The research centered on victim crimes - those that directly affect the safety of people and their possessions. The victim oriented crimes included in the data are violence against the person, sexual crimes, robbery, burglary, theft of car and theft from car. The methodology here was to add up victim crimes and express them as a percentage of the population.
This category was measured by reviewing four criteria for each local authority - hours of sunshine, access to parks, recycling and carbon emissions. The Met Office provided figures of average sunshine hours for all UK counties. Each local authority was then assigned a figure from the corresponding county that it fell into geographically.
When assessing parks, the data consisted of two parts - number of sites and total area they amounted to. It was combined with the population figures of each local authority, resulting in the final calculation of the number of hectares per head of population. And, finally, an index was created for the size of parks per head of population.
For recycling, figures for total household recycling management rather than municipal waste were used, and carbon emission levels were sourced from DEFRA and focused on the end user ie individuals rather than emissions from power stations.
The aspects that form the lifestyle category are access to culture and leisure, number of retail outlets, and number of bars, cafes, restaurants and places of accommodation.
Culture and leisure includes measures such as access to museums, concert halls, cinemas, theatres, gyms and sports facilities. To assess sports resources, the team calculated the actual number of public facilities in each local area and to make it comparable, they chose those that all four UK countries include in their figures - sports halls, swimming pools, ice rinks, bowling centres, pitches and athletic tracks. The researchers were careful to find out how many actual pools there are in each local authority and not just the number of leisure centres as one centre could contain three pools.
Information on retail outlets - which included anything from a corner shop to a department store - was provided by the Office of National Statistics, as were figures for catering and accommodation establishments.
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