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Measuring Deprivation in Scotland: Developing a Long-Term Strategy: Final Report

7. Relationships with other measures

In proposing new or amended measures of deprivation at either individual or area level, this work needs to be aware of the many existing initiatives to provide social indicators for monitoring or evaluation purposes. This section summarises possible areas of overlap or duplication and suggests how these might be resolved.

7.1 Individual measures

Area deprivation indices have been calculated by Government for at least twenty years but there has been no similar attempt to measure deprivation at an individual level. There are established measures of the number of individuals in income poverty, showing the proportion of people below various thresholds (Scottish Executive, 2003). In recent years, the Government has begun to publish a wide range of different indicators on social exclusion or social injustice, at both UK and Scottish levels (DWP, 2002a; Scottish Executive, 2002b). These provide information on separate aspects of these problem but do not attempt to measure the number of people excluded or suffering injustice. Few of the Social Justice Milestones relate directly to living standards as they concentrate on matters over which the Executive feels it has most direct control. The problems of overlap are therefore limited.

In Section 6, we argue that there should be separate standards developed to measure adult and child deprivation. In the latter case, there is a risk of overlapping with the work the DWP is currently undertaking to determine how to measure child poverty (DWP, 2002b and 2003). The DWP has taken a very broad approach to defining "poverty" which is likely to go beyond a simple income measure and may include a measure of material deprivation as well. Work is underway to explore the possibility of some indicators of material deprivation being included in the Family Resources Survey (FRS) and a report on this is expected by the end of 2003. The FRS has a national sample of around 25,000 households so that this exercise would provide a robust estimate for levels of child deprivation for Scotland as a whole particularly since the Executive has provided funding to increase the sample and improve coverage in Scotland. Unless there is clear evidence that people in Scotland would define a different set of necessities of life for children, it would make sense to ensure that there is close co-ordination with the DWP's measure if this goes ahead.

There is also work on-going within the European Commission to develop indicators of deprivation to make comparisons across the EU. This work is being undertaken by Eurostat as part of its programme of work on statistics on living conditions (Eurostat, 2003). While it would be useful to have co-ordination between the measures, the Eurostat work is heavily constrained by the difficulties of devising pan-European social indicators. We recommend that the Executive continues to monitor that work but that it should not be overly concerned to ensure any Scottish measure fits within this European framework.

7.2 Area-based measures

With the area-based measure, the main issue is the extent to which individual indicators in the index overlap with small area indicators developed for other purposes. In its statement on implementing the Community Regeneration Statement, the Scottish Executive produced a set of indicators that it will use to measure its contribution to "closing the opportunity gap between deprived communities and the rest of Scotland" (Table 7.1). These indicators were chosen because they were seen as relevant for monitoring one aspect of "deprivation" but also because they reflected existing targets that individual Executive departments are responsible for delivering. As with the Social Justice Milestones, these focus on matters which the Executive is able to influence directly. Some key indicators of deprivation, such as low income, were excluded because they do not reflect areas for which Scottish Executive departments have direct responsibility (Scottish Executive, 2002c).

As a result, it should not be seen as problematic if there are significant differences between these indicators and the set used to construct the area deprivation index. In this work, it was never the intention to devise a measure which would be used as a performance indicator or as the basis of a target against which the "success" of Government policy would be judged in some direct fashion. Furthermore, it is not clear what the Community Regeneration Statement means by the term "deprivation" in this context.

Table 7.1: Community Regeneration Statement monitoring indicators

Source: Scottish Executive (2002c)

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