It is also important to draw a distinction between equality and equity, in that the latter seeks to deliberately recognise and ameliorate the ways in which disempowerment, marginalisation and ostracisation have negatively influenced social mobility. In turn, an equity-based perspective seeks to offer more targeted support to those who are in more need.
Through this dimension, we have been seeking to understand if there is social equity across Ladywood constituency, using the Index of Multiple Deprivation. This index assesses the various overlapping data points that lead to deprivation, such as Jobs & Income, Education, Health, and Housing. It also helps to assess where best to target equitable interventions, as well as how this intersects with Peace & Justice at a local level, on which further future study is needed.
In their Community Cohesion Strategy, Birmingham City Council sets the following vision:
”We want Birmingham to be a city of equal opportunity, where everyone is able to achieve their aspirations, regardless of where they live or grow up.”
(Birmingham City Council, 2021)
The Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) are the official institutional measure for relative deprivation in England, with data produced annually at the Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) by the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government. LSOAs are the lowest geographical level at which statistics are gathered. This data is then used to find average constituency scores and ranks, weighted by population, by the House of Commons Library (2019).
The IMD provides a well-established and useful indicator for quantifying the extent of inequity in access to resources, key services and communities supports that exists between neighbourhoods. We have adopted this as our indicator for social equity, but we also recognise that the IMD takes a deficit-based approach. We continue to challenge the framing of communities as ‘deprived’, when instead they have historically and structurally been under-resourced and under-supported over many years, often decades and sometimes even longer.
The IMD scores were calculated based on data collected across 39 separate indicators, which span seven domains: Income, Employment, Health Deprivation and Disability, Education & Skills Training, Crime, Barriers to Housing and Services, and the Living Environment. These indicators were then weighted and combined (Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, 2019). The 2019 IMD scores are largely based on data from 2014 and 2015. Though this measure considers some individual deficits, such as in Income and Education, we strongly maintain that these are manifestations of systemic oppression and structural barriers, which would benefit from alternate framings to fully address this systemic layer.