Community Renewal Trust’s Lifting Neighbourhoods Together model focussed a system-change intervention on small deprived communities (e.g. 4000 residents).
The approach proposed by evaluators from Sheffield Hallam University and Community Renewal Trust in the Baseline Evaluation noted the potential to use the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). There were figures for SIMD released in 2020 related to data from 2017, 2018 and 2019 with the small Datazones for this aligning approximately to the boundaries of the intervention neighbourhoods for Lifting Neighbourhoods Together.
A full neighbourhood analysis of the intervention neighbourhoods including analsis of SIMD 2020 was conducted and published here: https://liftingneighbourhoods.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BMTH-neighbourhood-profile-2022.pdf
There was a sense that while it would be approximate, this measure would well demonstrate whether or not the neighbourhoods were “lifting out of poverty” in any sense.
There have been three major problems with this now identified and a series of smaller reflections which can be used to help others using this data set consider their evaluation plans.
- Scottish Government decided to delay the release of SIMD data from 2024 to late 2026. As part of this they also decided to change the Datazone boundaries to fit the new Census 2022 data. These decisions somewhat undermine the ability of programmes such as ours which had anticipated a 2024 release to report on changes in that period. On the other hand a 2024 release would largely have used data from 2021 and 2022 which was both during Covid 19 pandemic (when Lifting Neighbourhood Together model was altered to meet emerging needing) and would not have captured the model’s long term impact.
- Some of the work of the Lifting Neighbourhoods Together team relates to increase benefits uptake among people who were excluded from claiming benefits they were eligible for. We now find that this would have the effect of WORSENING the relative multiple deprivation measure as those people would newly be considered in the small area data to have health/disability issues or be newly counted as out-of-work. This is a relatively minor issue overall.
- The small area assessments for health and education are largely projected based on historic intermediate geography assessments – increasing skills and health outcomes locally is unlikely to have a short-term impact on the Datazone statistics.
While those are the reflections of the Community Renewal Trust team, the full learning resource by the external evaluators with their independent assessment in their own words of this is found below:
