This report provides an in-depth analysis of the trends in economic deprivation in the New Deal for Communities (NDC) areas, comparator areas and other neighbourhoods in England between 1999 and 2005. It seeks to addresses two questions:

The analyses draw on data from the recently constructed Economic Deprivation Index (EDI) which provides a consistent measure of overall economic deprivation and income and employment deprivation that can be used to compare different areas and track change over time. The nalyses also make use of specially constructed ‘neighbourhoods’ in order to compare the NDC areas with other geographically contingent areas of similar size.

The NDC Programme is a 10 year programme targeting 39 of the most deprived neighbourhoods across England. The NDC Programme is a key element of the Government’s National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal which has the goal of reducing multiple deprivation and disadvantage in deprived areas across five key themes: worklessness, crime, health, education and skills, housing and the physical environment. This report focuses on economic deprivation in NDC areas. This relates directly to the worklessness theme but also has broader links with all themes as people living in economically deprived areas are more likely to experience deprivation in multiple forms.

This report is part of the second phase of the national evaluation of the NDC Programme. The national evaluation is being conducted by a consortium of researchers lead by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University.

This report draws on the recently constructed EDI to track the path of economic deprivation in NDC areas, comparator areas and other similarly deprived areas in England between 1999 and 2005. The EDI is a composite measure of income and employment deprivation and the results presented here relate to overall economic deprivation as well as income and employment deprivation independently. The EDI itself provides a picture of the relative levels of deprivation; however, the scores on its composite domains represent absolute levels of income and employment deprivation. Hence the data here gives an indication of the changes occurring in NDC areas both in absolute and relative terms.

/01/2010

Kate Wilkinson and Michael Noble

research

Urban Policy > Economy knowledge & employment

Urban economy