The Scottish Government

Does the SIMD appropriately take account of issues in rural areas?

The SIMD does what it is designed to do and does it well i.e. identify small area concentrations of multiple deprivation across Scotland in a fair way. The indicators which make up the SIMD are chosen because they are measures of deprivation regardless of where a person lives. In rural areas, the issue is that poverty and deprivation are more spatially dispersed than in urban areas. In SIMD 2006, of the 15% most deprived data zones, 98.2% of them are in urban areas and only 1.8% in rural areas. ¹ This does not mean that there is no deprivation in rural areas.

The SIMD does take into account rural issues and some of the specific advancements in the SIMD to address issues raised by rural interests in the past include:

• the use of small geographical units of measurement (data zones) to enable pockets of deprivation to be identified (pockets which may have been masked by analysis using larger geographies such as wards or postcode sectors);
• inclusion of a domain on geographic access to services (including drive and public transport times); and
• averaging unemployment counts to take account of seasonal fluctuations in employment patterns.

The SIMD identifies small area concentrations of multiple deprivation - techniques which may help to identify individual level deprivation in rural areas include:

• examining individual domains of SIMD e.g. Income, Employment to identify the number of people experiencing this particular type of deprivation.

¹ SIMD 2006 data are grouped using the Scottish Government's Urban-Rural Classification 2005-2006. Further details can be obtained at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/07/31114822/0