Service availability and accessibility has been a key rural policy issue for many years. In order to monitor changing levels of service availability, we collect point location data of a handful of key services, such as GP Surgeries, and map the distance these services are from all rural and urban households within England. These analyses are used to underpin the CRC’s wider watchdog and monitoring work. The data and statistics available here enable the CRC to provide the answers to the following questions:

• How many services have closed or opened in rural areas over time.
• As a result of these services opening or closing do rural people have to travel lesser or greater distances to access these services than their counterparts.

All data are available at a national, regional, local and neighbourhood level and can be downloaded here.

2011

• Services outlets 2011
• Distance to services analysis

2010

• Rural Services Data Series headline results
• Services outlets 2000-2010
• All regions
• Distance to services analysis

Data downloads (Please note that the following are large zip files and may take some time to download. We recommend using Microsoft Access to import the data once downloaded.)

• Output area distance to services 2000 (4.9MB)
• Output area distance to services 2006 (5.3MB)
• Output area distance to services 2010 (7.2MB)
• Output area distance to services 2011 (6.8MB)
• Output area and household count (648KB) (number of addresses within each output area)

The service location data is sourced from a number of different Governmental, non-Governmental and commercial organisations.

Previously the accessibility analysis has been calculated as a straight line distance from the centre of a postcode to the nearest outlet for each service. From 2010 we have updated this analysis to use the road network which gives more accurate results. As part of this improvement historic outlet data for 2000 and 2006 were re-analysed so a true comparison can be made over time. The Technical Report has more information about how these figures are produced.

Unfortunately we’re unable to make available the datasets showing where services are actually located. Please be aware that it’s not possible to extract this information from any of the files we have made available.

The Department for Transport has published statistics on the Core Accessibility Indicators for 2008.

The Indicators provide a number of measures of accessibility by public transport, walking, cycling and car to seven service types: primary schools, secondary schools, further education, GPs, hospitals, food stores and employment. With the exception of further education, indicators have also been produced for an ‘at-risk’ sub-group of the population.