POVERTY AND DEPRIVATION


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Historically absolute poverty was defined as "lacking sufficient money to meet basic physical needs" (Lister 2004). Peter Townsend, Professor of International Social Policy at London School of Economics, first defined relative poverty or deprivation as lack of attributes, opportunities and access to services that are perceived as the norm in a society (Townsend 1979).

The observation that young people from deprived areas are less likely to obtain well-paid or influential positions in society has been further been formulated as social exclusion. Social exclusion is recognised as working at both the individual and neighbourhood levels: it includes a multitude of factors from low income and poor education at the individual level to high crime and poor living environment at the area level (Lister 2004).

The concept of place poverty has been emphasised by several authors (Kleinman 1999, Powell et al. 2001, Spicker 2001) . Place poverty can be defined as the sum of negative externalities suffered by people living in deprived neighbourhoods including: poor quality of housing, unattractive locations, peer influences, spatial determinants of employment and low area based resources. The lattermost of these refers to the effects of low economic participation and the outcomes that people in "bad areas" pay higher insurance premiums and are turned down for credit, taxi services or deliveries(Spicker 2001).

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Since 1997, the Labour government has funded several area-based initiatives in recognition that deprivation and social exclusion are about more than redistributing wealth through taxation and benefits, and that the functioning of local areas/neighbourhoods are important in reducing these problems (NRU 2006, Social Exclusion Unit 2006).

The allocation of area-based funding has been guided by a new set of area deprivation measures, the so-called Index of Deprivation (ODPM 2004). The ID2004 is released at Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOA) as a single multiple index (IMD) or as separate indices for the seven domains:

Each domain relies on direct measures, for instance, the number of means-tested benefit recipients (income deprivation) or the number of people suffering long-term limiting illness (health deprivation & disability domain).

The biggest area-based initiative to date is that of Neighbourhood Renewal with £1.3 billion to allocate to neighbourhoods falling into the 10% most deprived areas in the country, over the period 2005-2008. The Neighbourhood Renewal areas were selected as the 10% lowest ranking of the UK 's 32,000+ LSOAs. Several of Southwark's LSOAs are amongst the 10% most deprived.


REFERENCES [TOP]
Kleinman, M. 1999. There Goes the Neighbourhood. Area policies and social exclusion. New Economy 6: 188-192.
Lister, R. 2004. Poverty. Cambridge: Polity.
NRU. 2006. Neighbourhood Renewal Unit 2006. Communities and Local Government website: URL.
ODPM. 2004. Indices of deprivation. Communities and Local Government website website: URL.
Powell, M. et al. 2001. Towards a geography of people poverty and place poverty. Policy & Politics 29: 243-258.
Social Exclusion Unit. 2006. Social Exclusion Unit. Cabinet Office: URL.
Spicker, P. 2001. Poor areas and the 'ecological fallacy'. Radical Statistics 76.
Townsend, P. 1979. Poverty in the UK. Harmondsworth: Penguin.