POVERTY BY PARISH IN CORNWALL

The Church Urban Fund (CUF) has produced deprivation figures for the church parishes in England. You can access ones for each of the Cornwall parishes by putting Truro in the diocese box.

This is excellent work by the CUF.

The statistics show a reality I keep saying on the blog: the levels of deprivation and wealth vary across Cornwall which make all-Cornwall statistics of limited use and which should encourage us to advance policies that target areas within Cornwall according to their need rather than peddle an all-Cornwall romanticism.

Anyway, you can see the variation for yourself and the unacceptable deprivation in some of the Cornwall church parishes by using the CUF figures. They are
here.

These are the Anglican church parishes not civic parishes.

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FUEL POVERTY IN CORNWALL

I discussed fuel poverty in the Shiver quietly:fuel poverty post and wondered about the wisdom of the cut in the winter fuel allowance at this time of rising fuel prices. The other day the Commons debated a motion from the DUP which inter alia urged the Tory Libdem government to reconsider its decision to reduce the allowance (Hansard 22 November 2011 column 182). The debate explored the issues well.

The government claimed convincingly the cut in the allowance was what the predecessor Labour government had planned and, less convincingly, that it had a range of effective policies to tackle fuel poverty. All six Cornwall MPs voted against the DUP motion, that is in effect supported the reduction in the winter fuel allowance.

An important point in the debate was that the current winter fuel allowance was paid universally to people over sixty whatever their financial position; but devising any targeted needs-based allowance that actually reaches the people for whom it is intended is difficult. The advantage of universal benefits is that they have an effective reach and targeted benefits tend not to. While targeted means more for those in need, universal, which gives to those who do not need it, helps to bind us all in social solidarity, national cohesion, and removes any stigma from the benefit. There is no easy solution but I support the needs-based targeting of the winter fuel allowance. While we try to get to that – and tackle fuel costs – I think the allowance should be paid universally to the elderly at the uncut rates.

Fuel poverty in Cornwall
Meanwhile here are some statistics about the distribution of fuel poverty in Cornwall.

The average proportion of households in fuel poverty by Cornwall constituency in 2009 (the latest year for which figures are available): Truro and Falmouth 22.0 percent of households, Camborne and Redruth 23.2, South East Cornwall 23.9, St Austell and Newquay 24.1, St Ives 28.4, North Cornwall 32.8. There were about 60 000 households in Cornwall in fuel poverty in 2009 according to these figures; the rise in fuel prices has probably increased that.

Of course, there is significant variation across Cornwall, ranging in the subwards (lower layer super output areas, LSOAS) from 7.7 percent to 48.1 percent.

The statistics are on the Department of energy and climate change website here. They are organised in various geographical areas including the six constituencies and 327 subwards in Cornwall.

Broken promise
There is another issue too. The May 2010 election manifesto of the Conservatives said, “We will protect pensioners’ benefits and concessions and this includes … the winter fuel allowance”. The Tory Libdem coalition program for government said, “We will protect … the winter fuel allowance”. Reducing the allowance is not protecting it and candidly nor would needs-based targeting be.

Fuel poverty definition
A household is described as in fuel poverty if it has to spend more than ten percent of its income on fuel to maintain satisfactory levels of warmth.

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SHIVER QUIETLY: FUEL POVERTY

The Tory Libdem government has decided that for this winter, 2011/12, the winter fuel payments to the elderly will be £200 and £300 for people over sixty and over eighty (see here for details). Since 2008/09 they have been one-off payments of £250 and £400. There is an argument that the higher levels for the last three years were temporary but I think most people will see what has happened as a de facto reduction. There are also cold weather payments if the temperature very much drops.

Is this reduction a wise policy at this time when fuel prices are very high?

An interim report Fuel poverty: its problem and its measurement on the question in England has just been published. The final report comes out in January 2012. This interim one looks at the evidence there is on questions like: Is fuel poverty a distinct problem or part of the problem of poverty generally? How many excess deaths are there in winter and how many of those are due to fuel poverty? Is the current definition of fuel poverty sound and can a better definition based on low income and high costs be had? The measurement of fuel poverty is problematic.

The interim report is a capital study and presents the evidence well.

Some snippets from the report: not having access to the gas grid increases energy costs – relevant to many in Cornwall; people on low incomes are least likely to be on the cheaper tariffs; fuel poverty and cold homes might adversely affect school attainment; largely preventable excess winter deaths in England run at around 25 000 each winter of which about a fifth may be due to cold homes (page 10) and an unsure number to fuel poverty. In Cornwall there are about 300 excess winter deaths each year.

It is important generally to look at the evidence and base policy on it, though evidence is not always clear cut. Fortunately the evidence here tells us very much about the nature and scope of the issue. How we should respond to it is a political judgement based on what we wish to achieve and how we are best likely to achieve it. I not think that the winter fuel payment in its present form is the right response. It is based on age and goes to some people who do not need it. If we wish to help people mitigate the known and suspected adverse effects of cold homes by indirectly subsidising their fuel costs, targeting those with the lowest incomes and the highest fuel costs strikes me as a better immediate approach; it would enable, within the overall cost of the present scheme, higher and more realistic payments to be made to those targeted households.

However, the Tory Libdem government is floundering on fuel costs and there is a danger that it will see a new way of measuring the problem as an end in itself and easier than tackling more difficult elements. The costs are increasing and will probably continue to increase and this will push more people into fuel poverty at a time of static wages, rising unemployment, high inflation, and little or no growth in the economy. We need to reduce fuel costs by ensuring there is a more extensive program to make all homes thermally efficient: the Tory Libdem government suspended the Warm Front scheme between December 2010 and April 2011 and then reintroduced it with less funds and more restricted eligibility. We should ensure by legislation if necessary that the poor can access the cheapest tariffs. We need also to explore the feasibility of regulating fuel costs ( we do it for fares on the private railways) but I don’t think the Tory-Libdems are up for that. More patches for policies, I suppose, and shiver quietly.

Note
Here is a House of Commons debate on energy prices 19 October 2011

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CHILD POVERTY UP AND UP AND UP

Another report from the Institute for fiscal studies (IFS), Child and working age poverty and inequality in UK: 2010 (October 2011), forecasts that child poverty will rise over the years of the Tory Libdem government and onward to 2020/21. This takes us beyond the earlier IFS report.

I have discussed child (and adult) poverty before and here I reprise the core data. In 1998/99 there were 3.4 million children in the UK in relative poverty, 26.1 percent of children. By 2009/10 Labour action had reduced that to 2.6 million, 19.7 percent. A massive achievement but not nearly good enough: hard though it was, more could have been done as I have argued in earlier posts.

In contrast by 2014/15 the IFS forecast around 2.9 million children in the UK, 22.2 percent of our children, will be living in relative poverty. Numbers in absolute poverty and for working age adults are also forecast to rise.

While the move to a universal benefit is expected to help many, a significant cause of the rise in poverty is down to the Tory Libdem shift to using the CPI measure of price inflation in place of the RPI for any increases in benefits. The CPI is generally lower than the RPI. Additionally, cuts in benefits, static wages or below-inflation increases, rising unemployment, and relatively high inflation are all contributing to the rise in child poverty.

We are going backwards on child poverty, relative and absolute. My anger stands on stilts. My language is “too narrow and too weak” to treat of this moral scandal.

Recent posts on poverty

Tackling poverty in Cornwall 24 May 2011
Child poverty: yesterday and tomorrow 16 May 2011
Making people poor 16 December 2010
Deprivation matters 22 May 2010

Language, thou art too narrow, and too weake
To ease us now
– John DONNE Elegy XI

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CORNWALL COMPARED: APHO HEALTH PROFILES 2011

The Association of public health observatories (APHO) has published its health profiles for England 2011. These include comparative data for 351 local authorities, including Cornwall unitary authority, on numerous indicators associated with health and wellbeing such as deprivation and smoking in pregnancy.

The data is here in one spreadsheet and here by separate indicators. It’s a modern curate’s egg as one would expect, a mixture, and it deals with Cornwall as a whole (and there are variations within the county unnoted here but which should inform policies) but on many indicators Cornwall as a whole performs better than England as a whole.

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TACKLING POVERTY IN CORNWALL 2011

Eoin Clarke who writes the excellent, well-researched Green benches blog, which I heartily recommend, has published a score board exploring the comparative impact of various benefits in constituencies in England. Read them here where he also explains his methodology. The scores are slightly adjusted in this post.

He has looked at the number of recipients of the benefits in each constituency and worked them into rankings of comparative overall poverty.

There are 533 constituencies and these are the overall poverty rankings for Cornwall (where lower means more poverty):
Camborne and Redruth 162nd out of 533, St Austell and Newquay 165, St Ives 236, South East Cornwall 286, North Cornwall 300, and Truro and Falmouth 324. (These are the final scores as set out in the post of 24 May 2011 on Green benches.)

The detailed findings for each benefit are on the blog.

The Cornwall constituencies are not the poorest in England on these measures.

You might also like to look again at the index of multiple deprivation which I have discussed on this blog several times and which largely tell the same story. I have also stressed that we have information for small areas of Cornwall (and the rest of England) and can identify which have a large incidence of poverty and which are comparatively prosperous. It is on the areas of serious poverty in Cornwall that our relentless focus should be though we need whole-county approaches too. Have any of the parties here got beyond rhetoric to even a half-policy for this? As far as I can see not one of our notionally left of centre parties in Cornwall has developed comprehensive and practical and up-to-date policies for tackling the multiple causes and forms of the poverty experienced here. Make a start with a living wage anyone? Anyone?

Recent posts about this
Child poverty: Yesterday and tomorrow

Cornwall unaffordable by 2019?

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CHILD POVERTY: YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW

Labour’s record

We now have the final data on Labour’s work to reduce poverty, the figures for 2009/10 when child poverty fell. Read it in this Department for work and pensions (DWP) report Households below average income (May 2011). The Institute for financial studies (IFS) has published a comprehensive analysis of this, Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2011.

In Labour’s first full year, 1998/99, there were 3.5 million children in the UK in relative poverty; that was 26 percent of children. In 2009/10 there were 2.6 million, 20 percent.

Reducing child poverty by nearly a million is a worthy achievement from which children in Cornwall benefited. It was a substantial fall but not nearly enough. Labour missed its target to halve it by 2010 and the end-target of 2020 is candidly out of reach. Labour began promisingly but lost focus and drive and faltered in the middle of its period in office which saw a mortifying rise in child poverty as my earlier posts of 2008 and 2009 miserably record. I see no reason to retract what I said then:

“Some good work has been done, especially before 2005, as Labour half-heartedly tackled the leftover misery of an uncivilised version of Toryism which doubled the number of children in poverty after 1979. Labour had to balance on one hand the need to encourage enterprise and justly enable the reward of achievement and on the other hand the need to redistribute wealth to help those with life’s short straw. That takes skill and resolve and the disagreeable truth is that the Labour government lacked them. It also lacked the courage to challenge the self-absorbed to see beyond themselves and see a society; and it did not understand, for all the chatter of a moral compass and religion, the difference between rewarding success and indulging greed.

“It didn’t have to be like this. There has been enough money since 1997 to achieve the noble ambition. Yes, it might well be impossible to persuade most of the wealthy that the children of the poor deserve a break. It takes political and moral skill and determination to persuade middling workers, who are the vast majority and who often struggle themselves, that children in poverty should be a major priority, that there is a bill that must be paid. It takes courage to make them a priority. A supine Labour government wasn’t up to the task.” (2009)

Looking back on child poverty and the Labour years, a curate’s egg performance. The welcome strong beginning and end cannot eradicate the failure of the other years and the disturbing causes of that failure which say much about Labour under whom inequality also increased (see for example data on the Gini coefficient, pages 30 and 31 of the DWP May 2011 report and this IFS report). The party should understand its record here (and in affordable housing, another failure) and devise new policies and acquire lasting resolve.

And now

The Tory Libdem government does not seem to have a convincing strategy to continue to reduce child poverty. Indeed, it is pursuing policies that a report from the IFS says will likely lead to an increase in child poverty. This would be a moral scandal.

The Tory Libdems have played down the role of more money in reducing poverty and I agree that it isn’t only a question of money though I am wary when millionaire politicians say that. However, more money, from benefits and from work with decent pay and from tax credits, for example, are key to a significant reduction. A rise in child poverty because of government policies would irretrievably mark the Libdems as one of the parties of reaction and regress.

Poverty and work

I have remarked before on the evidence that more than half of children in poverty live in families where at least one adult works (and see page 12 of Households below average income, May 2011). Getting people into work will not of itself end poverty. There is a need to see that wages are more than minimal. A few months ago I wrote about the need for a living wage in Cornwall and I am about to return to the topic.

I am alarmed about future progress on child poverty.

Cornwall

The report Child poverty needs assessment for Cornwall 2011 looks in detail at child poverty in Cornwall. The data is from August 2008. Cornwall as a whole has a lower proportion of child poverty than England as a whole but its incidence varies vastly across the county. Look at the definition of poverty in this report and that in the DWP report. There are also more detailed Cornwall maps here.

Definitions

The figures that I cite are the ‘before housing costs’ ones; the May 2011 DWP report gives ones for ‘after housing costs’ too; see page 224 of the report for what these terms involve. Definitions of relative and absolute poverty are on pages 10 and 11 of the report.

Earlier posts on child poverty

Child poverty in Cornwall 5 August 2007

A mortifying failure 11 June 2008

Shameful failure 23 May 2009

Deprivation matters 11 June 2010

Making people poor 16 December 2010

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DEPRIVATION IN CORNWALL: UPDATE FROM THE 2010 INDICES

The lower the rank number, the greater the deprivation

The English indices of deprivation 2010 have just been published by the Department for communities and local government (DCLG). You can access them here in excel files. The ones entitled Local authority summaries and All domains are probably the most immediately useful.

Background
For the indices England is divided into 326 local authorities and 32 482 subwards (officially called lower layer super output areas, LSOAs) in those authorities, each LSOA with a mean average population of around 1500.

There are 327 LSOAs in Cornwall. The LSOAs are in the All domains file. Of course there is only one local authority in the county for the indices, Cornwall unitary council. This is in the Local authority summaries file.

Although the indices are called 2010 most of the data refers to 2008; there is an unavoidable time lag in assembling the data.

The indices cover various domains of deprivation such as income and employment. Each subward is also ranked in order of overall deprivation, the most deprived being 1 and the least 32 428; similarly in the local authorities table 1 is the most deprived and 326 the least.

How do Cornwall LSOAs rank?
Cornwall subwards range in order of deprivation from 749th (part of South ward in Camborne) to 30 387th (part of St Stephen’s ward in Saltash). As I have explained before, we are not the poorest of the poor and the range of deprivation in Cornwall – and prosperity, though that is not what the indices measure – varies greatly and it makes sense to think of Cornwall as many different places with different circumstances and needs.

How does Cornwall unitary authority rank?
Nevertheless it is possible to compare Cornwall as a whole against other local authorities. Cornwall has a rank of 82 in the rank of average ranks, and 110 in the rank of average scores, where 1 is most deprived and 326 is least deprived.

Details of each LSOA in Cornwall
On the unitary council’s website you can access information about the LSOAs in Cornwall through its Neighbourhood Profiles Map which enables you to explore the 327 subwards of Cornwall and names them and their LSOA code number which is needed to identify them in the overall deprivation index.

Another way is through http://mapping.cornwall.gov.uk/AreaProfiles/Exxx.pdf where xxx is the 8-digit LSOA number added to E such as 01018870. This takes you to the data for that subward.
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STRIPPING THE NATIONALIST ALTAR

Two of the tenets of nationalism here are that Cornwall is especially poor and that we are singled out for unfair funding of our public services by central government; and thus the annual announcements of central government funding of public services in England are often met with dispraise from some Cornish nationalists (and some nationalist-lite Libdems). I think the beliefs are wrong and have regularly disputed them on the blog. I have recently given a positive reading of the latest healthcare funding for Cornwall; I added the relevant Cornwall figures for schools funding without comment to the regular Cornwall data post with, as usual, a link to the source data. I have also responded positively to local government settlements for Cornwall in previous years.

Now I am going to explain why I think the lamentations are misplaced, using the education funding for 2011/12 as a starting point.

Cornwall outgrievanced
Yes, the average per pupil funding for Cornwall is lower than for most education authorities in England – and a higher funding than others, as measured by the guaranteed unit of funding (GUF) data. Note here (the GUFS 2011-12 file) that in 2011/12 the average per pupil funding for Leicestershire will be less than for Cornwall; in fact it will be lower than for Cornwall in seventeen local education authorities. In the current financial year a patient in Buckinghamshire primary care trust area receives less than one in Cornwall. In some areas people receive less per capita funding for both education and healthcare than in Cornwall – Cornwall outgrievanced.

How are schools in England financed?
It might be useful to explain here very briefly and broadly how schools in England are financed. Briefly and broadly, because school funding is too complex to be explained fully here and governments tend to change the details. It can be seen as a two stage process. The vast majority of school funding comes through the dedicated schools grant (DSG), next financial year taking in various other grants. This grant comes from central government and is paid not to individual schools but to local education authorities like Cornwall council. How much DSG each authority gets is decided by a funding formula which I shall look at in the next sections. The local education authority retains some of the money for central services and distributes the rest to schools, applying local filters of priority such as need. Some money is assigned directly by central government to schools.

Different amounts for different needs
Why are some education authorities (and indeed schools and pupils) funded at a higher level than others? Because central government tries, imperfectly, to match circumstances and funding. Circumstances among education authorities and pupils differ; hence funding differs. The education department’s consultation document on the formula for deciding who gets what rightly says this “should reflect that different pupils need different levels of support and that different areas will have different cost pressures” (Executive summary in the 2010 Consultation on the future distribution of school funding).

I say ‘rightly’. I think that the notion of fair funding demands this; it is the core value underpinning the funding process. These differences in funding are intended to reflect differences in needs and costs. Recognising different levels of need matters: for example, there is an association between social deprivation and educational underachievement.

Does anyone seriously challenge the rightness of trying to match circumstances and funding, this core principle? It’s how we try to redistribute public money at present. I assume complaints about perceived unfair funding are not challenging match-the-circumstances as a principle for distributing public funds but rather are claiming that recipients collectively in Cornwall experience objectively unfair funding, the funding they receive not being matched with their comparative collective circumstances, their needs and the costs of providing the services. However, nationalist complaints largely focus on broad comparisons between the funded authorities and do not appear to critique the formulas on which the funding is based, their components and weightings for example, and do not deal with the difference in funding for individual schools. Such an analysis is necessary for any objective case to stand.

Some authorities who receive the lowest allocation of funding have formed a lobby, f40, against what they see as unfair funding and you can read here (Arguments for a fairer funding system for education, March 2009) a serious critique of the present allocation system. This is the sort of detailed approach Cornish nationalism should take if it wishes its case to be heard.

Fair funding is not simply a Cornwall matter as the above paragraph shows. It would be an odd, and I think unacceptable, view of fairness that focused only on a part and disregarded the rest, on Cornwall and disregarded the rest of England and Britain. I have indicated that other places in England are more deprived than anywhere in Cornwall – see the Index of multiple deprivation – and others receive less per capita revenue funding for education and health, for example, than Cornwall, and others claim they receive unfair funding: a full view of fair funding has to recognise that and see Cornwall in context.

Cornwall, free school meals, and school funding
We have data not only for local authorities but for individual schools; in January the Education department published the per pupil GUF funding for each maintained individual school in England for 2009/10. Read the details here – Cornwall’s reference number is 908 in the primary and secondary schools tables. Note the different levels of funding within Cornwall; how different schools in Cornwall get vastly different per pupil amounts. Comparisons between local authorities do not tell the whole story.

The primary and secondary data of per pupil funding by grant income that I have noted above divides schools in three groups, high, medium, or low, according to the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals (high means the highest proportion of eligible pupils). Means-tested free school meals are a proxy for deprivation. In each group the median average per pupil funding for Cornwall primary schools collectively is greater than the England median for each of the three groups (excluding London schools which have additional funding to compensate for additional costs). All Cornwall secondary schools are in the low group and their collective median average funding exceeds the England median (excluding London) for secondary schools in the low group. It is detail like this that should caution against simplistic claims of unfair funding.

Free school meals are not the only component making up school funding of course but I think this data shows in relation to free school meals that funding is broadly matched to need.

What is fair funding?
I have explained above that I think fair funding is matching public funds to circumstances. The 2010 consultative document puts it admirably: we “must recognise that the concept of ‘fairness’ does not mean that everyone will get the same. Instead it must reflect that our economy and geography means that different areas have different cost pressures, and that different pupils need different levels of support in order to help them achieve” ( paragraph 1.11). Arguments recognises (paragraph 5.3) that there are higher staffing costs in London, for example.

Belief that one is unfairly treated and is special is common. As Matthew Taylor gently self-mocked in the education debate he initiated: “…there is no member of Parliament who does not believe their constituency is unfairly disadvantaged in comparison to others” (Hansard 2 February 2010 column 71WH). In a debate about local government funding in 2007 John Healey, the minister, ironically said of local lamentations: “…every council regards itself as uniquely disadvantaged by central government funding decisions, and every council has a special case unique to its circumstances” (Hansard 6 December 2007, column 990). I remarked recently in this post on the Parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill in the Lords that Chris Rennard had commented that there was virtually no limit to the number of places regarding themselves as special cases.

How are the funding amounts arrived at?
The distribution of public funding by central government among education authorities is not an arbitrary or random process but a thoughtful one and anyone can scrutinise and interrogate the various workings. The importance of circumstances has been mentioned in the previous section. The 2010 consultation document on school funding is an excellent account of the various criteria and in the recent consultation the government asked for comments on the components that make up the schools grant/funding.

Is the Cornish nationalist case that these departmental workings include elements that are wrongly included or assessed or omit elements that should be included? That the weightings are wrong? That – whatever. As I have said above, let us hear a robust case with a detailed critique.

Does more spending work?
Let me raise one difficult question. Does more general pupil spending improve educational achievement? It appears not though I think more research is required and need-targeted spending is a different issue. Look at the data for per pupil spending and GCSE results in individual schools. Read the analysis made February 2011 in A statistical analysis of secondary school spending which also provides an accessible table of per pupil spending and results.

If there is a lack of correlation of spending and results, what is the educational reason for the complaint about Cornwall’s share of spending? Where is the contrary evidence that pupils in Cornwall are achieving less because of perceived less general educational funding?

Fundamental error in approach to funding
I think nationalism makes a fundamental error in its criticism of the county’s public funding from central government for services like health and education.

Aggregate countywide or even districtwide data hides variety too much, though sometimes it is the only data available and thus we have to use it despite its limitations. Anyone who lives here is well aware that there are poor and prosperous places in Cornwall, even deprived and wealthy streets in the same town. As I have repeatedly said in posts on the blog, we can identify the locations in Cornwall, and in education the individual schools, where there is serious deprivation and poverty. For the schools the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals is a reasonable proxy for poverty, though paragraph 4.12 in Arguments offers caveats. We should be looking to focus help on these pupils and places, we should be pressing for more help for where it is needed most.

Although I have tended to stress social deprivation, it is of course not the only component of need. For example, there is a focus on pupils with special education needs to ensure the schools they are in get proper funding for them. To a very large extent meeting the varied needs is already done through the thoughtful national and local distribution formulas but the approach should be advanced much further. The Tory-Libdem pupil premium, with all its imperfections, is basically a right approach in looking to a pupil in need of additional support rather than seeing funding on the basis of only a county. Above a base for all schools, we should centre funds on the pupil and the school he attends.

Look at the range of results for different schools in Cornwall for GCSE examinations. Look at the range in the data from the health observatory for the old districts of Cornwall and the maps of the subwards in those districts. Of course, acknowledging sizable internal differences and seeking to focus on pupil need where it is greatest will diminish a sense that Cornwall is an undifferentiated and uniform county/duchy/crown dependency/kingdom/extraterritorial whatever and heighten a realisation that “Cornwall” is many places, there are many Cornwalls, and people’s experience of life here very much differs one from the other.

Recast the argument
Nationalism should abandon the nonsense of its grievance agenda and recognise the complex reality revealed by the various measures and comparators of deprivation and prosperity and costs and school spending – the comparative data on eligibility for free school meals, imperfect as it is, should be a mandatory primer; a brief comparative glance at the eligibiliy for free school meal percentages for schools in Durham and in Cornwall would be an instructive starting point. The narrow nationalist argument should be recast. Strip away from the nationalist altar the vessels full of notions that we are a county that is picked on, done down, unfairly funded, uniquely poor. Throw down those beliefs. See Cornwall in context; engage with all the evidence, especially the evidence of the correlation between deprivation and poor educational achievement; recognise the fine detail data and the limitations of a focus on the county; critique the funding formulas; and develop a case that identifies need and its location and ways of getting funds and other resources to support those needs wherever they are in England.

NOTES

Rurality as a component in public funding is a legitimate concern for Cornwall. For health funding read the Report of the advisory committee on resource allocation (December 2008) which shows how seriously the task of the fair distribution of public funds is taken. Last year the former Libdem MP Matthew Taylor initiated an informed debate on the impact of rurality and small schools in education, focusing on Cornwall: Hansard 2 February 2010 columns 65WH-72WH. In 2010 of 272 maintained schools in Cornwall 196 were classed as rural: DEP 2010-2245 of 9 December 2010.
Rural needs in school funding are discussed in paragraphs 4.14, 4.19, and section here.

Healthcare funding 2011/12

Schools revenue funding 2011/12

These show the factors in assessing education funding for the education authorities and pupils and healthcare

School funding settlement 2011/12 and pupil premium

School finance (England) Regulations 2011. Part 3 sets out formulas for LEAS to use for school budgets.

Deprivation indicator LSOA level. LSOAS, lower layer super output areas; there are 32 480 in England, each with an average population of about 1500. See here for more details.

Primary care trusts: funding and expenditure (House of Commons Library).

Read this interesting inselberg post: Is Cornwall really poor?
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MAKING PEOPLE POOR

The Tory Libdem government like to characterise their policies as progressive and fair. They’re having a laugh of course. Anyway here’s the latest assessment of their progressive and fair harrowing of Britain, the report for the IFS and JRF on child and working-age adult income poverty in the next few years as a result of the government’s decisions: Child and working age poverty from 2010 to 2013.

There is a summary at the beginning of the report. In brief, relative poverty among these groups goes up from 2010/11 to 2013/14 by about 800 000 as a result of the government’s policy choices. Absolute poverty will also rise. Several thousand of them will be here in Cornwall.

Any chance of Cornwall Libdem MPs sharing their thoughts with us?

Notes
IFS Institute of fiscal studies
JRF Joseph Rowntree foundation

Note that the report says the work is “subject to uncertainties and limitations”.
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