Official stats, and how to publish them - a post with Taylor Swift

I’ve previously discussed on here how I found the portrayal of one particular set of government statistics – the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation – problematic. To summarise that argument – reporting, based on government press releases, called certain neighbourhoods “the poorest”, even though IMD does not measure poverty, is a relative measure, and most problematically, this added to the stigma of the neighbourhoods. I covered some of the impact of this in one of the papers I’m most proud of. So when I was contacted by the statisticians working on SIMD16 to come and have a chat with them about how they could present it in a better way, I leapt at the opportunity. When their report came out I was extremely impressed. You can download it here – it’s quite a big PDF. The things I particularly like were: 

• The very clear statement of what SIMD measures and how it works, and can be used, on page two 
• The case studies that demonstrate that living in a neighbourhood ranked as deprived by SIMD isn’t awful, and that it can help target resources for great things to happen 
• The very clear “do not use SIMD for” list on page six 
• The fact that nowhere does it say which is the “most” or “least” deprived neighbourhood. 

The team that did SIMD were nominated for a UK Civil Service Award, which they won!

Here’s @PermSecScot congratulating member of Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations team-winners of #csawards Use of Evidence award. Her pride is plain to see! pic.twitter.com/1uYo8ULhiB

— Suzannah Brecknell (@SuzannahCSW) November 23, 2017

I was incredibly pleased on their behalf, because they really deserve it.

via GIPHY

And, they’ve only gone and done it again – not won an award, but produced a report that is staggeringly good.

via GIPHY

It’s a report on a set of experimental statistics that have used new questions on material deprivation asked in the Scottish Household Survey to create a local poverty measure. Have a look at it here. It is soooooo good. 

Again, they’ve combined qualitative data with the presentation of the statistics to make the reality of lived experience come to life, but in a non-stigmatising way, for example on page six “Mary” describes how: 

“My kettle blew up, so I went and got a kettle off my catalogue. Cause I wouldn’t have been able to afford to just go and buy a kettle. And I didn’t want to say to anybody, ‘I can’t afford a kettle.’ Ken, people are coming in for a cup of tea and that, and ‘oh my kettle’s blew up, and I can’t afford another one’” 

An absolutely brilliant way to describe what material poverty means. 

And it gets better. There are bar charts throughout which show a percentage with confidence intervals. Rather than getting bogged down with complex descriptions of confidence intervals and statistical significance, the charts are simply labelled “The bars show measurement uncertainty. Where two bars overlap, there may not be a real difference between the two groups”. I mean!!!!!!

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AND AND AND it gets even better. Not only do they have CI’s clearly labelled, they then go onto interpret them for you. Each chart has a very clear description of “What the data says” and “What the data doesn’t say” to ensure that people don’t misunderstand the charts.

via GIPHY

And the data is really interesting. I just wish all official statistics documents were published this well, with this much thought put into their presentation.

via GIPHY

With thanks to the Taylor Swift Open Data Institute.

Book Review - Good Times, Bad Times: The Myth of Them and Us

I reviewed this book for Housing Studies.

Good Times Bad Times – the welfare myth of them and us

John Hills

Bristol, Policy Press, 2015, 334+xviii pp. £12.99 (pbk)

ISBN 9781447320036

The election of a Conservative majority government in the UK in May 2015, with their manifesto commitment to cut the ‘welfare bill’ by £12 billion, has meant that the public debate within the UK on the costs of the social insurance system has remained high profile. In this tour de force, Professor John Hills provides a forensic account of social policy and socio-economic inequality in the UK, trying to provide evidence to inform what is often a ‘post evidence’ political debate (see, for example: Macdonald et al., 2014: on ‘hunting the yeti’ of the policy trope of households with three generations of unemployment).

The book is based on exhaustive analysis of administrative and survey data-sets across the UK. As a structuring device, the book returns to a television programme shown on ITV in the UK in 1989—Beat the Taxman. In this original programme, Hills’ colleague Julian Le Grand showed how through taxation and benefits from universal services an affluent family—the Osbornes—actually did far better from UK government expenditure than the worse off Ackroyd family.

The device of comparing the two families, now with grandchildren, is used throughout the book, and particularly in pen portraits that start each chapter, to compare the income and assets of the households involved, the proportion of household income each family pays in tax and what benefits in cash and services each household receives. At its core, the book returns to a key insight about the role of the welfare state stated in the original Beveridge report, that its role is more about redistributing resources over an individuals’ life course than redistributing resources between individuals (Figures 3.1–3.3, pp. 50–51). One of the interesting early points also made is that compared to other welfare systems around the world, the UK state does the most ‘work’ in redistributing income; we might have a very economically unequal society, but it is even more unequal before the state has done its work redistributing.

The book will hold particular interest for housing scholars in its consideration of the way the housing market, taxation and the benefits system interact in the UK. While this is not a central focus of the book, it includes important new analysis that will be of interest. For example, Chapter 6 ‘The long wave’ focuses on retirement and wealth. With many older people now being home owners outright, and supported by good pensions, the intergenerational divide between ‘baby boomers’ and younger people is another common trope of current social policy public discourse. Through his analysis of wealth in the UK, Professor Hills clearly demonstrates that it is inequalities within generations between the extremely wealthy and those with few assets or debts that are of greatest concern at all age ranges. These inequities are far greater than those between generations. Furthermore, policy in the UK clearly supports and exacerbates these inequalities: wealth is very lightly taxed, with home ownership barely taxed at all. For those receiving out-of-work benefits, levels of marginal taxation are actually a disincentive for lower income households to save.

Professor Hills also uses extensive new analysis on the UK benefits system, including the work of his colleagues at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE, to highlight the weaknesses around the housing benefits system in the UK. Using analysis of longitudinal data in Chapter 4, he demonstrates the normality of ‘high frequency’ living in the contemporary UK—that is, for most households, income varies dramatically across the year as members move into and out of insecure work. The benefits system, and particularly housing benefits and tax credits, serve to exaggerate rather than (as might be expected) smooth these swings in household income.

This is an excellent and competitively priced book that will be of interest to a wide audience and is accessible enough to be a core text on undergraduate reading lists. A possible weakness of the book relates directly to its intellectual strength: its core messages and use of a wealth of data are intellectual hard work. Though it no doubt acts as an intellectual bulwark against anti-welfare policy arguments, one does wonder if it will succeed in more widely challenging the ‘myths’ around welfare that it intends to.

As critical analysis suggests (Jensen & Tyler, 2015) current tropes and myths of policy discourse—three generations unemployed, benefits broods, households receiving over £100,000 a year in benefits—are enormously powerful in shaping policy and political discourse. These emotive images cannot easily be countered through analysis that shows that they are non-existent, or are extreme and explicable cases. Similarly, individual examples of the hardships caused by welfare reform are very emotive—such as the widely shared story of a man who had to bathe in an inflatable children’s paddling pool in his new living room after being evicted from his adapted home due to rent arrears caused by the ‘Bedroom Tax’ (see The Liverpool Echo 22 August 2015). But ultimately, these stories appear unable to change UK public attitudes in favour of cutting welfare benefits to the poorest in society, as shown in Chapter 9. As a reader, I cannot offer any answers regarding what would more effectively counter such public attitudes, but unfortunately, I doubt this book will be the solution.

Jensen, T. & Tyler, I. (2015) “Benefits broods”: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense, Critical Social Policy. 

Macdonald, R., Shildrick, T., & Furlong, A. (2014) In search of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’: Hunting the Yeti and shooting zombies, Critical Social Policy, 34(2), pp. 199–220. 

Queer-ying gentrification

18 months ago my colleague Dr Kirsten Besemer blogged on here about a surprise finding from some work we had done for the EHRC in Scotland – that a disproportionate number of non-heterosexual people lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. We’ve since written this up as a journal article now published in Housing Theory and Society.

In writing up the paper we set the findings in the broader gentrification literature. As Kirsten wrote about back in 2012, this was because the narrative of LGBT households as gentrification pioneers is dominant. Growing up, one of the formative events in my emerging sexuality was watching the Channel 4 drama Queer as Folk. Aiden Gillen’s character Stuart typified this narrative – he lived in a swanky loft apartment in central Manchester, in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, paid for through his successful career, despite the homophobia he had experienced in his life. Similarly, in a lot of American scholarship on the creative class, LGBT households are synonymous with the creative class. If you’re a gay man, you’re rich and live in a loft apartment.

Reading through the literature on gentrification and LGBT residential location choice that I did for this paper, it was surprising how much this narrative has not been troubled – even though Loretta Lees in this article from 2000(£) argued that gentrification scholarship needed a much greater focus on issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual identity as well as class. Apologies if I did miss out on particular literature, but the stuff that came up in my literature search was predominantly accepting of the gay gentrification narrative.

There are two issues with this. Firstly, it does smack of a growing heteronormativity that has been particularly noticeable in the debates around equal marriage. Gay men are now just seen as men, in fact they’re almost seen as uber-men as they aren’t burdened with childcare, and just want to settle down with their husband in a very tastefully decorated house. This ignores the “little things” that Panti Bliss talks so evocatively about that frame how non-heterosexual people experience the world. Yes, we have seen the declining significance of homophobia in our society, but as a non-heterosexual you still find yourself censoring your behaviour; or feel that lump of fear in your throat when you reveal the gender of your partner to a relative stranger. To presume that non-straight households are always gentrification pioneers, or increasingly second-wave gentrifiers, is to ignore diversity within the non-straight population, and impose a heteronormativity upon non-heterosexual people. If data on sexual orientation at a neighbourhood level is available for other countries, I would strongly encourage others to repeat our analysis to see if this is a Scottish phenomenon, or a broader one.

The second issue is one of the policy implications of recognising that the lives of non-heterosexual people might be difficult and therefore they find themselves living in socially-rented housing in deprived neighbourhoods. As we stated in our original Hard to Reach report it is all too easy to presume Scotland’s deprived neighbourhoods are homogenous, white, heterosexual working class areas. We have shown they are not. Our finding might be a geographic fluke because the non-heterosexual population is so small, although tests of statistical significance show it is not. That this non-straight population living in deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland is comparatively older, does give credence to the description an older LGBT-identifying friend described, of lots of older non-straight people who had pretty difficult lives, living in social housing in the west of Scotland. If we accept this, then we need to consider whether services for non-heterosexual people need to move out of inner-city locations, or that mainstream services in deprived neighbourhoods need greater skills and training around helping a non-heterosexual population that might have multiple problems. 

Poverty and social networks

I don't usually put images on this blog (I know I should) but for once I have one to hand that is very appropriate:

Regularly readers of this blog might recall back earlier this year I was writing about doing my review on the evidence around social networks and poverty for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (including this handy guide to key concepts). Well, it’s finally had the sign-off, so as requested by the JRF I’ve published it myself here, with all the “findings” of the reviews collated into one document here (big PDF).

I’m very glad I got the opportunity to do the review. It really expanded my knowledge and understanding of what poverty is, particularly the difficult dividing line between economic inequality and poverty. The position I now find myself in intellectually is understanding that economic inequality drives poverty, but the two are distinct concepts.

As I was applying for the review I had a few discussions about doing research for the JRF with other researchers. One thing that was emphasised was that the JRF want two things that scholars often find very difficult to deliver – unequivocal findings and practical recommendations on what could be done now to make things better. And this is very much the case, I found out, particularly with these reviews that were designed to feed into a strategy to tackle poverty in the UK.

One aspect of this was an invite down to the JRF office in London earlier this year to present my headline findings I five minutes. To brag about myself shamelessly, I think I did rather well here, managing to get through them in three minutes. I presented them in “slide-pack” format: a slide packed with information that you can use as a sort of precis, available here. I managed to summarise my findings so briefly because there was so little to talk about, essentially the main finding was, in the short term, if you want to tackle poverty don’t bother focusing on social networks.

What was extremely reassuring at the JRF event was one of the panel members wholeheartedly agreed with me and summarised the point better than I could. Intrinsically you want to think social networks must matter for tackling poverty – it’s not what you know, but who you know, right? If you know richer people, they’ll give you money at the most basic, right?

Not really; or there’s no evidence to show that’s the case. Poverty is most likely to exclude you from social networks due to shame and financial exclusion. The idea of strong working class communities of poorer people rallying around to support one-another just doesn’t seem to be supported by the evidence.

However, one frustration with our review was because it was one of the smaller reviews and was very tightly circumscribed we had to miss out lots of evidence we could see was there. For example, the evidence around social networks, health and wellbeing, and poverty are extremely strong indeed, but these could not be included within the scope of the review.

It wasn‘t all negative though – one thing that did come through clear from the evidence was the importance of passive interaction. This article in Discover Society about my favourite public space in the world, City Park in my home city of Bradford, exemplifies this excellently. Freely provided, open and accessible spaces such as schools, parks and libraries provide areas for us to rub-up against difference, including poverty. This is more likely to make us understand poverty a lot more and be more sympathetic to policies to tackle poverty and integrate people into society. So, alas my main finding was actually the usual one provided by lefty academics – don’t cut expenditure on public services.

Why the Improvement Service is wrong on this one

This morning the Improvement Service, the organisation that is “Supporting Scottish Local Government and its partners to deliver better outcomes for communities” has a lot of coverage in Holyrood magazine for some research it has done looking at the “outcomes” in the most deprived 330 datazones in Scotland, the middle 330 datazones, and the least deprived 330 datazones, according to SIMD.

This has got me extremely riled and angry, but I am going to try and remain reasonably calm as I argue my case. The head of the Improvement Service, Colin Mair, is quoted as saying:

“The relationships examined represent neighbourhoods rather than individuals or households, which raises another significant observation: people born into a deprived neighbourhood in Scotland have a higher chance of being income deprived, of needing emergency hospitalisation, being a victim of crime, and achieving poorly in education. In this respect, the neighbourhood in which you live can have a substantial impact on your future experiences and outcomes.”

Now, essentially, this boils down to the Improvement Service proving that margarine causes people to get divorced. I cannot easily find the full report of the IS’s research to see if these points are addressed in it, but here’s the reasons why the reporting of this report, and seemingly its interpretation, are wrong.

Firstly, the SIMD is an index of measures of things like income deprivation, emergency hospitalisation, crime victimisation and educational attainment. If lots of people do badly in these indicators in a neighbourhood, then it will be low down in the index. That is what the index measures. Basically, all they are reporting is auto-correlation – that something is correlated to itself. If every single person in Scotland had the same outcomes, there would still be a “most deprived” and “least deprived” neighbourhoods in Scotland due to natural variation, it’s just the differences between them would be very slight and down to natural variation.

Secondly, Colin Mair speaks of people “born into” deprived neighbourhoods. The only longitudinal measure – i.e. a measure of the same thing over different points in time – that the SIMD includes is the datazone boundaries themselves. We can say nothing about the individuals within it. Between any two data points of the SIMD, the population of the neighbourhood might have completely changed. We can see this happening as the most deprived neighbourhoods slowly depopulate – by the 2013 SIMD they had about 14% of the population, as opposed to 15% if the population was randomly distributed – and the least deprived neighbourhoods increase in population. In the most recent SIMD the least deprived neighbourhood – Meggetland in Edinburgh – had a population 800 people too high. The Scottish Government know this and are thinking of redrawing the datazone boundaries, the trouble is if you do that the data is no longer comparable over time.

Thirdly, the SIMD is a relative measure of deprivation. This means two things that weaken this study. It cannot measure “affluence”; the indicators chosen mean that once you get into the top of the index it becomes pointless, as all the measures are focused on characteristics of deprivation. You cannot meaningfully say there is something different between a neighbourhood with one unemployed person and a neighbourhood with two unemployed people. Secondly, the datazone rankings move around a lot because neighbourhoods change. The most succinct way of summing this up is the knowledge of the residents of Ferguslie Park that there neighbourhood “became” the most deprived in Scotland not because it got any worse, but because places that were more deprived in Glasgow were demolished and the populations dispersed.

All we can say is that a third of all Scotland’s socially rented housing is in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland making up two-thirds of the housing in these neighbourhoods, and house prices are substantially lower. Subsequently it is housing allocations, spatial planning and housing markets that create deprived communities. Basically, we have historically put all our social housing in large estates; now it is people in greatest need who need social housing, so these neighbourhoods become concentrations of need and deprivation.

If people “born into” these neighbourhoods had worse outcomes, then we would be talking about neighbourhood effects existing – that is, an effect on life chances from living in a neighbourhood, that is over-and-above the effects of poverty, unemployment and other factors on the individual. And it’s fair to say that the evidence for the existence of neighbourhood effects in Scotland is mixed. A few years back Atkinson and Kintrea(£) identified very small effects on education and health, but nothing to justify the sort of language used by Colin Mair. More recently, van Ham and Manley (£) used actual longitudinal data from the Scottish Census, via the Scottish Longitudinal Survey, to look at whether neighbourhood had any impact on the chances of being employed on individuals. They found no evidence for a neighbourhood effect – the higher concentration of poor employment outcomes (i.e. being unemployed) was simply down to people having to access housing in these neighbourhoods.

From this though, I do not want to say that the neighbourhood does not matter at all. It just does not matter in the way the Improvement Service argue. Services should be targeted at deprived neighbourhoods, but not because if we “fix” these neighbourhoods we suddenly will solve the problems of inequality – we will not as the majority of people experiencing poverty do not live in the most deprived neighbourhoods. But you can make specific useful interventions: there is evidence that targeting employment initiatives at people living in deprived neighbourhoods gets you a bit more “bang for your buck”; the concentration of socially rented housing in these neighbourhoods means a third of all disabled people in Scotland live in these neighbourhoods, so you’d disproportionately help those people. Also, we do need to recognise because of the specific concentration of poverty and deprivation in these neighbourhoods they do need greater investment in basic services like environmental services (street cleaning etc.). The inverse care law is still in place.

What worries me is that the language used by the Improvement Service does two very bad things. Firstly, as I’ve argued here, it continues the pathologising of deprived neighbourhoods – blaming them for the problems that other people have lumped on them, without recognising the broader structural causes, especially the operation of housing allocations and markets. Secondly, it feeds into the deeply problematic “early intervention” agenda that has been the rage since the “cycles of poverty” literature of the 1960s, and as I highlighted last week was utterly demolished in the 1970s. Like the idea that there are “families with three generations of people who are workless” this idea that if the all-powerful bureaucrat sails into households and communities and tells them to pull up their socks and behave in a good, middle-class way, then they won’t be deprived keeps coming back again and again. To borrow a phrase used to described intergenerational worklessness myth, it’s like shooting zombies(£). But it’s a zombie I’ll keep shooting. As I argue here, yes we need a focus on place in Scottish social policy, but we cannot pretend this is going to solve wider structural problems in our whole society regarding wealth and income inequality, poor public services and entrenched spatial inequality as a result of historic planning decisions.

Finally, if we were serious about changing outcomes in neighbourhoods in Scotland then we would stop focusing on the bottom and focus at the top – demolish Morningside and Milngavie and turn them into mixed communities.

I’ve included a lot of links to paywalled academic papers in here – do get in touch if you want copies. 

And I’ve written this in a rage and quite quickly, so apologies for any egregious errors; as I say I could not easily access the Improvement Service’s actual report, so this is more of a reflection on the way it was interpreted by Holyrood Magazine.

Plus ca change?

Just re-read Gilding the Ghetto, the angry critical report of the Community Development Projects published in 1977. Far too much of it rings true today (click the links for contemporary policy in Scotland):

"Despite being urged to 'cover new ground' the various projects embody the now very familiar thinking: self-help, participation, surveys of needs, mechanisms for reducing dependence on the welfare services, assistance to socially handicapped families, pre-school compensatory education and coordination of services".

Community planning in action - Leith Community Conference

So, I took this afternoon off as annual leave and went to our local neighbourhood partnership community conference as it was in the church hall across the road and there are quite a lot of issues in Leith, that are basic service-level issues, that need attention and can be solved fairly easily. These are the sort of things a good neighbourhood plan (NB. COMPLETELY different from an English neighbourhood plan – this has nothing to do with land-use planning). I went to the event very sceptical given the my experiences of community planning during my doctoral research – I always use my mum’s aphorism to describe these: “councillor, where do you stand on dog shit”, “I don’t stand on it, I slide in it”. Also because I generally think community planning has a long way to go before it is effective in doing what it says on the tin – see here and here.

Actually the event was quite good. So here’s why:

It was organised well and wide range of people attended – with crèche facilities for parents and a free lunch (if I’d known the “refreshments” were going to be that good I’d have been keen to attend!). The only things they could have done better would have been microphones and an induction loop. What’s even better was the extra information and consultation they are going to bring in, including attending the “soup kitchen” at the church on a Sunday morning to hear the views of the people who attend that.

Poverty – obviously this is not a good thing. We were broken up into discussion groups of around eight and we first of all had to see whether we agreed with the list of priorities established from a previous self-selection questionnaire (which I had already completed). From two of these groups, one being the group I was in, came a focus on poverty in the neighbourhood. This continued with the discussion of another group during the next phase where we had to discuss what actions we should do. Now, arguably, at a neighbourhood level there’s little we can do to tackle poverty, and problems such as the Bedroom Tax and benefits sanctions. However, it really impressed me that we were talking about it openly and there was no question that it was a horrendous thing that the foodbank at the church has 1,000 clients and that people have been seen scavenging in bins in desperation for food.

Health services – twice it was pointed out that GPs services are massively overstretched in the neighbourhood with people having to wait three weeks for an appointment. I also added my experience of how overstretched local pharmacy services are, even though we have three within 25 yards of each other at the Foot of the Walk. This is an issue that’s been raised by our regional MSP Sarah Boyack, yet given it’s nearly 35 years since The Inverse Care Law was published I was shocked to hear how overstretched services are, and evidence of inequality compared to less deprived neighbourhoods. However, given how poorly the NHS has engaged with neighbourhood-level community planning structures across Scotland, I do really wonder whether this is something that the neighbourhood partnership can do anything about.

We won! – at the end we had to put sticky dots onto the actions we liked most and two of our group’s suggestions won. This is good because….

Cleaner air – one of the suggestions that got 17 dots was to make the air cleaner in Leith by planting trees and encourage walking by improving the built environment. This was prompted by someone from Greener Leith who have been leading a campaign on the issue. Even they admitted it was a niche issue, but as soon as it was explained people agreed with it. Which was fantastic to see.

Better environmental services – we weren’t the only group to suggest this, but the way we framed it got it the most votes. I drew on the Clean Sweep work the JRF funded to highlight that in a neighbourhood: with the highest population density in Scotland (as per the 2011 census), with a high rate of income poverty (so people can’t afford £20 for a pick-up of rubbish), with massive problems of trade waste, and footfall for an extremely busy town centre; we need very high density good environmental services across the board – bin emptying and barrow beats – to keep the neighbourhood clean and tidy. This also got nods from one of the local councillors. Frustratingly, chatting to council officers they still slipped into negative stigmatising views of residents that completely ignore these massive structural reasons behind the problems of neighbourhood cleanliness.

Community empowerment – another surprising theme that kept coming up in discussion was moving away from community planning as it is, towards community empowerment. Leith neighbourhood partnership does it’s £eith Decides community budgeting event which is very good. However, I suggested, if we’re going to do the sort of fancy coproduced, partnership policy making that cuts through complexity (the sort the Christie Commission dreamed of) we’re going to need more community power over local budgets and local priorities. We’re going to need something that aims to be like what Our Place aims to be. The good news is, it seems in Edinburgh, we need to watch this space. However, depressingly, an idea along these lines from our group got dismissed out of hand. This was the suggestion that the £20 cost for a waste uplift should be removed in deprived neighbourhoods, as it does seem to cause fly-tipping as people cannot afford it. The council then spend more money doing reactive lifts in response to resident complaints. It got dismissed because of the view people would then think they can just throw things out for free. I pointed out that’s what they do at the moment anyway…

My only minor disappointment with the day was the broader way it was organised. The independent facilitator was very good; however it was limited to two hours and was very structured – we had to obey what we were told to do. I think I would have preferred it if it was a longer event with more deliberation allowed. In particular, I have a thing about sticky-dot voting. It’s easy, but it closes down debate and ignores that most people probably agree with all the points. What was telling for me was that as people stuck their dots on and stood back from the flipcharts, they then began to chat in small groups. I could help but think that the officers should have been ear-wigging these conversations to find out even more.

I ended the event chatting to the neighbourhood partnership convener, Councillor Deirdre Brock*and brought to her an idea I’d had at the end. A student at Heriot-Watt did their dissertation on the charetteplus process done by Planning Aid for Scotland. One thing this highlighted was the process mopped up a lot of information of the sort collected here – concerns about local services and problems – which then went nowhere as they were not planning concerns. I suggested that running a charette focused on Leith central and the Foot of the Walk could bring in some really valuable information on making the area better in a place-making way, turning the Foot of the Walk in particular into a place, not a road junction, and also place-keeping, maintaining the neighbourhood as a nice place to live in future. It looked like my idea fell on fertile ground.

Finally, we were asked to write anonymously on flipchart paper what we would do after the event. I wrote that I would keep an eye on how clean the neighbourhood was to see whether we had been listened to. And that is the key thing here – there were very good ideas, and many practical things that the Council and other service providers (the NHS and Police Scotland mainly) can do, with very little expense, to make Leith better. Now we just have to see them do it.

If you want to see a bit more about the event, see the tweets here.

* you might recognise her from her life as an actor.

Tackling poverty?

I’m just back from two days spent at the Poverty Alliance fifth Poverty Assembly. It’s far too long since I’ve been at an event like this and I really enjoyed it, although was a bit disappointed how attendance thinned out, especially among the sort of policymakers who could probably learn the most and make a difference.

I want to reflect for a moment on the plenary speeches today by Jackie Killeen, Scotland Director of the Big Lottery Fund and Julia Unwin, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which I thought were very interesting. Jackie highlighted a programme the BLF have been running called Support and Connect which essentially funds projects to alleviate real hardship – foodbanks etc. She explained that she was very surprised they had ended up funding projects like this as it was not something they thought they would end up doing.

Julia Unwin also did something that is very unfashionable and highlighted the massive progress on tackling poverty between until 2010 (and particular from 1992). Particular achievements were the disconnection between older age and poverty. It had been taken for granted that as you grew older you would end up in extreme poverty. We got to the stage where we had almost eradicated that issue before 2010. We had also got to the stage where the connection between poverty and squalor had almost been added – yes people experienced poverty, but they did not also have to live in very poor quality housing. We had also moved on from talking about destitution to talking about relative poverty. We are now back to having to consider helping people with absolutely nothing. The powerful message of this bit of her speech was that we can make decisions to make a big difference to tackle poverty if there is a political will.

She went on to a similar point as Jackie was making – that post 2008 and with austerity, things have changed. We have demographic pressures on services and massive reductions in budgets. During the rest of the two days, I spent a lot of time in a session discussion whether area regeneration can make a difference in tackling poverty. Reflecting on the plenaries, I could not help but think we are at the same place when it comes to regeneration. From 1997 in particular, we were making big strides in renewing housing in deprived neighbourhoods, starting to target services and coproduce services in interesting ways in neighbourhoods (such as the developments after the New Commitment to Neighbourhood Renewal). For all their localist rhetoric, at Westminster policy is tumbling backwards as funding is diverted away from deprived local authorities and as the Communities and Local Government Select Committee said, they don’t even have a regeneration policy.

I’d like to say things are better in Scotland. We do have a regeneration strategy - Achieving a Sustainable Future. However, when a Scottish Government civil servant talked through this I was very troubled by the way the policy problem was framed and therefore the solutions. The contemporary focus on community empowerment in Scotland, although laudable, does easily slip into pathologising discourses, that blame communities for not being empowered enough, completely ignoring the massive inequalities when it comes to empowerment and capability, not to mention the states’ response.

A really interesting point on the civil servants slides was that they wanted to empower communities to “exploit opportunities in communities” based on their essays. I was fascinated by the lack of agency and choice of words. Exploit is a very strong word: capital exploits labour; colonialism exploited slaves; economic growth exploits the planet and its resources. Yet, without agency “exploit” becomes lovely – all communities have assets, we just have to put them to work. But we have to ask who is doing the exploiting? Can the community exploit their own assets and maintain the benefits of this? Are public services exploiting local communities to do things they can no longer afford to do (clean the streets, care for vulnerable children, alleviate poverty)? Are community assets being exploited to make a small cabal of developers a lot of money?

Quite practically, when I look at the delivery of services around me and listen to people in projects, it seems that local authorities in Scotland and other public services are retreating from good work they were doing because of the cuts, be that through the “Strathclydisation” of Police Scotland ending community policing in the Lothians as I used to experience it or through the litter that I wade through on the streets of my local neighbourhood, or the cuts that community projects are facing as local authorities protect core, statutory services.

But, just like with tackling poverty, we can make choices to make more money available for the state as a whole, and for deprived neighbourhoods. On the latter was a nice idea (which I’m sort of editing here) that came out of our group, which is having a much more strategic approach to public sector recruitment to make sure that it benefits deprived neighbourhoods the most. I think this would be a very exciting area for spatial strategy to go into, and there is some good practice I’ve read about already from the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. On the former, today started with a panel of MSPs. I’d recommend going back on the #PovertyAssembly twitter tag and look at some of the tweets from it. Basically, it did end up being rather a Patrick Harvie love-in. But much as almost everyone agreed with his wonderful blend of Green politics and radical economics, this really has not been turned into action. And I’m sorry, I cannot see it being turned into action anytime soon unless our politicians are braver and lead public debate more. We live in a very rich country. We have enough money to pay for a large, supportive state, and to ensure everyone, no matter where they live, has a dignified life. 

Pensions

A bit off the urban planning track, but I know far too much about pensions. I’m on the management committee of a housing association in Scotland and the whole sector is having to make some very difficult decisions around pensions now because of the Scottish Housing Associations Pension Scheme (SHAPS). The Scottish Housing Regulator is all over this as it could actually bring down the whole housing association movement in Scotland.

What being heavily involved in this has meant is I now know an awful lot about what pensions mean to individuals and to employers, and I’ve ruminated quite a lot on the social and policy side of pensions. Therefore, Gideon’s announcement on pensions in this week’s budget very much worries me, as it does lots of other people.

Essentially a pension collectivises the risk of not being being able to earn an income due to old age. If it’s a state-pension that collective risk is borne by future tax-payers. If it’s a defined benefit scheme then that risk is collectivised among members of the scheme – alas SHAPS has collectivised too much. If it’s defined contribution then the annuity you should buy collectivises that risk among the private customers of an insurance company. As most people are highlighting, the danger is that people will not buy an annuity and will be left in penury during their retirement. Oddly enough, in the committee of the housing association, a couple of current pensioners talked about how you used to be able to cash in DB superanns and going on shopping sprees, leaving their pot now a lot more reduced. Also, the risk of old age will no longer be pooled among the annuities held which could mean that the annuity market will collapse, or operate much less efficiently. Essentially this is individualising the risk of old age.

My experience of pensions really made me realise what an utter mess UK policy is. In particular, we have not had an open debate about how much income people should have in older age and how that should be distributed. In particular, whether the pensions system should be redistributive. One thing that really angers me is the statement often made that DB schemes are unaffordable because of increasing life expectancy. This utterly fails to recognise health inequalities. Someone on a low income will enjoy their meagre retirement income for a few years after retirement. In fact, with the increasing retirement age, they’re likely to die on the job. People on very high incomes are likely to live a very long time into their retirement, drawing down an enormous income. This is what is not affordable. This is why, much as I’m very glad I’m in a final salary scheme, the inequities they produce are shocking. They essentially put existing income inequalities into a photocopier that travels through time – magnifying existing inequalities far into the future.

Gideon’s changes make this worse for DC schemes as essentially your DC pot for the very wealthy will just become extremely tax-efficient savings scheme and people will be able to cash it in on retirement (removing a chunk of funding from the collective pool) and live off their saved bankers’ bonuses etc.

This is why, what really angers me about the pensions announcement is it’s individualisation of the risk of old age. Looking after people should be a collective effort. We are a very rich country and we can afford to give everybody a good income in their retirement that reflects their earnings. However, if we fully collectivised provision (through a proper state pension) then we could start asking questions such as: should lower income people pay in relatively less reflecting their lower life expectancy? Should higher income people pay in relatively more to reflect their higher life expectancy?

As a start, I think everyone who joins a pension scheme should have to have a one-day training session from an actuary on their pension paid for by the provider. When I joined by DB scheme I just knew it was good. I did not know what I was actually getting at all. I’ve had ample training and now know some of this. A pension is the largest, most important financial product anyone ever buys and generally as consumers we know nothing about it. 

It’s not what you know but how you know it

I’ve (literally) just finished* my evidence review for the JRF on poverty and social networks that I’ve blogged about here, here and here and sent it off for their feedback (which I’ve just received some of, all generally quite positive *phew*). Because it’s still drafty, I’m not going to release it to the world for a while yet, but I did want to blog about the methodological thoughts it’s led me to have, and this links to the title of the post. The phrase “it’s not what you know but who you know” really demonstrates the “folk” interest in the links between social networks and socio-economic mobility. However, now I’ve read a load of this evidence, methodologically, it actually seems to be more about how you know about these social networks. This is for two specific reasons: methodology, methods and disciplinary contexts; and bigger epistemological experiences about experience and how this is “collected” by the research process.

On the first point, the review was the first time in a while to read a good chunk of North American social science. I’ve read about the “methods wars” between qualitative and quantitative social science in America, and the feeling that the latter had won; I’d also listened to American delegates at the International Interpretive Policy Analysis conference bemoan the dominance of the rational actor model and quantitative methods. But I’d really not realised how dominant quants where. Successive were based on big datasets, with endless methodology sections explaining how survey instruments were used, with big scary equations that, as a qualitative researcher, I didn’t have a clue about. What struck me about them was they usually ended with, firstly, a lot of uncertainty about their findings and secondly a lot of unanswered questions. So, for example, some regression models would support theories, others would contradict them; when you controlled for different factors the overall conclusion was “meh”. And the unanswered questions didn’t help – invariably there would be the conclusion “but we cannot understand causation here”.

Which brings me to one of my favourite methodology books I’ve read for a long time, Mike Savage’s Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940. It’s essentially a history of social science methods in the UK from 1940 and it’s the historical approach that I love. To go back to the title of this whole blog – urbanity and history – that I chose three years ago, it’s always struck me how social scientists don’t get history, or even have much of a sensitivity to time. Savage sort of makes this point – the technocratic sociology that emerged in the 1950s was a study of the now. I often find it funny – and I’m guilty of doing this myself – how the strictures of social science writing mean that people will present evidence that is decades old in such a way as to suggest its contemporary, without any reflection on how the social world might have changed since then, and reflexively, how that knowledge has since changed the world that is now the object of study. The presumption is the knowledge is scientific and presented in the linear, “standing on the shoulder of giants” way. What I love about Savage’s book is it highlights the social context where the methods of modern British sociology/social science, particularly the survey and semi-structured interview, emerged from.

So, why does this all matter, well for me it brings us onto the second bigger epistemological question. The best way to talk about this is how it emerged in the evidence review itself. In terms of that folk idea of “it’s not what you know, but who you know” is the idea that if poorer people know wealthier people then they will do better in life. It also leads to the more negative idea, which I’m deeply uncomfortable with for its use in “underclass” discourses, of “cultures” of poverty – that experiencing poverty around others in the same situation lessens your chances of leaving poverty because you behave like them and this excludes you from wider society and opportunities. A lot of this sort of theorisation lies behind the “neighbourhood effects” literature I read for the evidence review; I discussed the problems with this in this blog post. However, I want to go back to a striking theme running through the neighbourhood effects literature: basically, most quantitative studies that try and find a neighbourhood effect either find a very small impact, or none at all, or the data is too messy to form consistent conclusions. Qualitative studies tend to find there is an impact, people recognise it when they work or live in the neighbourhoods. This is a contrast discussed in a very well-title article by Atkinson and Kintrea – Opportunity and despair it’s all in there (£) – and in the critique of neighbourhood effects by Tom Slater (who critiques the distance of the quants researchers from their research subjects).

In this quants study of neighbourhood effects in Scotland, van Ham and Manley suggest that it might be down to the geography that we measure neighbourhood effects on. Usually we have to do statistical analysis at the level of census super outputs areas or datazones, or similar administrative boundaries that have quite large populations (1000+). Like any “contagion”, if neighbourhood effects are diluted among a large population then they will have less of an impact. Van Ham and Manley suggest that we might need geographies of just a few hundred people to find a neighbourhood effect. However, this leads me to question (prompted by a point someone made at a Poverty Alliance panel in Glasgow on Friday 28 February) whether this then is a neighbourhood effect – surely if the geography becomes really small then we’re talking about a sociological or socio-psychological impact; residence is just by-the-by as the social network could be anywhere? All points raised in the quants neighbourhood effects literature.

However, I think we are talking about a bigger epistemological point here that we need to recognise fully and debate and play with. For example, this study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found no quantitative neighbourhood effect on young people’s employment opportunities from postcode discrimination, a neighbourhood effect, whereas this qualitative study also for the JRF, found that young people who live in deprived neighbourhoods that are distant from local labour markets and geographically isolated have reduced geographical horizons for their job search strategies, a neighbourhood effect. These different findings, I think, can only be explained by differences is how we know, no what we know. These are different experiences of young people in deprived neighbourhoods understood in different ways.

As a qualitative researcher I use my research to illuminate how socio-structural factors – particularly socio-economic inequality and status – have an impact on people’s lives. However, a problem for me is that a broader focus on “lived experience” of conditions such as poverty can easily lapse into the personal and focus on individual deficiencies or strengths, effectively blaming the poor, rather than emphasising the socio-structural forces that limit people’s opportunities and psychological reactions in any given context. This is a criticism that is levelled quite often at neighbourhood effects researchers, but most I know put the socio-structural first and want to understand neighbourhood effects as something that makes the situation that much worse. At its most problematic though, this individualising of experience and “witnessing” of negative experiences does lead into the sort of nonsense the Centre for Social Justice come up with – the production of ignorance – and deflects us from an emphasis on socio-structural causes. This is very apparent with the recent debate in the UK on changing the definition of child poverty and the conflation of cause and impact in the proposed measure (as well as initially coming up with something that is unmeasurable). I'm also always left with a nagging feeling that without the devolution of taxation and welfare matters to the Scottish Parliament and Government, policy-makers up here falls way to easily onto person-blaming, behavioural policy answers in areas like public health and social work, rather than the more obvious fact that if a few people had a lot less income and wealth and a lot of people had a little more, then a lot of problems we have would be far less severe. We get away with this victim-blaming because we can frame it in our lovely, fluffly, Scottish social democratic discourse. 

And I’ve just realised I’ve written myself into a corner. What am I saying? It seems that a lot of methodological choices in the social sciences are actually deeply circumscribed by the disciplinary and cultural context you find yourself in. If I was in the US my career would’ve probably have done nowhere because of my aversion and inability to wrangle big datasets and produce equations that are penis extensions. However, in the UK, with a methodological pluralism that welcomes qualitative research at the ethnographic end, I need to be careful that my research does highlight the structural, and doesn’t presume that cultural changes are all that are needed in society to produce more positive outcomes. 

* I finished the review on Thursday 27th, started writing this on Friday 28th and then got way-laid by a gin and tonic. I have now finished writing it.

Poverty and social networks - key concepts

Social networks across the literature there is no single definition of social networks, they can vary from knowing a neighbour to say “hello” to, to having strong ties to kin and friends that individuals can rely on.

Social Capital the concept of social capital is used widely in sociology and political science. It focuses attention on social networks that offer benefits for members. There are two key conceptions; firstly derived from Robert Putnam’s work. This focuses on the extent of network membership and the amount of trust within networks. Societies with high levels of this sort of social capital are seen to be functioning more effectively than those without. The second is derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and critically aligns social capital with the unequal distribution of economic capital in society. It focuses on networks as means to gain influence and access to resources in society to accumulate further resources.

Poverty the report is based upon the JRF’s definition of poverty used to frame the research programme:

“when a person’s resources (mainly their material resources) are not sufficient to meet minimum needs (including social participation).”

In using this in data analysis we have chosen the consensual measure used in successive Poverty and Social Exclusion surveys in the UK. In secondary data collected for this review various measures of poverty and low income have been used, with varying strengths and weaknesses, including: UK income measure of two-thirds median equivalised household income, or equivalent; income-based poverty measures of other countries (US, Netherlands, Norway); the Market Research Association’s Social Grades; the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification; and commonly tenure, or employment status as a proxy for poverty or concentrated deprivation.

Weak ties/strong ties the sociology of Mark Granovetter focused attention on the strength of relationships within social networks. His early work identified large numbers of weak ties among professional employees that enabled them to access information about work opportunities and advancement. This has been contrasted with the limited networks of strong ties that people in less skilled labour markets rely on to change between similar level jobs.

Similarly a distinction has been made between the “bonding” social capital within less affluent communities that helps people get by, for example, being able to call on people for childcare, and the “bridging” capital of more affluent communities that helps people get on by, for example, being able to access work opportunities or advice.

Reciprocity many social networks are based on reciprocity – the return of favours or resources granted. Reciprocity can be individualised or generalised. Individualised reciprocity is the giving of resources to an individual with an explicit agreement that there will be a reciprocal exchange. Generalised reciprocity is the provision of resources to individuals within a group with the knowledge that someone in that group will return resources in exchange at some point in the future. Networks of generalised reciprocity are thus high-trust networks.

Neighbourhood effects is the theory that there is an effect on an individual’s outcomes from living in a neighbourhood with a concentration of people with a certain characteristic, above and beyond the individual’s own characteristics. To put it simply in this case, it is the theory that experiencing poverty in a deprived neighbourhood is worse as the neighbourhood itself reduces the chances of leaving poverty.

Mixed community there is no single definition of a mixed community, but across the literature reviewed mixed communities were either mixed in terms of tenure, particularly in the UK where this can be a proxy for household income; mixed in terms of the incomes of households; mixed in terms of ethnic diversity, particularly in Netherlands and US context. UK evidence on mixed communities is mixed between evidence from neighbourhoods built as mixed through regeneration programmes and similar, and communities that have become mixed through tenure diversity as a result of the Right-to-Buy policies.

Digital divide is a contested term, but is largely understood to be the divide between people who have ready access to information communications technologies and those who do not. Two digital divides are more commonly identified: a socio-economic divide where less well-off people cannot afford the up-front of on-going cost of internet access; and a cohort divide where older people are not comfortable using newer technologies.

Web 2.0 and social networking web 2.0 generally refers to websites and other resources that allow people to create their own content on the web include blogs, video-sharing sites, audio-sharing sites, noticeboards and micro-blogging. Social networking, through sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is a subset of web 2.0 technologies that specifically allow people to share information with social networks.

Poverty and social networks...what works?

I’m now beginning to get to the stage the JRF want me to be at for my evidence review – thinking about what works; or what policy interventions might you used to develop social networks and social capital to help tackle poverty. In my previous post I used the mixed evidence around neighbourhood effects to question whether mixed communities policies might mean people in poverty might gain more links to more affluent people. Since then I’ve not read any evidence that counters that. In fact, evidence from the US Moving to Opportunity programme suggests that people who were given vouchers to move from deprived to more mixed neighbourhoods often then felt lonely and isolated from previous social networks. There was also depressing evidence from Dutch studies that although less affluent people wanted to mix with their more affluent neighbours, the latter did not reciprocate, or were not there to reciprocate.

So, the picture is much more complex than the idealistic concept of a less affluent person befriending an affluent person and suddenly being inspired to be less poor. What there does seem to be consistent evidence on though is the role of informal, unstructured meeting places in neighbourhoods which allow people to mix and build up trust. In particular the role of primary schools and parents bumping into one another when they drop their children off seem to be key in a lot of the studies of mixed communities for the development of social networks between affluent and less-affluent people. Similarly, good quality community centres and parks offer a similar, if more limited role.

Trust building is important. The US work on social capital, led by Putnam, puts a lot of emphasis on the development of trust in developing networks that help a society get on. I’ve not seen any convincing evidence of this in my review, but what does seem to be the case is that trust helps reduce stigma and prejudice against marginalised groups.

One of the markers for trust within groups is a high-level of generalised reciprocity – in a twitter discussion I referred to this as the sociology of buying rounds in a pub. Basically, if a group has very little trust and there are lots of you, people won’t buy rounds for the fear that they won’t have a drink bought for them the same drinking session. If you have trust and generalised reciprocity then rounds will be bought knowing that you will have a drink bought for you sometime in future. It would be really nice if the sort of trust developed by passive acquaintance in public spaces could lead to generalised reciprocity.

However, I doubt this would happen in a society as socio-economically unequal as the UK because poverty and low income reduce generalised reciprocity as people withdraw from reciprocal networks or are excluded because they cannot offer anything back.

Which doesn’t neatly bring me on the internet and libraries. Hey-ho. Anyway, let’s see if I can shoe-horn a connection back in. So, the JRF also want us to look into the “digital divide” and whether the affordances of new information communication technologies could help develop social networks, and social networks which can make a difference. So far in the evidence: use of email helps develop loose ties that help you get on; social media tends to help build strong ties that help you get by. Also, interestingly, people in poorer neighbourhoods who have less access to the internet at home, are not affected by distance to their local library in their internet use – they will overcome geographicalbarriers to use the internet.

Which got me thinking about the role of libraries in developing social networks within communities, and I found this rather nice evaluation of the Big Lottery Fund Community Libraries Programme. Reading through it I was immediately reminded of a quote from a former community worker I spoke to during my PhD who described the Ferguslie Park Community Library in the 1980s thus:

“I say the local community library who were…I’ve I mean the first time I’d ever been in a library in my life where they played really loud music during the day but it was great because it meant there wasnae this kind of, wasn’t seen as an educational establishment it was seen as a community establishment and that was a really important factor”

And I think this sort of library could be a really important resource for alleviating and tackling poverty through developing social networks: providing space for learning activities; provided cheap rooms for groups to meet; providing an access point onto services or the “bridging” capital (people that matter like Councillors or MSPs/AM/MLAS/MPs) to make changes in their life.

However, this is a big change is the nature of what a library is – moving a big way from the Victorian philanthropic ideal of the library as a space for self-improvement by immersing oneself individually in good reading matter. This is thinking about the library as a community space, seeking to foster community, and lend out books. The evaluation of the Community Libraries Programme highlighted how this change of use for libraries had a big impact on staff – some felt energised and developed a great deal, others thought something had been lost in their role as librarians.

This got me thinking about a good response I had to my first encounters with community policing in Scotland. The police in Scotland, and particularly the bits of Lothian Borders Police I saw in my PhD, did community policing really well – working closely in partnership to deliver preventative action against low level criminality. When describing this to someone, they agreed, but countered that there was a danger police officers would become social workers, which they definitely should not be. And is the danger that librarians become community development workers or social workers and libraries are just community centres with books, left after all the community centres are closed? Or, if we are going to radically reshape services to coproduce them, should every public sector worker be a community development worker with the requisite training and supervision support?

Socio-economic inequality, poverty and place

This blogpost on elearning made me giggle this afternoon. And it's rather apposite as in this post I'm sharing some of my teaching materials and was wondering how to frame them - as "MOOCish" "SPOCish"...None of that; it's just a set of notes.

My postgrad courses are delivered as distance learning and so I spent a big chunk of my first year in the job writing extensive notes of rather dubious quality. Every year I go back to them to update and refresh them (this year I discovered a large section of text I left last year that just said "blah blah blah blah blah"). Every year, rather than cringe, I'm pleasantly surprised with how not-atrocious they are. So, here you go, the first tranche I'm willing to make more public - my notes on socio-economic inequality, poverty and place. All errors and omissions mine and I'm happy to accept that. This covers two lectures I deliver as part of a wider course called Social Sustainability. Once you've read them, if you pay us a lot of money, you can do the assessment and get the credit as part of one of our postgraduate programmes.

/edit: and given the first tranche of notes seemed to have been welcomed, here's another set of notes, this time on "policy responses" i.e. regeneration

Ferguslie is NOT the most deprived neighbourhood in Scotland

Ferguslie Park is. And even that statement is not right. No news outlet I’ve seen so far could be bothered to go to Ferguslie Park and speak to some of the amazing projects doing really good work in the neighbourhood or even take a photo of the nice homes provided by Ferguslie Park Housing Association and the new primary school.  The Daily Record bothered to use a Google Street View image. STV and the BBC couldn’t even be bothered doing that much, just using library images. The BBC one is particularly crass. No homes in Ferguslie Park look like this, and the woman in the foreground is just horribly stigmatising - the sort of "The Scheme" bullshit that drives the debate on this issue. 

This whole story depresses me because this is the second time “Ferguslie Park” has been the “most deprived” neighbourhood in Scotland. The last time was 2006. It’s not the entire neighbourhood. As Alasdair Rae’s fantastic Google Mapping of the SIMD 2012 shows, it’s one datazone. The ranking of this datazone in the SIMD has gone from 1 in 2006, to 2 in 2009, and now back to 1. Switch on the satellite view on the Google map and have a look at the stats behind the ranking you’ll see part of the reason why - the datazone is depopulated. It’s part of a continuing story of disinvestment, low demand and poor housing management decisions that have characterised Ferguslie Park since it was built. As the Community Development Project in the neighbourhood in the 1970s concluded, this slum clearance housing was “cuts housing neglected before it was built”.

One thing I have to make clear, I think SIMD is a fantastic tool and I welcome the Scottish Government’s continued investment in it. What angers me is this sort of reporting of “Ferguslie” being the most deprived and Craiglockhart the least deprived. It’s just inaccurate. For a start, it’s Ferguslie PARK (it was the park land of the Coats’ mansion which backed onto their Ferguslie Mill). It’s not the entire neighbourhood, it’s one datazone. If you want to give it a name, call it Candren. The index is relative, so as one community activist put it to me (I paraphrase here): “we only came out bottom because they knocked down places in Glasgow worse than us”. And Craiglockhart is not the least deprived. It’s a deprivation index, not an affluence index, so once you get up to the top of the index it’s essentially meaningless (also, see Alasdair Rae's fantastic "what does it all mean" page).

What really angers me is that this sort of reporting feeds into the stigma which helps keep Ferguslie Park a deprived neighbourhood; which isolates its residents and lowers their life chances. As I pointed out in this paper(£*) the stigma towards Ferguslie Park is so great that it is likely that any regeneration programme will be termed unsuccessful. The “feckless feegies” as the other residents of Paisley call them, don’t “deserve” the community centre, new housing and other facilities they have – the real successes of the regeneration programme. If the neighbourhood is misnamed the “most deprived” in Scotland then this is similarly just typical of those “feckless feegies”.

As far as I’m concerned we need to make Craiglockhart the problem neighbourhood. Why does this neighbourhood of horrendous new build flats and bungalows have so few unemployed people – that’s really weird. Why do they have such high educational qualifications – surely some of them have messed around at school at some point in their lives? Why is there so little social housing? Why are there only three children of school age? (and why aren’t those stats anonymised?) Why are there so many young men? Frankly, I think they need to knock down Craiglockhart and start again. Yuppies don’t deserve such nice housing.

There's a very funny book from many moons ago called Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. The politically correct version of Snow White is "Snow White and the Seven Towering Giants" not because the dwarves were, but because they had "towering" personalities. Much as this is satire, it is this change in language that we need to see if we are going to tackle neighbourhood deprivation in a constructive way. If you're looking for bonding social capital, then I can assure you, Ferguslie Park has bucket loads of that compared to Craiglockhart.

* as ever, my paper is behind an academic paywall. I won't get into a debate on open access. If you want a copy of my paper please contact me by Twitter or email and I'll happily send you a copy. In the New Year the University online depository goes live and you'll be able to get a green open access version.