow next and blues less deprived (the darker the blue, the less deprived), as below.

For the moment, I don't have any plans to extend this analysis to Wales or Northern Ireland, but you never know...

Isolated Entities or Integrated Neighbourhoods?

My paper on spatial context and deprivation is to be published in Urban Studies in August 2009. Since it is imminent I thought I'd do a very quick blog on the topic. In a nutshell, it's about looking beyond the attributes of individual locations and also considering the spatial location of neighbourhoods as an important contextual factor in how they operate. This paper is really just a baseline study in terms of data and a method of understanding spatial context, so more on this in future...

The front page of the paper is shown below, but for the real thing you'll need to see Urban Studies itself.

Sustainable Communities in Manchester

A new piece of work has recently been published by the Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER), a Commission set up to provide an evidence-base for decision making in the Manchester city region (MCR). The publication is called 'Sustainable Communities' and is an overview of deprivation and neighbourhoods in MCR. Some of the material is related to work I was involved in during my time at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies in Manchester and I still have an interest in what's going on there. Changes in neighbourhoods in many parts of MCR have been good, but the performance varies across the different areas.

Since I'm doing some work on indicators and spatial policy monitoring at the moment, I thought I'd do a short post on this topic. In particular, I wanted to explore the changes in the percent of people in each Greater Manchester district (Bolton, Bury, Oldham, etc...) who live in areas ranked among the 10% most deprived nationally between the Indices of Deprivation from 2004 and 2007. In actual fact, of course, the IMD2004 is based mainly on data from 2001 and the IMD2007 on data from 2005 - so the comparison here is really between conditions in 2001 and 2005. Nonetheless, I wanted to see how things had changed.

I linked the population in each lower layer super output area (LSOA) to the IMD data for each area and then added up the population in each district that fell within the most deprived 10% nationally (i.e. ranked from 1 to 3,248). The results are provided in the chart below, followed by some comments. [Quick explanation: for example, Trafford now has around 2% less of it's population living in areas classified as amongst the 10% most deprived in England - this ought to mean things are getting better - very crudely speaking]


As you can see, the population of Manchester within the 10% most deprived nationally (England) has fallen by around 8%. This is the most obvious change. Falls were also evident in Bury, Salford, Trafford and Wigan. In contrast, Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport and Tameside (marginal) saw a rise in the population ranked amongst the 10% most deprived nationally.

Notwithstanding such issues as the ecological fallacy and questions about the validity of such indices in the first place - the changes are very interesting - particularly when we begin to ask questions about how these changes have occurred. Has it been because of household mobility, increased prosperity, or another reason? That's for someone else to answer. For now, I'll just finish by adding this chart on population changes between 2001 and 2005 - it makes an interesting comparison (has the increase in Manchester's population between 2001 and 2005 been a process of displacement of less well off people by more affluent people? maybe).

The Economic Deprivation Index (EDI)

I've been meaning to blog on this for a while, so here goes...

Relatively recently, the Department for Communities and Local Government released the Economic Deprivation Index for the purposes of 'tracking neighbourhoods' through time in relation to their levels of economic deprivation. They did this because the existing Indices of Multiple Deprivation (2004 and 2007) 'do not facilitate backwards comparison nor do they enable users to understand how the pattern of deprivation is changing between these fixed points' (CLG, 2009).

Despite this, several examples of comparison between 2004 and 2007 deprivation levels have been produced at the local level - e.g. exhibit a, exhibit b - though I'm not picking on anyone here; I actually think there is a good deal of confusion that needs to be addressed since the new EDI says what is quoted above and the information on the 2007 Indices of Deprivation page says 'comparison between the two Indices is therefore acceptable'. So, it is hardly surprising that people compare IMD 2004 and 2007.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The EDI is comprised of data from the Income and Employment Domains of the IMD and is produced on a yearly basis from 1999 to 2005. The maps below summarise changes at LSOA level, where green is an improvement in rank and red is a reduction in rank. You can click on the images for larger maps.

More commentary follows below... but the official report is worth a look.

England EDI Change in Rank 1999-2005 (Green = Improvement, Red = Decline)


A couple of nuggets here for England as a whole... The largest change in rank towards being more deprived was 17,769 - for a LSOA in Slough (008D), which changed from a rank of 31,509 in 1999 to 13,740 in 2005. Since LSOAs are quite small, and the data very sensitive to micro-spatial factors, such changes are not entirely surprising (but I do wonder what happened here). In total, 27 LSOAs saw their rank change by 10,000 or more places towards being more deprived and the majority of these were in the south of England.

At the other end of the scale, there were 22 LSOAs which changed rank by 10,000 or more towards being less deprived. The LSOA experiencing the largest improvement was in Tower Hamlets (029A) with a rank change of 18,463 places. In 1999 it was ranked as the 12,878th most deprived in England (so, not really that deprived) and by 2005 it had moved to 31,341. More interestingly, one LSOA in Nottingham (026C) was amongst the most deprived in 1999 (ranked 3,150) but by 2005 was ranked 16,873 (a change of 13,723 places - the fourth largest improvement). The big leap forward came between 2002 and 2003 (new build 'luxury apartments'?).

London EDI Change in Rank 1999-2005 (Green = Improvement, Red = Decline)


We can also take a closer look at London - there does seem to be a more obvious pattern of change between 1999 and 2005 than for England as a whole. This is clearer towards inner London and perhaps reflects even more severe housing market pressures in the capital - particularly in Westminster, Islington, Tower Hamlets and Hackney. The outer boroughs, and Hillingdon in particular, seem to have become more deprived according to the EDI - although this is all relative of course because some of these areas are not at all 'deprived'.

Manchester EDI Change in Rank 1999-2005 (Green = Improvement, Red = Decline)


And now to Manchester, because it is the location of the LSOA that has remained most deprived on the EDI for each year from 1999 to 2005 (Manchester 009C). The overall pattern looks not too bad, with mostly greens. However, when you overlay the location of the 10% most deprived LSOAs (2004 IMD - since these are the main policy targets), things don't necessarily look so good. Lots of areas which remain the focus of policy have not improved on the EDI - they have become worse according to this measure. The exact change in rank may not be statistically significant but it is notable that they have not been able to improve rank at all. I'll not go into whether or not such indices are a useful measure - that's not for me to decide. I just thought it would be useful to explore the data for now.

So, that's the Economic Deprivation Index... Now I need a holiday.

Deprivation and Spatial Context - The NNIMD

Time for a short post on some of my more recent work. A lot of what I do deals with areas, deprivation and trying to understand the links between the two. Since I live in Liverpool and work in Manchester, I've got a good idea about how some of the most deprived (according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation) areas look, where they are and how spatially clustered they are. I also think that the way we identify which areas ought to be the focus of policy could do with some refinement.

So, here's what I've done. I took the 2004 IMD data and created what I like to call the NNIMD. That is, the Nearest Neighbour Index of Multiple Deprivation. I've written a paper on this for a journal (to appear around October 2009) but I decided in the meantime to update the work for the 2007 IMD and post on it here. The NNIMD takes the IMD scores for all neighbours of an area and averages them to give what you might call a 'spatial context' or 'neighbourhood' deprivation value for each lower layer super output area.

This process is repeated for the entire country (England) so that for each of the 32,482 lower layer super output areas we have a score which provides intelligence on the kind of neighbourhood it sits in, at least in terms of the IMD deprivation score. Yes, it's not perfect and yes there are issues with the definitions of 'neighbourhood' that we have to use, but it's a good start on the way to understanding local spatial context and the role this might play in neighbourhood outcomes. I plan to continue this work in the future, but for now here's a couple of graphics showing how Liverpool looks using the 2007 IMD (first map) and the 2007 NNIMD (second map). [Note: the colour spectrum goes from blue (least deprived) to red (most deprived).]

The Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 to 2007

The new Indices of Deprivation for 2007 were released very late in 2007 and since this is an area I'm particularly interested in, I thought I'd blog on the differences between 2004 and 2007.

I've been exploring IMD 2007 just to see how it compares with IMD 2004 since authors say that they are comparable (but they do of course acknowledge that the methodology is not exactly the same).

For the most acutely deprived wards, there's not too much change, but the most deprived LSOA out of all 32,482 has moved from north Liverpool to south Liverpool (from just beside Anfield, Liverpool FC's stadium to Speke, by Liverpool John Lennon Airport). The list of the most deprived 100 LSOAs (about 150,000 people in total) is still dominated by the North West, with 68 out of the most deprived 100 LSOAs in England. It is also interesting to note the co-location of football stadia and the most deprived LSOAs. This phenomenon is perhaps not that surprising but it is replicated across Great Britian in other indices of deprivation. It also highlights the massive gulf between rich and poor in a very real manner.

More interesting are those LSOAs which have seen a significant change in LSOA rank. Using the 10% cut-off for change in rank (i.e. a move of 3,248 or more places up or down the list) I did a quick bit of analysis just to see how areas might have changed. In total, 2,374 of England's 32,482 LSOAs saw a change in rank of more than or equal to a 10% shift in their IMD category. That's 7.3% of all LSOAs, which seems like quite a lot. Most of these were not among England's 10% most deprived, but a handful were. Seventeen LSOAs among the most deprived 10% in 2004 experienced an improvement in their IMD ranking of 10% or more between 2004 and 2007.

Conversely, there were 11 LSOAs which declined by 10% or more between 2004 and 2007 to place among England's 10% most deprived. Most were in London. Overall, it's interesting to note the changes in ranks of areas and how extreme these can be. I just question if there can really have been that much change in 3 years in some of these cases and if so, what has caused it (gentrification? housing market pressures?). Are those LSOAs which have shown large improvements big success stories or statistical anomalies?

Lots of interesting nuggets when we compare IMD 2004 and IMD 2007.