Identifying poverty in rural England

This article demonstrates how benefit dependent households can be identified at small area levels in rural areas. Current debates about the nature and extent of rural poverty are outlined. We then explain how municipal administrative data can be mapped at different spatial levels - Enumeration District and 500 metre grid squares. Such data at small spatial levels are potentially useful components of national indices of deprivation for the allocation of central government resources to local authorities. There remains a need for measures of poverty that can be consistently applied to urban and rural areas for the purposes of national funding allocation.