The map is a cartogram showing the level of child poverty for each of London’s councils in addition to their predicted loss in revenue spending power resulting from the recent government cuts. As you can see the shapes of some of the poorest boroughs in London have been enlarged to reflect high levels of child poverty. The darkest colours, sadly, also seem to match the most enlarged boroughs, showing that they will be hardest hit by the cuts.
This is mostly due to those boroughs having proportionately larger budgets. It’s the same idea behind richer people paying a higher rate of income tax – they can afford to pay more.
While these borough councils were hardest hit by the cuts, they benefited most from the overspending that proceeded them.
The councils that have the smallest cuts have the least they can cut – Buckinghamshire’s tiny (one of the lowest in the country) funding cut is leading to a 90% reduction in spending on youth projects. The youth budget wouldn’t have been big, so in absolute terms that’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s a relatively huge cut, and about the only one they could still make (the transport budget has been tiny for ages) without bins not being emptied and libraries closing and such like.
An interesting subject for a map however I find the combination of stretching and colour a little confusing, deploying either one or the other would have communicated the severity of cuts more concisely. It would have removed the need for second, true boroughs map in the right corner.
When contrasted with this Parliamentary constituency map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LondonParliamentaryConstituency2010Results.svg) one could argue that the cuts are more likely to be severe in Labour held areas where one can assume that the Conservatives are already unpopular.
Si, surely bigger councils have bigger budgets because they have more demands made of them. Their bigger budgets don’t equate to having spare money which can be cut without harm. For cuts to be fair they should be evenly spread across councils big and small.
Nice site btw, will be back.