What does it mean for a neighbourhood to be poor? Since the 1970s, the UK government has regularly sought to answer this question by pulling together a range of statistics about the people who live there. The aim is to enable funding to be directed where it is most needed, and to make possible place-based initiatives alongside those aimed at individuals or households.
For a Labour government trailing Reform UK in the polls, the latest data – which is weighted towards income and employment, but also includes health and educational outcomes – should serve as a wake-up call. Virtually all the areas in England either trapped in the “most deprived”, or climbing up the ranks to join them, are in the party’s urban or post-industrial heartlands.
A neighbourhood in the Jaywick & St Osyth area of Tendring, near Clacton in Essex, has the top spot on the table, known as the index of multiple deprivation, for the fourth time in a row. Seven of the top 10 places are filled by neighbourhoods in Blackpool. Middlesbrough, Birmingham, Hartlepool, Hull and Manchester also feature heavily. Similar mapping exercises in the devolved nations are carried out separately. While the tools and lexicon of policymaking around deprivation have grown more sophisticated, the reality is that millions of people remain in the same old trap.
Work to free them has picked up under this government after the levelling up strategy flopped. Analysis by the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods shows that investment in the north-east during this parliament will be seven times higher than it was under Boris Johnson, if current trends continue. Labour’s successor scheme, Pride in Place, will see 169 communities in England receive £20m each. Its goal is the kind of tangible improvements – youth clubs, prospering high streets and so on – that could boost trust in politics along with morale, and help lessen the appeal of outrage-fuelled populists.
Such spending is urgent and necessary if Labour is to demonstrate its commitment to a renewed public realm. Similar programmes including the New Deal for Communities (under New Labour) and Big Local, funded by the national lottery, have achieved some good results in the past.
But the warning contained in the updated index must not be ignored. Neighbourhood-level deprivation, which is a relative measure and far broader than poverty calculated via incomes, is extraordinarily hard to shift. The biggest change to the official figures, compared with six years ago, is mostly due to the decision to calculate incomes after rather than before housing costs. The effect is to underscore the devastating impact of high rents in areas including inner London. The result is likely to be higher funding settlements for some of the affected councils. If this helps to focus minds on the urgent need for affordable housing, and support for family finances in the meantime, that will be beneficial. But new priorities must not displace longer-standing problems in post-industrial and coastal areas – such as those featured in the Guardian’s Against the Tide series.
Schemes such as Pride in Place can strengthen civil society as well as physical infrastructure. But they must not be viewed as a substitute for policies targeting incomes in these places. If neighbourhoods stuck in deprivation for decades are to have a chance, the children in them must be given opportunities. The latest deprivation data strengthens the case for removing the limits placed on benefits by the Tories, including the two-child benefit cap.
