Got Neighbourhood Renewal's Indices of Deprivation 2004 spreadsheet today, comparing all NR target areas in Bristol, and measuring them against each other using an arbitrary points system. We are somewhat concerned by the results, since they really don't reflect reality at the moment.

These numbers (though they don't tell us how they work - see here for some more explanation) cover the following seven areas: Income, Employment, Health Deprivation and Disability, Education - Skills and Training, Barriers to Housing and Services, Crime and Disorder, Living Environment. There are 32,000 'Super Output Areas', and the numbers are the rank of these in the country as a whole. St Pauls features fairly high in this scale and gets the following results:

Now I'm not going to plough through the full document for the whole country, but this is all based on crime figures, housing figures, etc etc... I guess it's probably fairly accurate, but I'm sure their are much worse places in Bristol than this. Maybe it just seems that way because there's so much going on...