Professor Tanya Ovenden-Hope explores how Cornwall’s scenic beauty masks deep-rooted deprivation that the government measurement, the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 2019, systematically underestimates. This blog discusses the findings of the Plymouth Marjon University, The Pretty Poverty Report: Cornwall Rurality Matters.
The Problem of ‘Pretty Poverty’
Deprivation in Cornwall is not immediately evident, hidden behind lovely landscapes and seaside idylls. Cornwall represents a paradox of lived experiences, with many living in ‘pretty poverty’. Ranked 83rd out of 317 local authority areas for overall deprivation using the IMD 2019, the county appears to experience moderate disadvantage. Yet this ranking masks the complex experiences of rural deprivation.
Our research selected six rural Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) in Cornwall representing the most deprived rural neighbourhoods based on the IMD 2019 data (ranking in the lowest 20-30%). The selected LSOAs also experienced educational isolation at a local school level through a combination of geographical remoteness, socioeconomic deprivation, and cultural isolation, and represented a geographical spread across the length of Cornwall.
Interviews were conducted between September 2024 and March 2025 with residents of the six LSOAs to explore their experiences of the seven categories of the IMD 2019 to understand how deprivation manifests for rural residents. We also researched secondary data on Cornwall’s context, measurements of deprivation and rural deprivation.
Six Dimensions of Rural Deprivation
Transport as Essential Infrastructure
The most striking research finding across all neighbourhoods was transport dependency. Unlike urban contexts where car ownership might indicate affluence, in rural Cornwall, it represents essential infrastructure. This dependency creates transport poverty, a rural tax not captured by income-based measures. Rural residents face higher transportation costs while potentially appearing less deprived on IMD metrics.
IMD 2019 weighting allocates just 9.3% to the Barriers to Housing and Services domain (which includes transport), compared to 22.5% each for Income and Employment. Yet our research reveals transport as the fundamental determinant of rural access to employment, healthcare, education, and social participation.
Housing Displacement Dynamics
Cornwall’s housing crisis extends beyond simple affordability to what we identify as housing displacement. With over 20,000 homes out of residential use, two-thirds classified as second homes or holiday rentals, local residents face intense competition for housing. This creates intergenerational housing dependencies invisible to standard indicators. A participant told us, “I essentially needed a close family member to pass away so that I could actually afford to live by myself“. Such experiences reveal how housing security often depends on family assets rather than individual economic capacity, creating vulnerabilities not reflected in ownership statistics.
Employment Precarity – Beyond Unemployment
Rural employment challenges extend beyond the binary employed/unemployed categorisation used in the IMD 2019. Cornwall’s economy, with tourism accounting for 20% of employment characterised by seasonal, low-wage work, creating systemic employment precarity affecting even highly qualified professionals. Highly skilled individuals face geographic constraints on career development that are invisible to standard employment measures.
Healthcare and Service Access
The systematic withdrawal of rural services compounds geographic barriers to create healthcare withdrawal. There is a pattern of local GP closure and reduction that forces residents to travel increasing distances for basic care while struggling with digitalised systems that assume urban connectivity levels. Cornwall’s internet speeds are 43% lower than the UK average (106 Mbps compared to 164 Mbps), yet healthcare services increasingly assume digital literacy and access.
Educational Isolation
Educational opportunities face multiple constraints in rural and coastal localities. Post-16 provision was noted by participants to be located in colleges that required significant travel time from rural locations. Adult education was also reported as hard to access where they were still provided. There was also an emerging pattern in rural schools of high numbers of Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) pupils, with one school reporting 29% of pupils having Education and Health Care Plans compared to the national average of 3%. This concentration creates significant resource challenges for small rural schools already struggling with funding formulas designed for urban contexts.
Community Resilience – Asset or Mask?
Despite multiple challenges, all study areas demonstrated remarkable community resilience and social capital, as one participant summed up: “Generally you know your neighbours… if someone hasn’t seen you for a week or so, you’ll generally find you get a knock on the door“. While this social capital provides crucial support, it creates measurement challenges. Strong informal networks may substitute for formal services while being interpreted as reduced need rather than adaptive resilience.
The Rural Deprivation Measurement Problem
The IMD 2019’s reliance on LSOA-level aggregation creates a fundamental misrepresentation of rural deprivation patterns. Rural areas typically contain mixtures of affluent and deprived households within the same LSOA, creating averaging effects that mask individual household disadvantage.
The IMD 2019’s indicators reflect urban realities more than rural contexts. Crime statistics focus on recorded crime, missing rural under-reporting patterns. Service access measures emphasise proximity rather than effective accessibility, failing to capture how geographic, digital, and financial barriers combine in rural settings.
The current weighting structure systematically undervalues the multiplier effects of geographic isolation. Transport barriers receive minimal attention despite their cascading effects across all life domains in rural contexts.
Policy Implications
Cornwall’s experience demonstrates the urgent need for rural-specific deprivation indices. Alternative approaches could incorporate smaller geographic units to reduce averaging effects, increase transport accessibility weighting, add digital inclusion metrics, and include social capital measures that recognise community assets while avoiding substitution for formal provision. The new Socioeconomic Index for Small Areas (SEISA) offers promising developments, using smaller Output Areas and identifying 7% of the most deprived areas as rural compared to the IMD’s 3%.
Policy responses must move beyond urban models to address rural-specific challenges. This requires recognising rural transport as essential infrastructure, developing innovative healthcare delivery combining digital access with place-based provision, and creating economic development strategies addressing skills mismatches and geographic constraints. Current resource allocation mechanisms, heavily dependent on IMD 2019 rankings, systematically disadvantage rural areas by failing to capture hidden rural deprivation.
Looking Forward
The Pretty Poverty Report reveals that addressing rural deprivation requires fundamental shifts in how we measure, understand, and respond to disadvantage in rural communities. We must move from urban-centric assumptions to rural-specific realities grounded in lived experience. The scenic beauty of Cornwall, and similar rural and coastal areas across the UK should not mask the genuine challenges faced by communities. Only through place-based approaches that acknowledge unique geographical and social contexts can we develop appropriate policy responses to rural disadvantage.
The challenge now is ensuring that policy development moves beyond the ‘rural and coastal idyll’ to recognise and respond to the complex realities of rural life. Cornwall’s experience of ‘pretty poverty’ provides critical insights for developing more effective approaches to rural policy across similar contexts. I hope to see more place-sensitivity in the forthcoming IMD 2025.
Professor Tanya Ovenden-Hope is Dean of Place and Social Purpose at Plymouth Marjon University and Lead Researcher and Author of The Pretty Poverty Report. For more information about place-based challenges in rural and coastal areas, contact tovenden-hope@marjon.ac.uk
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Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.