Premier League Poverty?

The financial health of the English Premier League is a regular topic of discussion. No matter how you look at it, the sums of money involved in the operation of Premier League teams are immense and it looks even more striking when you consider the locations of their stadia - typically in the most deprived areas of England. This is related to a number of factors (e.g. history, land values), but in my work on neighbourhood deprivation and mapping I've noticed a common trend over the years so I decided to look at the location of all 20 current Premier League teams in England and how deprived their local area is, using the Government's official measure of deprivation (the IMD*). The maps below show each team and its area's deprivation rank within England, where 1 = most deprived and 32,482 = least deprived. Shading: red = poorest 20% of areas in England, yellow = next poorest 20%, and so on... Liverpool is most deprived and Fulham least. See below for more.

Arsenal - IMD 4,432 

Aston Villa - IMD 479

Chelsea - IMD 5,483

Everton - 1,070

Fulham - IMD 19,076

Liverpool - IMD 219

Manchester City - IMD 599

Manchester United - IMD 10,235

Newcastle United - 18,570/6,582 (split)

Norwich - IMD 12,253

Reading - IMD 6,843

Southampton - IMD 855

Spurs - IMD 950

Stoke - IMD 2,171

Sunderland - IMD 6,291

Swansea - WIMD 374

West Brom - IMD 1,619

West Ham - IMD 3,593

Wigan - IMD 429

QPR - IMD 7,848

In Newcastle, the stadium is split between two areas, so I have given the deprivation ranks for both areas. The English Indices of Deprivation obviously only cover England so I have included a map for Swansea which uses the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation figure from 2011. More on that in a previous post. Similar patterns exist in Scotland, as you can see from the bottom part of this 2009 post. What does this tell us that we didn't already know? Not much, but it does provide some hard data and an overview of the contrast between the wealth of clubs and the poverty of many local areas they are located in.

* The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 are used here. They rank each of the 32,482 Lower Layer Super Output Areas of England from most deprived (a rank of 1) to least deprived (a rank of 32,482), taking into account such things as income, employment, education and health. There was a similar piece of analysis in Regeneration and Renewal in 2009 but this looked at the local authority areas only and not the specific location of stadia.

The National Planning Policy Framework

I work in a planning department at an English university so I'm duty bound to blog today on the new National Planning Policy Framework for England. It might sound a bit boring but it's likely to have significant implications for the built environment for years to come and it represents the biggest change to the planning system in England in a generation (or more).

What are the main changes? Well, much has been made of the reduction of planning policy guidance from more than 1,000 pages to around 50. That's one of the most obvious changes and there is certainly a good deal of simplification associated with the NPPF. It has 13 main sections (image below), from 'Building a strong, competitive economy' to 'Facilitating the sustainable use of minerals'. It also covers 'Protecting Green Belt land', which is something I've written about recently on this blog in relation to data.

I was interested to see that the Glossary (excellent as it is in many ways) does not include a definition of 'sustainable development' (the NPPF's key guiding principle). Instead, it says on p. 2 that:

"The purpose of the planning system is to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. The policies in paragraphs 18 to 219, taken as a whole, constitute the Government's view of what sustainable development in England means in practice for the planning system."

Paragraphs 18 to 219. That's quite a lot, but I didn't really expect it to be defined, given the inherent difficulties associated with defining it. To be fair, the Government could not really be expected to define this but it does seem strange that their view of the core principle of the NPPF cannot be articulated in fewer than 200 paragraphs.

Other interesting snippets I noticed so far...

• Section 3 on 'Supporting a prosperous rural economy' is only 157 words long (much shorter than, for example, Section 7 on 'Requiring good design' - which gets 840 words)
• The word 'regeneration' appears 3 times in the NPPF
• Among the documents the NPPF replaces is the 1990 PPG on 'Development on Unstable Land' - the NPPF mentions the word 'unstable' once
• The 'Plan-making' section from p. 37 says that 'Local plans are key to delivering sustainable development'
• Local planning authorities have to prepare a Strategic Housing Market Assessment and Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment
• Parishes and 'neighbourhood forums' can use neighbourhood planning to 'grant planning permission' through Neighbourhood Development Orders (p. 44)
• Related to the point above, the NPPF states that 'Where a Neighbourhood Development Order has been made, a planning application is not required for development that is within the terms of the order' (p. 46)
• But, NDOs and Community Right to Build Orders 'require the support of the local community through a referendum' (p. 47). 
• Annex 2 (p. 50 to 57) is the Glossary and v. useful
• Annex 3 (p. 58 to 59) details the documents replaced by this new NPPF

The ministerial statement on the NPPF from Greg Clark is on his website and all other NPPF materials can be found on the CLG website. The NPPF pdf doesn't take long to read! It will be 'interesting' to see how all this plays out in practice over the next few years. Perhaps it will not be as good or as bad as people think...

A final point of reminder here - the NPPF applies to England and not the whole of the UK. 

Indices of Deprivation 2010

The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 were published this morning. Previous Indices were published in 2000, 2004 and 2007. I've decided to do a few posts on this because I find it very interesting and it does have real implications in relation to policy. In this post, I've done some basic mapping and analysis (click on any map to view it full size).

A quick snapshot first: the most deprived LSOA is in Tendring, Essex. It used to be in Liverpool. Overall, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Knowsley, Hull, Hackney and Tower Hamlets remain the most deprived local authorities. So, no major surprises.

Overview for the whole of England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Overview cartogram for England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Detailed map showing location of the most deprived LSOA in England.


A zoomable google map version of the above, for good measure.

View Tendring 018A in a larger map

A more focused map of Merseyside, showing Liverpool, Sefton and Knowsley.

Note: The Indices of Deprivation 2010 are produced for small areas called LSOAs. These lower layer super output areas are not 'neighbourhoods' in a formal sense but they often have a high degree of internal similarity. The average population of an LSOA is about 1500 and in total there are 32,482 of them in England. The data used in the Indices are mostly from 2008 but you can read more about this in the technical report.

Urban Change in Chicago

Not much to say today but I thought I'd post this photo from my recent visit to Chicago. I took it during a tour of Chicago public housing (see, we do serious things at conferences). The school is no longer there and much of the neighbourhood is no longer there but the sign lingers on. It makes you wonder why it was there in the first place. Chicago is fascinating from this perspective but it's people's neighbourhoods and people's lives that are affected so it was good to meet a local activist and get the low-down from the inside. It also made me think back to Hoop Dreams and the relationships between people and places.

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).]