Dr. Eamonn Carroll:

I am just looking at our results. The urban-rural difference did not come out strongly in our research in terms of predicting respondent satisfaction. It was not a significant effect. It came up in terms of predicting whether the respondent was in favour of or looking for reform of PA provision. Compared with those in rural areas, people in urban towns were more likely to be in favour of reform. That could be because they were less satisfied with the package or because they were perhaps more plugged into networks of people and knew this was a possibility. However, it was not something that came out strongly. Perhaps the variation is more area to area than straightforwardly urban-rural.

Something that came out in the qualitative interviews was the importance of other services alongside PAs. We spoke to one individual who was based outside a reasonably sized town – it was not a small village – who was on a bus route but could not use it because it was not accessible. There was no taxi in the local area that was able to carry the person who therefore needed a personal assistant to travel into town where, had there been an accessible bus route, the individual could have travelled in alone. These other services may be what are missing in rural areas, more so than personal assistants.