Introduction

There is a strong and growing concern amongst those involved with rural policy making that traditional measures of disadvantage fail to disclose levels of need for services in rural areas. This is in part a reflection of the fact that the statistical indicators used fail to reflect the nature of rural deprivation. Disadvantaged and poor households in rural areas are unlikely to be spatially concentrated, they tend to live amongst the more affluent and the actual numbers involved tend to be small. Their presence is thus unlikely to make much of a statistical impact on an area (e.g. a ward or parish) basis. Commonly used indicators (such as unemployment and car ownership) perform in different ways in urban and rural contexts whilst potentially useful indicators (such as ways of capturing social isolation) tend not to be available.

There is thus growing acknowledgement that poverty and deprivation differ between the city and the countryside and that this is not adequately captured in standard deprivation measures. However, the search for high quality indicators to inform rural service planning is complicated by the fact that disadvantage in rural areas is not merely a function of individual level attributes or household composition, but is inextricably linked to characteristics of the wider area. Some rural areas are more sparsely populated than others, some are located near to urban centres or large towns, while others are not in close proximity to supporting urban services. These differing area characteristics are associated with differing economies of scale for service providers that can have important implications for service accessibility and quality. For example, the higher unit costs in very sparse areas (where there are lower catchment populations) or in highly peripheral areas (where economies of scale associated with cross boundary flows in service use cannot be achieved) make attempts to promote equity of access considerably more difficult. The identification and measurement of service need in rural areas thus rests upon:

This report begins with a discussion of what is meant by rurality itself (section 2). This is because the way in which rurality is defined will have important implications for the way in which service needs and problems of access are interpreted. There is growing interest, for example, in the way in which peripherality appears to be associated with high levels of deprivation, low health status and poor service access.

Measures of rurality also alter with the scale at which analysis takes place. Key aspects of rurality and rural deprivation cannot always be gauged from standard indicators where the unit of analysis is too large to capture the heterogeneity that characterises rural areas. This issue is taken up in section 3, which reviews different ways of measuring rural deprivation and illustrates the difficulties of representing such need on an a real basis. The section concludes with a description of the various ways in which indicators are currently being improved, which include the development of measures that reflect the multiple dimensions of deprivation and the use of direct measures rather than proxies.

In section 4 we present an empirical analysis of the way in which different indices predict deprivation in rural areas and of their sensitivity to phenomena that are known to be associated with disadvantage. To this end, we examine how different deprivation indices predict variations in standardised illness and mortality ratios. We conclude that the DETR Index of Multiple Deprivation 2000 is best able to express the impact of disadvantage in rural areas. Finally, section 5 relates to the issue of accessibility. Here recent developments in the measurement and modelling of potential accessibility are reviewed.