Elsevier

Journal of Rural Studies

Volume 83, April 2021, Pages 155-164
Journal of Rural Studies

In a straightjacket? Targeting deprivation in rural Scotland in the context of localism and austerity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.02.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Rural local authorities face particular challenges in targeting deprived people and places.

  • Approaches to area targeting in the rural South of Scotland are examined using qualitative methods.

  • Interventions are shaped by national priorities, and indicators focused on urban patterns of deprivation.

  • .While rural local authorities can try to contest and adapt these, their capacity to do so has been constrained by austerity.

Abstract

There is a long history of area-based interventions targeted at places seen as being particularly disadvantaged. However, the implementation of such approaches is problematic in rural areas on a number of grounds, including the more dispersed patterns of deprivation and a reliance on high-profile indices of multiple deprivation that are arguably less appropriate in rural contexts. While there is a growing interest in place-based service delivery and localism as a means to tackling geographical inequalities, this sits alongside the pursuit of fiscal austerity by national government that has disproportionately affected local government expenditure. Based on a case study of two largely rural regions in the South of Scotland, this paper explores how deprivation and spatial inequalities are understood and addressed by local government in rural regions, and what evidence is used as a basis for targeting ‘deprived’ areas. The results show that although interventions are targeted at specific areas in a variety of ways, local targeting is broadly undertaken within nationally determined frameworks, and in particular based on those indicators identified by central government as constituting an appropriate evidence base. It is argued that there are fundamental tensions around whether the aim of this type of targeting is to direct resources at specific area-based problems, or whether individuals' residence within particular ‘deprived’ areas is used as a proxy for their likely experience of specific types of deprivation. This ambiguity has particular implications for rural regions, where residence is less closely linked with individual- or household-level deprivation. While there are opportunities for rural authorities to contest the dominance of ‘urban-centric’ indicators, these are limited by central control of resources and the ongoing hollowing out of local government through austerity.

Introduction

Over the decade since the global financial crisis and the great recession that followed, poverty, deprivation and socio-economic inequalities have re-emerged as high-profile issues across a range of policy areas. One way in which this has manifested itself is in concern with the uneven geographies of deprivation and spatial inequality. At the national scale, this is seen most prominently in debates around places that have been ‘left behind’ (Goodwin and Heath, 2016) or ‘don't matter’ (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018), in the UK linked to concerns around highly uneven regional development. There is also, however, a long-standing interest in more localised and persistent concentrations of disadvantage at the neighbourhood level; this has tended to focus on inner-city neighbourhoods or urban peripheries (Atterton, 2017). Ever more sophisticated area-based deprivation indices have been developed to measure these, and although criticised for being less useful for rural areas, these measures have gained in prominence as tools for national and local government to target policies and interventions at particular apparently disadvantaged places. There are of course also extensive debates about the effectiveness of this type of targeting (e.g. Crisp et al., 2014).

This growing concern with localised inequalities has emerged in the context of two parallel trends for local governance. On the one hand, in the name of community empowerment or localism agendas, central government has sought to promote a shift towards ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’ focused service provision as part of a transition towards an ‘enabling state’ (Markantoni et al., 2018). In Scotland, as part of the UK with devolved responsibility over a range of social policy, this is linked to a ‘return to place’ (Matthews, 2012), based on a recognition that outcomes for individuals are both highly geographically variable and highly geographically clustered (Mair et al., 2011), and as a practical step towards developing more integrated and ‘joined up’ approaches as part of a broader agenda of public service reform (Bynner, 2016; Atterton, 2017).

On the other hand, local government, which is in many cases at the front line of delivering these shifting priorities, has also been disproportionately affected by cuts in public sector expenditure resulting from the pursuit of austerity since 2010 (Gray and Barford, 2018). There has been a tendency to view these impacts through the lens of ‘austerity urbanism’ (Peck, 2012) that sees cities as the key sites of fiscal consolidation, although there is evidence that – at least in Scotland – some rural local authorities have experienced greatest per capita reductions in spending (Hastings et al., 2015).

Taken together, the intersection of these issues – a pressure to demonstrate action on socio-economic outcomes at local level, the hollowing out of local government through austerity, and high-profile indicators focused on typically urban concentrations of deprivation – presents significant and specific challenges in rural areas, not least of which is how to target resources at both more traditionally deprived neighbourhoods in their larger towns and a more dispersed and sometimes remote disadvantaged population. This paper attempts to explore and illustrate this based on the example of two largely rural regions in the South of Scotland, and proceeds as follows. Firstly, the Scottish policy context is briefly set out, with a focus on responses to inequality and to the developing mechanisms for local governance. Secondly, there is an examination of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation as a typical example of an official and nationally applied indicator, and of some of the conceptual and practical difficulties with its application to rural areas. Evidence from the case study regions is then presented, based on analysis of poverty and deprivation indicators, policy documents and interviews with local authority officers and elected members, illustrating some of the ways in which local interventions are targeted at particular places, followed by a discussion of the role of this particular ‘official’ national indicator in shaping approaches to addressing spatial inequalities and how this relates to the rationale for these interventions. The paper concludes by setting out the conflicting pressures and dilemmas for rural local authorities in this policy area, in the context of an increasing emphasis on the need for ‘place-based’ approaches, but where the allocation of public funding, and the indicators used as evidence for this, remains largely centrally determined.

Section snippets

Area-based deprivation and rurality

In the decade since the great recession that followed the global financial crisis, the long-term trend of falling poverty in the UK has levelled off (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2017), the number of people experiencing severe poverty has increased (Fitzpatrick et al., 2016), and growing precarity in employment, income and housing has led to the widespread experience of financial stress (Bramley and Bailey, 2017). At the same time, welfare reforms, with increased conditionality and use of

Socio-economic inequality in Scotland: local governance and policy responses

At the Scottish level, there have been a variety of responses to issues of poverty, deprivation and inequality in recent years, with tackling the ‘significant inequalities in Scottish society’ identified as one of the National Outcomes in the Scottish Government's National Performance Framework (Scottish Government, 2016b) In parallel, the goal of ‘inclusive growth’ has been introduced as a priority in the most recent Government Economic Strategy (Scottish Government 2015). This represents “a

Methods and study area

This research project aimed to investigate how deprivation and deprived areas are viewed by local authorities in rural regions, how they have attempted to address these issues and how the results of the SIMD, and other sources of evidence, are used to inform approaches to targeting deprivation. This was approached through case studies of two local authority areas – the lowest tier of formal government – in the South of Scotland. Both Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders are largely

1: Area deprivation

Based on the headline SIMD scores, datazones in both local authority areas are clustered around the middle of the national rankings. This is illustrated in Fig. 2, which shows the place of each datazone in the two local authority areas on the national distribution from most to least deprived. Dumfries and Galloway, having a larger population, has more datazones overall, with a slightly greater proportion of these than the Scottish Borders in the national most deprived quintile.

There are,

Discussion

The growing prominence of IMDs and other indicators is at least in part associated with the discourse of evidence-based policy making, which itself is a central issue in public service reform in Scotland (Coutts and Brotchie, 2017). As noted in the variety of critiques from the policy studies literature, however (e.g. Cairney, 2016; Parkhurst, 2017; Sanderson, 2011), public policy emerges from a range of competing values and priorities, including the construction of what is considered as

Conclusions

This paper has explored how rural local authorities have sought to address issues related to socio-economic deprivation within the ‘straightjacket’ of being asked to do ‘more with less’. Although there are both national and local strategic approaches to addressing poverty and deprivation, there are also an array of relevant policies and interventions cutting across the traditional ‘service’-based structures of local authorities.

Local authorities serving rural areas face particular challenges in

CRediT author statement

David Clelland: Conceptualization; Methodology; Investigation; Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant scheme (RIG070725). Thanks to Dr Alexander Whitelaw for his comments on a draft of this paper.

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