Rural Development Sub-Committee

Inquiry into Poverty and Deprivation in Rural Wales

Response from Ceredigion County Council

Response of Ceredigion County Council to letter of 22^nd January 2008 inviting submission of evidence on the experiences and effectiveness of anti-poverty and anti-deprivation policies.

General

Problems

Perhaps the most fundamental issue for seeking to address poverty and deprivation issues is establishing a consistent approach to describing and measuring them across all areas and through time. This is closely allied to the problem of definition that the Rural Development Sub-Committee has asked should not be a focus of the responses.

Without good and robust time-series data it is impossible to make comparisons between areas and across time, so prioritisation between competing demands and most importantly measurement of the impact of interventions becomes less clear.

Poverty Wealth and Place in Britain 1969 - 2005 (Social and Spatial inequalities Research Group funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation) has highlighted the increasing rate of poverty (poor / breadline poor) in Ceredigion over the 20 years prior to 2000; increasing from 25.7% to 42% in settlements and from 20.6% to 29.6% outside the settlements in that period.

Recent studies both at UK level and Wales level have focussed attention on low pay. The Welsh Economy Labour Market Evaluation and Research Centre at Swansea University has monitored the economic impact of investments during the Objective 1 period. Their on-going work shows an increase in jobs in the County, a small increase in human capital (skills etc) and a fall in relative income levels here.

Specifically related to rural areas

The problems of good and robust time-series data are compounded in rural areas and rural communities by sparsity and the small size of settlements. Within rural communities levels of poverty and deprivation are equal to or may exceed those areas more readily identifiable in more urban areas.

(For example; local analyses used to support the designation of Communities First areas in Ceredigion. Anonymised full post-code counts of housing benefit recipients were compared with the number of postal delivery points in that full post-code. Potential distortions of the denominator by non-residential delivery points will have less effect in rural areas and potentially lead to under-measurement of concentrations in more urban tracts where commercial activities may be found alongside housing. So the approach allows some comparisons to be drawn within sparsely populated areas.).

Without good and comparable data interventions are difficult and their impact is impossible to evaluate.

Areas of substantial poverty and deprivation exist throughout rural areas. They represent very significant proportions of local communities. Conventional approaches to describing and measuring poverty and deprivation have used common areal bases which are TOO LARGE to distinguish and therefore describe the smaller rural pockets of extreme poverty and deprivation. These approaches have been led by the availability of data and information for areas that consequently have little or no relation to the issues being described and are too coarse to reflect the life and functioning of rural communities. Areas such as enumeration districts (historically) and LSOAs have no relation to communities or the functioning of the rural economy. Examples of where these units 'fit’ and can describe significant areas of poverty and deprivation are chance occurrences and extremely rare in 'Rural Wales’.

The size or extent of the areal unit used to describe and measure poverty and deprivation across Wales and therefore its impact on life in local areas should be appropriate to the size of the community in the local area.

This is clearly not so presently for most rural areas.

Equally larger areal units should be used across Wales in more urban areas both to relate the data more closely the communities described and to reduce data problems such as auto-correlation in the data sets.

A key issue is that distance and travel times severely constrain opportunity and choice in rural areas. This works in both directions; the catchment population for centrally-placed services and functions is usually small and only increases marginally by increasing the area; for citizens constraints of time and distance usually mean that there is only a limited element of opportunity or of choice in their social and economic decisions.

These aspects of the issue have a number of consequences:

Central services or functions serving rural areas remain at a disadvantage unable to achieve economies of scale through enlarging their catchment population
Central services may be limited or curtailed in the face of centralizing tendencies and policies (e.g. introducing new health technology requiring high population thresholds for cost-effective working)
Some central services and infrastructure may not be at all present in rural areas (e.g. mains gas network or cable services)
Citizens in rural areas are unable to achieve personal development in social or economic areas because of reduced opportunity and choice in rural areas. The range of choice of e.g. employment may be severely limited leading to under-employment or migration to other areas.
Citizens of rural areas face higher personal costs in time, money and stress to access a range of services that are relatively easily reached in urban/suburban UK (e.g. certain common health services)
Citizens of rural areas are vulnerable to system change e.g. the closure of an existing employer or other function usually means there is no equivalent within travel range. In the case of employment with specialist skills or experience this will also lead to under-employment or migration to other areas.
Increasing pressures to achieving cost-effectiveness in public as well as private sectors through economies of scale tend to put rural areas and their citizens at a disadvantage.
High specification systems and technical infrastructure demand high throughput, and consequently high threshold populations. If these become specified as universal or minimal requirements this tends to encourage further centralization of services to the detriment of otherwise adequate provision in rural areas (e.g. addition of specialised health services in emergency).
Policies and deliveries that emphasise choice tend to disadvantage rural areas where choice may be constrained. Areas become further disadvantaged when public services are increasingly assessed and managed through the exercise of choice.
There remains a substantial dependence on private car to access work, services and health care. Rural areas are differentially affected because of this dependence by rising costs of fuels.
The whole concept of collaboration and co-operation in the development of the 14 -19 education agenda, though praiseworthy, is extremely difficult to work out in the reality of distance and time (general lack of access to services) in rural areas, especially if local communities, small and vulnerable as they are, are to be maintained and enhanced.

Housing across much of Ceredigion cannot be connected to mains gas supplies and is dependent on higher cost fuels for heating. These dependences aggravated by low pay lead to widespread fuel poverty across the County.

Initiatives

The largest current initiative addressing poverty and deprivation in this part of rural Wales is the Convergence Programme for West Wales and the Valleys 2007 - 2013. The Programme is one of a number across the European Union which concentrate resources in regions with less than 75% of the union average 'wealth’ - poorer and more deprived regions, bringing EU funding and levering domestic funds, to bring areas back closer to the Union averages, concentrating on jobs and growth, and so to 'converge’ them.

Ceredigion is the most significant, substantial and wholly rural area included in that programme area but represent only around 4% of the population of that area.

Because of requirements for large projects, it is very difficult for predominately rural areas to engage with the programme and address specific rural poverty and deprivation.

Where there is a specific focus within the programme on poverty and deprivation, in Priority 5 Theme1 Physical Regeneration, targeting using existing data sets and synthetic indicators based on inappropriately large areal units has excluded all rural areas from this theme’s priorities.

The Rural Development Plan for Wales 2007 -2013 has provided opportunities to support activity in rural Wales, (eligible rural wards are specifically defined in the document), but its focus is on the wider agenda of supporting the restructuring of rural areas and it shares that common agenda and 'tool-kit’ with RDPs which cover all member states and is not primarily focussed on disparities in wealth / poverty / deprivation between or across regions.

Communities First is a major anti poverty / deprivation initiative. There are some designations in rural areas including in Ceredigion, but rural areas have largely been excluded from the initiative because the designation has primarily been driven by national deprivation indices - which do not adequately describe deprivation in rural areas. The approach depends on developing capacity within the deprived community to able it to influence and improve its own circumstances and also influence others and bend other delivery programmes. The approach is difficult in sparsely populated rural areas because of the difficulties of achieving a 'critical mass’ of capacity to enable the initiative to take off.

Other initiatives are more targeted and often have limited delivery time scales. Examples include over the last 6 years the Healthy Heart Programme - an Inequalities in Health programme that has targeted those suffering 'deprivation’ using a community development approach. However, this funding has now come to an end with no continuation funding found despite evidence demonstrating the benefits of this programme. Also a Mind Your Heart programme running locally (funded from Wanless funding) that targets those with mental health problems to lead healthier lifestyles. Again, a time limited programme.

Possible Measures for WAG implementation

WAG should investigate other approaches to describing and measuring poverty and deprivation geographically allow for the sparsity of rural areas and will recognise the impact of poverty and deprivation on smaller rural communities, not allowing it 'to fall below the radar’. There should be a break from the standardisation of areal unit size in key opinion advising actions like the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Presently the delivery of many WAG programmes seeks to identify outputs such as jobs created; jobs are identified by many studies as not the core issue in rural areas. Interventions should focus on raising levels of pay. Business support interventions should focus on raising pay levels.

Higher levels of pay arising from publicly supported investments could be incentivised through wage subsidy schemes. There is a considerable history in rural Wales of local authorities working co-operatively to support job growth through wage subsidy schemes funded by previous ESF programmes.

WAG should focus the economic outcomes from the new round of European structural funding on the quality of jobs created and levels of pay.

As part of a partnership approach between Assembly, Central Government and local government there should be coordinated action to address these policy objectives. This should include the allocation of ring fenced resources for targeting poverty/deprivation in each county area but with local discretion on how this funding is used to meet local needs - e.g. through a local area agreement but to meet and achieve agreed milestones. Local authority actions might include More flexible planning for transport and service. However, these schemes are difficult to get off the ground and sustain due to financial pressures, and tend to be time limited funding. They are also not available to all. Service planning needs to occur in a coordinated way and not in isolation between departments and agencies. Local Authorities must prioritise in line with Assembly initiatives as well, otherwise momentum is lost. LAs are best placed - because of local knowledge and accountability - to work out these initiatives at the micro level. Similar targets and milestones should be agreed for Assembly and Central Government delivered actions.

Introduction of a formal and transparent process for the consideration of the rural implications of all policies, distributions and other decisions and a commitment to 'rural-proofing’ the actions of the Assembly and Assembly Government.

An example of this may be drawn from the amount of money being projected into activities which perceive poverty and deprivation simply in conventional, urban terms (free breakfasts, the RAISE programme, Flying Start etc.). Rural areas are losing out substantially and the balance needs to be redressed. Greater consideration needs to be given to the way that WAG expects Authorities in rural areas to respond to developments at, for example 14-19, from urban areas. The whole concept of collaboration and co-operation, though praiseworthy, is extremely difficult to work out in the reality of distance and time (general lack of access to services) in rural areas, especially if local communities, small and vulnerable as they are, are to be maintained and enhanced. There needs to be a more sensitive and supportive approach to the whole issue, especially in view of the generally high educational achievements of such areas. Undoubtedly, there are developments that need to take place, especially in providing vocational courses and work-based education, but this is a really big issue which WAG needs to take on board before it is too late.

Good practice

Seek to achieve outcomes related to pay levels and moving away from low pay rather than simply seek to increase the number of jobs.
More targeting of Central Government resources through Tax Credit system
More close working to bring together education, skills and childcare in sparsely populated areas
Local flexibilities in national programmes like Want to Work
Higher levels of Income Support and Job Seekers Allowance Earnings allowed while in receipt of out-of-work benefits should be increased to encourage participation in the labour market.
Consideration of the impact the high levels of public sector employment in rural Wales and the prevalence of low paid workers in that sector.
Attention is urgently needed to examine how sustainable jobs with adequate levels of income can be developed in rural areas.
JRF have advocated investigating how progress could be made toward a 'Minimum Income Standard’ might be made (www.minimumincomestandard.org)

Population Groups

Joseph Rowntree Foundation analysis has highlighted the following issues in rural Ceredigion for these population groups:

Children and Young People

Poor access to child care
Lack of opportunity in employment and the social sphere
The perception of lack of opportunity and choice is likely to lead to early out-migration
Likely to feel trapped in rural areas
High public transport costs or non-existent transport make them reliant on others

Economically Active

Low pay
Housing quality and in particular the lack of central heating.
Limiting long term illness is significantly above the average for Wales.
Basic skills attainment levels are below average
Lack of access to employment
Lack of access to services
Fuel poverty

Economically Inactive

Lack of access to services
Lack of access to programmes and activities to address inactivity issues
Housing quality and in particular the lack of central heating
Fuel poverty

Older People

Lack of access to both primary and secondary health care
Lack of access to services
Housing quality and in particular the lack of central heating
Fuel poverty

Conclusion

The Council presents the above-mentioned comments for the consideration of the Sub-Committee and would also commend to you the Response submitted by the WLGA.

D Morgan
Chief Administration Officer
Ceredigion County Council
Penmorfa
Aberaeron
SA46 0PA

10^th March 2008