Crawley’s Internet User Classifications

While working on another project as part of my day job, I recently came across the map of Internet User Classifications set out by the Consumer Data Research Centre.

Organisations like the CDRC produce this type of research in order to help their clients better understand their consumers, what they want and how to reach them. There are lots of different geodemographic systems out there, most famously MOSAIC, which all the major parties have bought-into at one time or another and yet which in my experience doesn’t tell you anything you won’t learn through just getting out on the doorstep regularly speaking with local residents.

As I’ve written before, any map of Crawley based upon any socioeconomic variable typically shows a clear divide between its eastern and western sides. The map above doesn’t show such a clear split, but what leapt out immediately is that it does seem to closely follow the town’s housing typology.

The pinker area’s of the map tend to be areas built as private housing, from the obvious sections of Pound Hill and Maidenbower, to Tinsley Lane, and the self-built units around Tollgate Hill (the pink in Furnace Green is another category, but interestingly it’s clustered around the units built through housing co-operatives, rather than those built by the council or the Commission for the New Towns).

Both the green and yellow areas tend to be areas built out as council housing, with the green sections being the earlier parts of New Town Development, with the areas of greatest social housing concentration in both Pound Hill and Furnace Green notably being highlighted green.

The town centre and properties south of Haslett Avenue East are both marked out in their own colour, both of which are areas of recent and largely flat-based development. Meanwhile the areas of Broadfield and Langley Green highlighted in purple happen to be two of the most financially deprived parts of town.

What does this all mean? Well, there are some obvious links, purple is classified as ‘e-withdrawn’, and its obvious to see how the more difficult the financial circumstances the less likely people are to be well connected to the internet, similarly the Town Centre is suggested to be younger users, and Haslett Avenue East more likely to be professionals (people who have moved into Crawley for cheaper house prices while using Three Bridges to commute to London for work), something which I can confirm from my experiences of canvassing these areas.

Most likely, there are a range of correlated variables here which can explain why there’s such a strong link between the housing typology and internet usage, but it does highlight something important. As we work towards a digital-first approach for the delivery of public services, something which enables the public sector to free up limited resources to focus on delivering other objectives, we need to be mindful that there are whole neighbourhoods we risk disenfranchising in the process, compounding existing disadvantages. Channel shift may well be inevitable, but by targeting support using the best data available to us, leaving people behind doesn’t have to be.