Rowner Community Trust (RCT) is dedicated to improving life chances and the local environment for residents in Rowner, an area facing significant and persistent disadvantage. With Pride in Place funding secured, RCT and its partners had a critical opportunity to ensure that investment was directed towards the issues where it could have the greatest impact.
Rowner is not a uniform area. Different parts of the neighbourhood experience different challenges, and headline statistics for Gosport or Hampshire can mask important variation at a very local level.
RCT needed clarity on how Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) within Rowner compared with one another. There was also a need to move beyond overall deprivation scores to understand the underlying drivers of need: were issues primarily economic, or rooted in gaps in community infrastructure?
We delivered a comprehensive Local Needs Analysis designed to provide both strategic clarity and practical insight. Focusing primarily on the English Indices of Deprivation and the Community Needs Index with a range of supporting indicators, we compared Rowner’s LSOAs with each other and benchmarked them against Gosport, Hampshire, England and other agreed comparator areas.
We explored how different dimensions of deprivation and community need overlapped geographically. By mapping and analysing patterns across each of the domains used in the Index of Multiple Deprivation and the Community Needs Index, we identified where multiple pressures were concentrated. This helped distinguish whether particular hotspots were driven mainly by economic exclusion, connectivity issues, or weaknesses in community infrastructure.
Beyond the IMD and CNI, we explored the wider socio-economic context, which further helps to explain why levels of deprivation and community need are so high in Rowner.
Finally, we examined relative change over time between IMD 2019 and 2025. This longitudinal perspective highlighted areas where conditions had worsened, improved or remained entrenched, providing a baseline for evaluating the impact of Pride in Place investment.
For each of these sections in the report we provided commentary on how the data related to Pride in Place funding and potential priorities.
The final report was written in clear, accessible language, ensuring it could be used not only by RCT and local authority partners for strategic planning, but also by residents seeking to use robust evidence to influence local decision-making.
Some description
Explore the underlying drivers of need across communities to inform priorities, programmes and partnerships
Identify where Pride in Place investment could have the greatest impact
Provide a robust baseline to support impact evaluation and communicate clear, insights to partners and residents.
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