A deprivation by constituency chart

Yesterday I decided to update a little chart I made after the 2017 General Election. It was inspired by a histogram that Owen Boswarva made and the idea was very simple: put England's 533 constituencies into 10 columns, with the most deprived on the left and least deprived on the right, and then colour it by party. The image below is the result. UPDATE: I have now done a full-UK version of this - see below. Also includes an animation and the individual frames which show one party at a time. Read the notes on the UK chart for more information.

Link to slightly higher resolution version

Full size version

Easier to decipher as a gif

Labour

Conservative

SNP

Liberal Democrats

DUP

Sinn Féin

Plaid Cymru

Green

Independent (at 2017 General Election)

OORDEEER!

I did this out of curiosity the last time and then after speaking to my colleague Philip Brown about data, elections and suchlike I decided to update and try to improve the older chart, which was informative but a bit of an assault on the eyeballs. I then saw that the House of Commons Library team re-ran their analysis aggregating the English Indices of Deprivation for the 533 English constituencies, so that was all I needed. And, by the way, the House of Commons Library team are in my opinion doing some of the best data curation, manipulation and analysis out there - really great team. 

Of course, the results are hardly surprising but I didn't expect the sorting to be quite so stark. Naturally I tweeted the graphic and lots of people also found it interesting. So, I've done a slightly different version below which has the constituency names in the boxes - but you'll have to click and zoom to read those.

Full-size version here

Zoomed-in extract of the image above

It's not possible to do a full UK-wide one using a single dataset from the same time point, because the deprivation indices for each country of the UK are slightly different and cover different time period but it would be nice to have been able to - and at least in Scotland the colours would be quite spread across the deprivation spectrum. UPDATE: as you can see above, this last statement is true and I've also done the full-UK chart.

I also did one more version of the graphic, this time in a very long single column vertical one, the original of which is here, with a lower resolution one below. The tends to work great on a mobile but needs a bit of zooming in and out in most browsers. I've added the 'required swing %' figure to this one, showing what percent vote shift it would take for a constituency to change hands.

Click to see full size

Looks like this when full width on screen

There wasn't any great agenda or rhyme or reason behind this, I just wanted to see what it looked like and in particular how much the colours would be grouped and where the obvious anomalies were.

Given what I do for a living I'm duty-bound to point out the following obvious but important things:

• Correlation is not the same as causation (yawn! but true).
• I don't believe voting Labour makes you poor, or that voting Conservative makes you rich, as some people online seem to have implied - or even that 'the poor' vote Labour or 'the rich' vote Conservative - and I certainly wasn't trying to demonstrate either of these but understand that's sometimes how people see things.
• There is a reasonably high amount of variation within most constituencies in relation to levels of deprivation, although at the top and bottom of the scale a lot less than you might imagine - I'm currently working on a project all about this kind of thing.
• Colours - they are the html values for the party colours from the respective party websites.
• The aggregation method used to derive the constituency rankings could be done a number of different ways, and therefore can produce slightly different results based on how you do it but the order of places would always be broadly the same.

That's all for now.

Research with QGIS, R and speaking to people

I recently led a piece of research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on disconnected neighbourhoods - basically, it looked at the UK's most deprived areas and how connected or disconnected they are to their wider cities in relation to jobs and housing. You can read the brief Findings or Full Report here. This post is just about the methods we used and some of the outputs. We used open source software QGIS and R for the analysis (led by Ruth Hamilton) and we also spoke to policymakers across the country (Rich Crisp and Ryan Powell).

You can see the full report here

We looked at those areas in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales that fell within the 20% most deprived on the national deprivation indices in each nation and then explored data relating to household moves and commuting (plus lots more). We updated and developed two area typologies to help us make sense of the data - and to see how things changed we produced riverplots (Sankey diagrams) in R (this was done by the briliant Ruth Hamilton).

Created with the Riverplot package in R

I also did a little bit myself with open source software, including updating a 'divided cities' type graphic I produced in the past - looking at the spatial split between most and least deprived parts of 13 cities across the UK, as you can see below. See Sheffield in particular for a very stark divide.

Red = most deprived, blue = least deprived

Our colleagues Rich Crisp and Ryan Powell then spoke with more than 140 policymakers in cities across the UK - another nice 'open source' method. You can read more about this in Chapter 6 of the report but the bottom line is that if we want things to change for the better then we need to take a different approach to urban policy - a more inclusive approach.

As I said, there are two typologies, and we then combined these into a matrix in an attempt to understand area types a bit better and then suggest possible policy responses that might make sense. What each category means is explained in the report but in the figure below you can probably make sense of what 'Gentrifier' areas are and what those labelled 'Disconnected' are.

The shaded areas might be a good policy focus to begin with

The point of this blog post, however, was just to highlight how useful and effective open source software now is, and can be, in real-world research. Advocates will already know this but many more have yet to make the leap so hopefully this will provide just a little bit of inspiration or motivation to do so.

We produced hundreds of maps for the project (too many for the report) so you can probably find one for your area in the online folders. Two examples - one for each typology - are shown below.

Residential typology map of Birmingham

Travel to work typology map for Glasgow

For more on the methods used to develop the typology, see the Annexes in the Full report.

What can explain Brexit?

There have been enough maps, charts and infographics on Brexit already, so I'll just post three scatterplots here. I was trying to figure out what was going on, so I explored a few key variables that I thought might explain why people voted the way they did. I chose deprivation, lack of qualifications and higher qualifications, using 2011 Census data. I only focused on England here. Some of it has been done already by John Burn-Murdoch at the FT, though in a different (much nicer) way.

First, deprivation is - overall - not strongly correlated with percent voting leave at the local authority level (R-squared is 0.0369). I used 2015 Indices of Deprivation at the local authority level in the scatterplot below, where I've also labelled some areas and coloured the points by region. 

Click to enlarge

Next, I decided to look at whether the percent of people with no qualifications correlated closely with the percent voting for leave in each local authority in England. This was much more successful, with an R-Squared of 0.6197. 

A pretty convincing pattern here

Finally, I decided to see whether higher levels of education - rather than lack of education - was more strongly associated with the propensity to vote leave, and it is. In the scatterplot below I compare the percent with Level 4 qualifications or above with the percent voting to leave the EU. This produces an R-squared value of 0.8053, which is really pretty high.

The outlier to the top left is the City of London

This may not be particularly surprising, given what is known about the link between voting patterns and education but I think it's particularly interesting because of i) the historic significance of this referendum and ii) the people likely to be hardest hit by any post-Brexit economic downturn.

Data sources: Census 2011 table KS501EW via NOMIS and EU Referendum data is from the Electoral Commission. I have shared the spreadsheet (and the Level 4 vs. % leave) here in case anyone wants to look more closely or make an interactive version.

Deprivation and affluence, cheek-by-jowl

As part of some work I'm doing for a 'fracturing societies' seminar this summer, I've been thinking about the spatial manifestation of inequality in England. Some places will always be rich and some always poor - if we're defining it relatively - but the location of these places, their characteristics and their wider neighbourhoods may all differ significantly. That's one of the reasons I made a 10% most/least deprived interactive map last week and shared it online.

You can explore the map online here

This then raised the question in my mind of how many of the 10% most deprived areas in England neighbour areas among the 10% least deprived. In part, this was inspired by the famous image of São Paulo rich and poor taken by Tuca Vieira in 2007 and widely circulated since then (see below). The photo shows the favela of Paraisópolis on the left, right next to the upscale Morumbi neighbourhood over the wall. You can't really imagine a more stark divide. For more on this, see Teresa Caldeira's article from LSE Cities.

Credit: Tuca Vieira, 2007 - original here

In England, things are not quite as extreme as this example, but there is quite significant socio-spatial inequality nonetheless, as documented over the past few years by many observers, including the SASI research group here in Sheffield. It matters for many reasons, but life chances, health, opportunity and education are just a few of the major advantages/disadvantages experienced by people on either side of the rich/poor divide. 

The answer to my original question of how many of the 10% most deprived areas in England have a neighbouring area in the 10% least deprived is, I found, 75. I set about investigating further and here's what I found. You can see all the maps here but below I've provided a few examples to illustrate my points.

The most deprived area in England with a 10% least deprived neighbour is in Birmingham. On each map I've added in the LSOA name at the top, in addition to the LSOA ranks of the areas in question - as you can see here the one in Birmingham is ranked 38 out of 32,844 so it's right at the very most deprived end of the spectrum. But you can also see that the relationship with the neighouring area isn't like the example from São Paulo above. It's just more a feature of the way the boundaries are drawn. This is the case in quite a lot of the areas, but not all.

Just Google the LSOA name to see an interactive map

One area that's a bit different and where the most and least deprived are almost literally next door is in Gateshead. On one side of the road we have one of the most deprived areas in England right next to one of the least deprived over the other side. Mind you, the location of people within these is still not exactly of the 'cheek-by-jowl' category we see in São Paulo. Most local authorities don't have any areas with 10% most/least neighbours, but Kettering has three, one of which you can see below.

Not many most/least deprived are like this

This is partly an artefact of how the boundaries are drawn

More striking examples of areas where people live next door but in opposite ends of the deprivation spectrum can be found in Leicester, Norwich, Nottingham and Swindon - see below.

You can see this contrast on Google Maps

The Indices of Deprivation 2015 which I used to map the 10% most and least deprived areas do not measure affluence but the areas in the least deprived 10% are significantly wealthier, healthier and have lower crime rates - among many other differences - so it's a pretty reasonable proxy for affluence in many respects. 

All of this raises the vexed 'so what' question once more. Is spatial inequality worse when you can see it? Is it worse, or somehow more grotesque, when rich and poor live side-by-side? Wasn't that what the 'mixed communities' policies of the 2000s were all about? Well, sort of but not really. 

There is a mix of things going on here to create these patterns - sometimes it's housebuilding on brownfield land, sometimes there are physical or artificial features dividing neighbouring areas such as rivers, roads or railway lines, sometimes it's a boundary effect and the people in households aren't really neighbours. Either way, I find it very interesting and troubling at the same time. The plan is to keep working on this. I know it's not exactly São Paulo levels of contrast, but the big gaps between places - and particularly the life chances of young people - are really important.

Click on the image below to see all the maps.

Here are all 75 '10% most' areas with a '10% least' neighbour 

How Urban is Deprivation in England?

The answer to the question above is 'very'. However, it's not all about the big cities, and there are significant pockets of deprivation in rural areas that don't often get the attention they deserve. In this post I take a little look at the distribution of England's most deprived areas (the 20%) in relation to the 2011 Rural-Urban Classification - developed for the government by Paul Brindley and Peter Bibby here at Sheffield. The ideas is to try to shed more light on the kinds of places that we find among England's 'most deprived'. Let's take a look at this in overview first of all.

This maps shows the 20% most deprived, with rural-urban area types

Sometimes it's a bit difficult to tell from a map like this how it all breaks down by category, so I also did two sets of charts - one each for the % and total in each deprivation decile in England (where decile 1 is most deprived, 10 least deprived). In the % charts below (click to enlarge) you can see the nature of the distribution by rural-urban classification type, followed by the total number in each decile in the second set of charts.

Green for rural types, red for urban types here

By absolute numbers, the urban areas dominate

Given the nature of what is being measured, and the distribution of the population by socio-economic status, this is not particularly surprising. What I do find interesting is the extent of deprivation among non-'conurbation' areas (one of the types in the rural-urban classification). You can see these in the map below, coloured blue, followed by a zoomed-in map for Blackpool.

These areas seem to get less press than the more famous examples

All these areas in Blackpool are among England's 20% most deprived

In some areas there is more of a mix of area types on the rural-urban classification, with rural, town and conurbation areas all featuring. Two examples here are County Durham and Barnsley, as you can see in the maps below (green for rural, blue for town, red for conurbation). This reflects the industrial heritage of these places but it also raises the issue that the policy solutions (or responses) may need to be tailored to meet the needs of very different local contexts. Well, that's for another day but at least this typology helps us identify the different character of areas that are often lumped together.

It's easy to spot the coalfield areas here

Barnsley also has a mix of areas

One area of the country that often seems to be overlooked - at least from a national perspective - is Cornwall. It's a very large local authority and the patterns of deprivation here are much more dispersed and not in conurbations. So, I've extracted a couple of maps here too - one with place names and one without.

Significant areas of deprivation here, but less obvious on a map

This time with labels, for anyone not from Cornwall...

To highlight one further kind of deprivation in England I have also produced a map of East Lindsey, which helps identify some areas of deprivation on the east coast. As you can see, they are a mix of rural (green) and town in the rural-urban classification.

East Lindsey is the 5th largest local authority in England

So, the answer to the question is of course that deprivation in England is 'very urban' but also that we find pockets of deprivation all across the country and often not in the kinds of inner-city locations we hear most about in the news, in government reports and in my maps. So, I'm trying to draw a bit more attention to it with this post.

Finally, here's all the areas together in a single animated gif, just to highlight the variable geography of the most deprived 20% by area type.

If you're looking for a map of deprivation in your area, see my IMD 2015 resources page.