Northamptonshire ranked second worst place to live in the UK in latest poll

Three days after the county council announced it would be cutting £77 million from its 2016/17 budget, the county has now come close to the top a poll of undesirable regions in the country, beaten only by Humberside.

The study by survey company B.Heard judged counties by crime data, the quality of schools, the number of people in poverty, fire service staff numbers, planning and health indexes and combined that with information from public opinion surveys to give an overall score.

Northamptonshire was found to have the ninth lowest number of outstanding rated schools, had the ninth highest crime rate and came out fifth worst in terms of GP satisfaction.

Chief executive of B.heard Oscar Vickerman, said: “This latest study builds on our work to gather all available data from regulators and government bodies and turn this into transparent, useful information for us all.”

Humberside was found to be the worst region to live for essential services overall, ranking second worst for schools and third worst for number of fire staff.

B.heard used data from Ofsted’s school inspections outcomes, the GP Patient Survey, police force area data tables from the Office for National Statistics to score each county in the UK.

Dorset was found to be the best place to live, scoring highly across the board, receiving the third best GP satisfaction score and the fourth greatest proportion of schools receiving Ofsted’s top rating, ‘outstanding’.

The study also found that Londoners were most at risk of becoming a victim of crime, but enjoy the highest-rated schools.

Best:

1) Dorset

2) North Yorkshire

3) Gloucestershire

4) Surrey

5) Cheshire

6) Northumbria

7) Hampshire

8) Hertfordshire

9) Joint Cumbria & Suffolk

Worst:

1) Humberside

2) Northamptonshire

3) Joint South Yorkshire, West Midlands & Essex

6) West Yorkshire

7) Cambridgeshire

8) Kent

9) London

10) Lincolnshire