People in Stratford are best off in county

PEOPLE in Stratford are better off than those elsewhere in the county in almost every regard, a new report has revealed.

Residents in the district are on average happier, better educated, less likely to be a victim of crime and less likely to suffer from mental health problems than those in the neighbouring districts and boroughs in Warwickshire - the Quality of Life Report reveals.

In the report, by Warwickshire Observatory, affordable housing and fuel poverty were among only a handful of scores where Stratford district came off worse.

In the report, half of the individual areas in Stratford identified were in the happiest scoring proportion of areas in the country - compared to just a quarter county-wide.

An average of 66 per cent of children score five A* to C grades at GCSE in the district, compared to 58 per cent in the county, while levels of child poverty were also substantially lower.

Some areas of the district also recorded some of the lowest crime levels in the country - with Wellesbourne among the top 200 safest places out of a total of 32,400 surveyed nationally, with several others also in the safest 1,000.

There were some less pleasing statistics as well though, with the supply of affordable housing unsurprisingly the worst in the county - the report revealing more than eight per cent of all households are on a waiting list.

And latest figures show nearly a quarter of adults and 13 per cent of children in the district are classified as obese - just slightly below the county average.

Fuel poverty - defined as where a household spends more than ten per cent of its total income - was also higher in the district relative to the rest of the county with more than a fifth of all households said to be in fuel poverty - way above the 15 per cent nationally.

The district has the lowest level of admissions to hospital through alcohol abuse in the county, but nevertheless this number had risen on previous years.

Elsewhere the report showed the biggest cause of death in the district was cancer, which together with heart disease accounted for nearly 60 per cent of all deaths.

And one unusual development revealed was the number of cars on the road in the county had dropped over the last couple of years - compared to a seemingly irreversible upward trend in the previous decade.