Poverty and affluence exist side in many areas leaving councils with little choice but to act as local instruments of social justice, suggests David Walker

Sandwiched between the greens of Clacton Golf club and the caravan parks of Jaywick Sands is a stretch of seaside surburbia, housed around Beach Crescent, Brooklands Gardens and Sunbeam Avenue.

It sounds idyllic. But this patch of Eden on the Essex coast is riddled with crime, joblessness, low income and poor housing.

Just days ago, it earned the dubious distinction of coming top of the indices of multiple deprivation (IMD), which extracts data from what used to be called ward level – neighbourhoods of around 1,500 people. Officially, they are ‘lower-layer, super-output areas’ – jargon for the closest-in data we have for places.

Perhaps coastal deprivation is not really surprising. Tendring district isn’t Essex’s starriest area. The district reports high unemployment – in a generally-affluent county – low wages, a poor skill set, and a proportionately large pensioner population. One in five Tendring children live in poverty – twice the national average.

So, just as Essex also contains down-at-heel Tendring, within the district, one will find neighbourhoods that are doing very badly indeed, such as Jaywick.

Fairness gets talked about as if it was just about how revenues and grants are divvied up in Whitehall. But, vital as the opaque distribution formulae are, equity is a local affair, too. Fairness does, or doesn’t, get sorted in councils’ own backyards. How far does ‘justice’ prevail inside a local authority area?

A paradox of the David Cameron era is that having talked so openly and unusually – for a Conservative – about fairness while in Opposition, his government is finding that people continue to apply fairness tests, even if they accepted its master narrative about the deficit and need for cuts.

The review of English local government’s revenue base has provoked a debate about distribution. It will heat up the closer communities secretary, Eric Pickles, gets to delivering on non-domestic rates. Nick Clegg has been claiming the Liberal Democrats are pushing property tax as a way of cutting income tax, and the Treasury is buying the idea. But, it is unlikely Westminster and Kensington will welcome a ‘mansion tax’, whatever sweeteners the Government may offer in terms of retaining the business rate.

We never quite know whether Mr Pickles is entirely on top of his department, but we might give him the benefit of the doubt and laud a decision to go ahead with the publication of the latest IMD figures – because they redirect attention to the huge disparity of resources and social conditions between England’s local areas.

Mr Pickles could choose to blame Labour. The data on which the 2010 sets are based runs mostly to 2008. But, not for the first time, the IMD data shows how much continuity there is in both poor and wealthy areas. The rankings simply don’t change.

The poorest, when the index was last compiled in 2007, remained the poorest in 2010. Among councils, there are Liverpool, Middlesborough, Manchester, and Knowsley. Poor here means those with the greatest concentration of neighbourhoods which score high on measures of household income, skills, jobs, crime, housing quality and so on.

Poor neighbourhoods are overwhelmingly urban, but note the high placing for Pendle district in Lancashire, a lot of which is countryside. In terms of the impact of poverty on local policy, Birmingham is one of the poorest places in England measured by the number of its neighbourhoods classed as deprived.

The geography of need compels redistribution. The Cameron Government’s radicalism is unlikely to stretch to breaking up England. That means, to put it bluntly, bailing out Birmingham. In turn, that implies you can never treat next-door Solihull as a sort of autonomous territory, keeping the proceeds of local taxation.

Yet central grants can never be enough. The IMD shows that 56% of local authorities’ areas contain at least one neighbourhood which counts among the very poorest.

Many councils rank as being well off when the income and employability of their inhabitants are totted up, but they still have patches where poor people are concentrated, lives are blighted and need is heavy.

From the chief executive’s suite at the top of Westminster City Hall, you can see all the way to the north of the borough. Not enough poor households live there to change the judgment that Westminster is anything other than a rich borough.

But they do pose a political question. If services are trimmed or reorganised to suit the affluent majority, what happens to the people in Paddington and the Mozart Estate? In other words, equalisation begins at home. Councils tend not to acknowledge that their own spending is inherently redistributive.

Race and gender equality are, by comparison, easy. Income inequality, and its impact on spending, can pose more fundamental questions. A central needs formulae based on place (council) may miss need. But that differential need is going to be visible locally, and be the subject of local politics.

Rich boroughs might, privately, aspire to get rid of their poor residents, and housing benefit changes may help achieve that. But the IMD shows councils cannot, for the foreseeable future, escape their fate as instruments of social justice.

David Walker is former director of communications at the Audit Commission