How deprived is Chelmsford Diocese?

by Canon Don Cardy, Chair of the Budget Sub-Committee

There are 46 parishes in Chelmsford Diocese that have pockets of high deprivation.

The most highly deprived pockets are in the coastal communities of Clacton and Southend.

High deprivation is most widespread in Newham Deanery. There is significant deprivation in Barking, Waltham Forest, Southend, Thurrock and St Osyth.

There are also small pockets of high deprivation in Redbridge and Colchester.

How do we know this? Governments have long been concerned with the effects of poverty in developing social policy.  Poverty has been characterised as a deprivation from social and material resources.  A recent measure of such deprivation is the Government’s 2004 Index of Multiple Deprivation (2004 IMD) for England.  It was this index that provided the above information.

For the 2004 IMD, England was divided into 32,482 small geographical areas by combining the much smaller areas used for the last National Census in 2001. Each area (population between 1000 and 3000) was then ranked out of 32,482 for seven separate measures of deprivation.  These were income, employment, health and disability, education and training, barriers to housing and services, crime, and lastly the living environment.  The 2004 IMD is a combination of these seven measures, the area ranked at 1 being the most deprived in England and that ranked at 32,482 the least deprived.

Because we already know the 2001 Census areas for each parish we can map the 2004 IMD areas to parishes.  Others will map the information in other ways; for example to the areas covered by county councils, local authority districts, or primary care trusts.

Just because an area is judged to be deprived, this does not mean that every individual within that area will be deprived: some might not be deprived at all.  Similarly an area amongst the least deprived could have some individuals who are very deprived.  Nonetheless the 2004 IMD gives a useful pointer as to where support and help might best be directed; for example, by identifying those areas ranked amongst the 10% most deprived in England.  These will have the rankings from 1 to 3,482 and it was such an analysis which produced the pattern of deprivation in Chelmsford Diocese given above.

There is much more to be discovered from the 2004 IMD.  Of the 32,482 areas in the index for England, 1,787 (5.5%) are in this diocese representing almost 1/18th of the total.  Of these, 4.8% are from the 10% most deprived in the country and 9.3% from the 10% least deprived.  Had the deprivation in the diocese closely followed the national profile we could have expected to have 10% of the most deprived areas, so some dioceses must have proportionately more deprivation than we do.  This is borne out if we look more closely at the 100 lowest ranked areas.  Only one is in this diocese – in St Osyth Deanery in a parish in Clacton.  The other 99 areas are mostly in the Midlands and the North.  On the other hand, our share of the least deprived areas is close to the norm and, whilst these are spread widely across 19 of our 26 deaneries, they are most common in the Saffron Walden, Brentwood, Chelmsford North and Chelmsford South deaneries.

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