Good Broadband Helps Ranking of the Top 50 Best UK Rural Areas to Live

The Bank of Scotland’s (Halifax, Lloyds) 2017 Rural Quality of Life Survey, which weighs a combination of broadband speeds, health, crime rate, weather, employment, happiness and skills etc. to determine the best rural places in the UK to live, has ranked Scotland’s Orkney Islands at the top.

Apparently residents of Orkney benefit from an above average rural employment rate of 87.6% (the UK average in rural areas is 77.4%), strong spending on school children and education (£9,281 per pupil, double Great Britain’s average of £4,622), low levels of stress, good health, the lowest crime rates, low traffic congestion on the roads and a large number of pubs.

Broadband connectivity (Ofcom data) also plays its part in the ranking as one of the key measures, although interestingly this is one area where the remote Orkney Islands do fall short and that’s despite the fact that the bank has used a weak definition for good broadband (i.e. “the proportion of premises able to receive 5Mbps“).

At present “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) networks cover a little over half of the Orkney Islands (Thinkbroadband data), with nearly 10% receiving speeds of below 2Mbps and 36% getting below 10Mbps. Instead the study recommends that people in Scotland consider East Ayrshire as “one of the best for internet access“, which is closely followed by Perth & Kinross and East Lothian.

By comparison Wychavon (England, West Midlands), which is ranked second in the table, is reported to have 92% coverage of superfast broadband. Sadly we don’t get a lot of detail on the broadband side of things for each area in the ranking (more here).

2017 Rural Qualify of Life Rankings – Top 50 UK Areas to Live