Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation 2006: General Report

Geographic Access to Services Domain

The access domain is intended to capture the issues of financial cost, time and inconvenience of having to travel to access basic services. The domain measures aspects of access deprivation that are relevant to all people as it is important to be able to access key services in rural and urban areas.

There are a number of differences between the access domain in the SIMD 2004 and the SIMD 2006 which are detailed in Annex 2. Due to these differences, care should be taken when comparing the results.

The key difference is that the 2004 access domain was based solely on drive times whereas the 2006 domain also takes into account public transport times to three of the basic services (shopping facilities, GPs and post offices). Public transport times to schools were not included as school bus services information is not available for all areas.

The SIMD 2004 included drive times to supermarkets. This has been replaced by travel times to shopping facilities which are a group of retail outlets providing a range of services including stores such as supermarkets.

The 2004 access domain was called 'Geographic Access and Telecommunications', however, the 'telecommunications' element of the domain name has been dropped due to a lack of suitable telecommunications data. For more information about the methodology used to construct the domain see the SIMD 2006 Technical Report.

Key Points

• The 2006 access domain takes into account both drive times and public transport travel times.
• Over 60 per cent of data zones in rural areas are in the 15% most deprived areas in terms of access compared to four per cent of data zones in urban areas.
• Highland and Aberdeenshire have the greatest proportion of Scotland's 15% most access deprived data zones in Scotland (each with 13 per cent).

Access deprived areas in SIMD 2006

The most access deprived data zone covers the islands of Eigg, Rum and Canna and some of the mainland, in Highland local authority area. The four next highest ranking data zones three are within Highland local authority area and one is in Perth and Kinross.

Highland and Aberdeenshire have the greatest proportion of Scotland's 15% most access deprived data zones in Scotland (each with 13 per cent). See the SIMD 2006 Statistical Compendium for a full list.

Within local authority areas, Eilean Siar has the highest proportion (75 per cent) of its data zones (27 out of 36) within the 15% most access deprived data zones in Scotland. Shetland Islands has the second highest, with 73 per cent of its data zones (22 out of 30) in the 15% most access deprived in Scotland.

Other local authority areas with high proportions of their data zones in Scotland's 15% most access deprived are Orkney Islands (59 per cent), Highland (45 per cent), Argyll and Bute and Aberdeenshire (both 43 per cent). See Table 2.13 for results for all local authority areas.

Glasgow City has only one data zone in the 15% most access deprived areas, which is in the Summerston area to the north of the city.

Table 2.13. Local share of data zones in the 15% most access deprived in the SIMD 2004 and SIMD 2006, by local authority area

Changes in access deprived areas between SIMD 2004 and SIMD 2006

The 2004 and 2006 access domains ranks are highly correlated with a Pearson's correlation coefficient of 0.83 (see Annex 4). Of the 976 data zones in the 15% most access deprived in the SIMD 2004, 77% (755) remained in the 15% most access deprived in the SIMD 2006.

Fife has had the largest increase in number of data zones in the 15% most access deprived areas in Scotland between the SIMD 2004 and SIMD 2006, with an increase of five per cent (24 data zones), followed by North Lanarkshire (four per cent, an additional 17 data zones).

South Lanarkshire had the largest decrease in the number of data zones in the 15% most access deprived areas in Scotland, with a decrease from 55 to 44 data zones. See Table 2.13 for results for all local authority areas.

Access deprivation by urban rural classification

Of the 1,203 data zones in rural areas over 60 per cent are in the 15% most access deprived areas compared with only four per cent of data zones in urban areas.

Table 2.14 shows the distribution of 15% most access deprived data zones in Scotland in urban and rural areas. The number and proportion of most access deprived data zones in 'large urban' areas, 'accessible small towns' and accessible rural' areas has decreased, whilst the number and proportion has increased in 'remote small towns', 'remote rural' areas and 'other urban' areas.

Table 2.14 Share of data zones in the 15% most access deprived data zones in the SIMD 2004 and SIMD 2006, by urban-rural classification

Source: SIMD 2004 data are grouped using the Scottish Executive Urban Rural Classification of 2003-2004 and the SIMD 2006 data are grouped using the Urban-Rural Classification 2005-2006