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Rural Evidence Project
Evidencing Rural Need shows the real socio-economic picture of rural England - its areas of deprivation, the economy and access to services. The resource developed by ACRE, its members in RCAN and our partner OCSI, comprises straightforward annotated reports with tables and maps. It enables users to drill down to small areas of geography and will help organisations influence decisions about rural policies, services and programmes effectively.
Evidencing Rural Need
This is a new resource that shows the 'real' picture of socio-economic issues across rural England enabling organisations to better understand and influence decisions around policy development and service delivery more effectively. Building on the pioneering work with the Rural Community Action Network (RCAN), ACRE commissioned Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) to develop a set of the reports for all rural areas across England. The resource comprises a series of reports, prepared for a range of geographies, highlighting the incidence of deprivation in rural communities throughout England along with reports on the rural economy and access to services. Although there is a great deal of data available for villages, hamlets and smaller towns, this information has not been brought together so succinctly in a single resource for all settlements in rural England.
The resource...
- provides robust data to help target programmes to the right areas, support funding applications, and help local communities with the evidence-base to support the development of Community Led Plans;
- strengthens the evidence base on rural deprivation across England;
- enables rural partners to use summary information to represent rural issues in programme development, planning and prioritization;
- is supported by detailed datasets providing profiles of small geographical areas, which are updateable (all data is the most up to date and publically available for each topic area and;
- provides local communities with quantitative evidence to support community and parish planning.
The reports are available through RCAN members only but the full range and background information can be viewed at www.rural-evidence.org.uk
