Condition of Nottinghamshire - National context

b) National Context

The government and other agencies have over the last few years begun to focus much more strongly upon the need to address the problems of small areas and neighbourhoods. As part of this focus, government has also become much more aware of the need for more accurate measurement of social and economic conditions at local levels.

The last edition of Condition of Nottinghamshire was published just before the final Indices of Deprivation 2000 were released by the government. The new Index was compiled by taking a basket of 33 indicators covering areas such as Employment, Income, Health, Housing and so on, combining these into an overall measure of deprivation for each district and ward in England. Condition 2000 gave the early district level results from the draft Index but these were subsequently amended and reissued by government alongside the release of the ward based data.

The final district based figures showed that both Mansfield and Ashfield were, in terms of the Index, significantly deprived, being ranked at 29th and 31st respectively. The position of all the districts and boroughs in the county is shown in Table 1 below. The relative deprivation of Mansfield and Ashfield as defined by the Index has been recognised by government through the allocation of monies through the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund.

Table 1

The ward breakdown of the Index is even more interesting for providing a finer grained picture of deprivation within the county. The overall ward ranking shows that there are 16 Nottinghamshire wards amongst the 10% most deprived wards in England and 50 wards in the most deprived 25%. Map D1 shows the location of these wards within the county.

It is also instructive to examine the various domains from which the overall index is compiled. As referred to above there are six of these domains in all, each of which has been compiled from a basket of indicators. The Education, Skills and Training domain for example was compiled from 5 indicators including several which measure school performance. When the Education domain is mapped at a ward level ( see Map D2), a very different picture from that shown in the overall Index emerges, with a significantly different geographical spread.

One of the major criticisms of the earlier 1998 Index was that the results emphasised urban problems to the detriment of rural and coalfield areas. The new Index attempted to address these criticisms through incorporating several new indicators including for example access to primary schools and post offices which were combined into a new Geographical Access to Services domain. When this domain is separately examined a very different picture of need, emphasising for example the effects of rurality, or sparseness of services, emerges. Map D3 shows this most graphically, indicating where in the county problems may be caused by poor access to services. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this map shows that these problems are largely concentrated in the east and south east of the county.