Luc Gauci Green on new figures showing increased deprivation in the borough

A man unloading containers of food from the boot of a car — Unloading supplies at Chipping Barnet Foodbank – (Credit – Leïla Davaud)

New figures show Barnet is becoming more deprived and some areas of the borough are now amongst the most deprived in the whole country.

According to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), which was updated last month, Barnet is the 140^th most deprived out of 296 Local Authority Districts across England.

However, in 2019, the borough was 173^rd most deprived out of 317 districts. This means Barnet is more deprived overall than 56% of local areas, one of the starkest changes in London.

Bob Bevil, advocacy and campaign lead for Chipping Barnet foodbank has lived all his life in Barnet. He says “the levels of poverty in Barnet are the worst they’ve been since the late 1970s, in my experience.”

Bob added that the organisation sees “year on year demand getting higher and higher”. He also noted that the demographic of people relying on their services has changed. Historically, they were usually homeless, “literally roofless” but now they are also seeing those “who are employed or families where the cost-of-living crisis has made it nigh on impossible to keep their heads above the water”.

Citizens Advice Barnet’s Louise Broadbent commented that the recent index aligns with the experience on the ground, citing an overall increase in people using their services, especially from areas such as Colindale and Burnt Oak. From the financial years 2021/22 to 2022/23, Citizens Advice Barnet saw a 50% increase in the number of people they help – it has since stayed around that level.

Despite this, Louise says “there are more people that need help but we (Citizens Advice) can’t get there”. They are also dealing with more complex problems; the people that come to Citizens Advice Barnet have “an average of four interrelated problems”. Even once they gain access to available benefits, “it might not be enough”, Broadbent says “the cost-of-living crisis never went away”.

The IMD is the official measure of relative deprivation in England and is part of a suite of outputs that form the Indices of Deprivation (IoD). The IMD25 ranks all neighbourhoods in England according to their level of multiple deprivation relative to that of other areas.

Deprivation is defined by lacking any kind of resource, not just income. In the IoD ‘deprivation’ refers to people’s unmet needs, whereas ‘poverty’ refers to the lack of resources required to meet those needs or social perceived necessities.

The IMD is used to identify the most deprived neighbourhoods and relatively compare areas across England, explore the types of deprivation and compare local authority districts. The IoD cannot be used to quantify how deprived an area is or measure absolute change over time.

There are seven domains of deprivation with weightings which combine to create the IMD: income (22.5%); employment (22.5%); education and skills (13.5%); health (13.5%); crime (9.3%); barriers to housing and services (9.3%); living environment (9.3%).

On Income, Barnet is more deprived than 76% of districts. On employment, Barnet is 54% more deprived and, on crime prevention, they are more deprived than 51%.

On Education and Skills and Health and Disability they perform extremely well, less deprived than 86% and 88% of districts, respectively.

However, on the living environment, both indoor and outdoor, as well as barriers to housing and services, Barnet is more deprived than 88% and 92% of districts, respectively.

There are some large disparities within the neighbourhoods or small areas used to measure deprivation in Barnet. Areas of Burnt Oak were more deprived than more than 80% of other neighbourhoods in England. In particular, the area around Grahame Park was more deprived than 93% and the most deprived small area in Barnet.

On the flip side, areas of Woodside Park, Totteridge and Whetstone were ranked less deprived than 98% and 99% of other neighbourhoods. Woodside Park ranked 33,622 out of 33,755 neighbourhoods, being one of the least deprived in the whole country.

Deprivation rankings are used to allocate resources so changes in rankings could have significant implications for local government funding.

Louise hopes the new findings can help Citizens Advice Barnet with outreach and ensuring everyone who needs their services can access it. In addition, it can be used for funding applications. “People think of Barnet as a very wealthy area and it is important to use this to show that there is really high deprivation”, Broadbent says, while the competitiveness of the funding climate right now makes any impact uncertain.

However, Bob thinks that the way this data will be acted upon and make a difference is by having “the voices of people with lived experience, speaking to the authorities. Data is all well and good but you need to see the story that it creates in the community. We’ve got stories of people living in cars, in garden sheds”.

He says: “the difficulty is that this particular group in our community, they have pride, they want to be dignified. Its not the sort of people that would run to the front of the queue saying I want to speak to the councillors. So, it’s a tightrope walk but if we get their voices heard I think there might be some change.”

Publication of the new IMD comes at a time when Citizens Advice Barnet’s services have come under risk due to lack of funding and increased costs. Their employment casework funding ended in June and will close permanently if no more funding can be found. Louise says there is “nowhere else to send employment cases”, without funding, “nothing can be done, we just have to send them away. We know the storm is coming”.

Similarly, Bob says that “as well as a cost-of-living crisis there is also a cost of giving crisis”. Chipping Barnet Foodbank is currently spending £4,000 a month on food for residents in need as donations do not cover the foodbank’s demand. “It’s not the most sustainable method,” says Bob.

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