Understanding Inequality in Surrey: An Evidence Base

What is this evidence base and why do we need it?

Our 2030 Community Vision is for Surrey to be a uniquely special place where everyone has a great start to life, people live healthy and fulfilling lives, are enabled to achieve their full potential and contribute to their community, and no one is left behind. Delivering against this aim enables public authorities in Surrey to meet their Public Sector Equality Duty to eliminate discrimination and advance opportunity based on people’s protected characteristics.^[1]

By many measures, Surrey appears an area of relative advantage, with higher life expectancy and earnings than the UK average. It is also an area with less cultural and ethnic diversity than many places in the UK, and an older than average population.

Over recent years we have done a lot to dig beneath this affluent surface to recognise how socio-economic disadvantage affects a significant proportion of our residents, and we have identified areas of the County where people are living in much more deprived communities. We understand that people in these areas experience worse outcomes across a range of factors including life expectancy, mental wellbeing, and educational attainment. We have defined a series of key neighbourhoods and priority towns where partners from the public, private and voluntary sectors are coming together to work alongside communities to address these inequalities.

During the Covid-19 pandemic we also learned some difficult lessons as a country about the deep inequalities that persist, including for women, people from minoritised ethnic backgrounds or people who are disabled. We recognised in Surrey, too, the impacts of these structural inequalities that meant that certain population groups fared worse during the pandemic than others – as set out in our series of Covid 19 Rapid Needs Assessments. There have also been several reports from across the UK over recent years that highlight how far we still have to go to ensure that public services are delivered in ways that meet the needs of all of our communities in an equitable way^[2].

We know, then, that it is not just geography that can influence whether a person is left behind. While talent is equally spread out among all our communities, opportunities unfortunately are not and characteristics like a person’s ethnicity, whether they are disabled, their sex, age or sexuality can too often be linked to their life outcomes.

This evidence base seeks to create a shared understanding of the inequality people in Surrey experience based on shared demographic characteristics, which can be used by all public, voluntary and private sector organisations working in our County. We will use this shared understanding of inequalities to come together to set an ambition and a strategy for how we work together to tackle them. In this document, we review the data we have about our communities in Surrey, focussing on a number of key ‘protected characteristics’ against which all public sector organisations have a duty to promote equality of opportunity under the Equality Act 2010, particularly age, disability, ethnicity and sex. Where data is available, we also consider inequality arising from gender reassignment, religion and sexual orientation.

The first section sets out what we know about who lives in Surrey, based on the 2021 Census. We then explore data that aim to shed light on the inequalities that different groups experience. We have grouped these around 5 themes that are important for ensuring no one is left behind:

Introduction: Who lives in Surrey?
Theme 1: Financial security and employment
Theme 2: Education and learning
Theme 3: Health and Wellbeing
Theme 4: Independent and secure living conditions
Theme 5: Personal and community engagement
Appendix: A note on terminology around race and ethnicity in this document

This work will complement the existing data and research on socio-economic and geographical inequality in Surrey and help to highlight where inequalities of outcome are and who they affect. It will help all partners who work in the county to deliver on our 2030 ambition by identifying where we need to address our efforts to ensure that there really is no one left behind.

Next Section: Introduction – Who lives in Surrey?

[1] Age, disability, ethnicity, gender reassignment, marital status, pregnancy/maternity, religion/belief, sex, sexual orientation,

[2] For example reports into disparities in maternal deaths, use of ‘do not resuscitate’ orders for disabled people during Covid-19, and reviews of culture around misogyny and racism in some police and fire services.