Elmbridge has been named the best place in the country to live for the third year in a row.

The Halifax Quality of Life Survey, published this week, put Elmbridge at the top of the pile because of the health of residents, life expectancy, employment, school performance and the weather.

Elmbridge has come top four times since Halifax started the survey five years ago.

The report showed 95 per cent of residents in the borough are in good health and the employment rate is at 75 per cent, with the weekly average earnings on £1,018.

It also said life expectancy in Elmbridge was higher than average at 81.4 years and residents enjoyed more weekly sunshine (32.7 hours) and less rainfall per year (676mm) than most people in the country.

The report was issued just weeks after credit experts Experian identified Elmbridge as the area best prepared to deal with the effects of recession and public sector cuts.

Nitesh Patel, housing econmist at Halifax, said: “For the third year running Elmbridge has delivered against a range of indicators to demonstrate that its residents have the best quality of life in Britain.

“Surrey scores highly on several measures, including health, life expectancy, employment, average earnings and school results.

“Many areas in southern England perform well in terms of average earnings, employment rates, health and the weather, while areas in the north tend to score highly on school exam results and physical environment characteristics such as low population densities and low traffic flows.”

In recent years, Elmbridge has become famous nationwide for being a popular area for the super rich, even being dubbed by one national newspaper as “the Beverly Hills of Surrey”.

The borough is home to a host of premiership footballers and other celebrities, such as Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, musicians Ronnie Wood and Mick Hucknall and sport stars Andy Murray and Colin Montgomerie.

But some people have warned this image comes at cost, with “pockets of deprivation” in the borough being ignored as a consequence.

In the Hidden Surrey survey published by the Surrey Community Foundation in 2009, Walton Ambleside was named as the third worst area in the county for child poverty, with double the national average.

The same area came 14th in the survey's list of places with “multiple deprivation”.

The report also showed poverty among the elderly in Walton North was two thirds above the national average.

Dominic Raab, MP for Esher and Walton, used his first speech in Parliament in May to highlight the disparity between rich and poor in the constituency.

He said: “My constituency is an aspirational place, and generally my constituents enjoy a high quality of life-generally, but not uniformly.

“The Hidden Surrey report concluded the previous government had choked money for local services in the area because there was ‘no electoral cost’.”

Reacting to the recent news on his blog, Mr Raab said: “Reports like this are a double-edged sword. Labour used these mean scores to diddle Elmbridge in terms of the funding we get back from central Government for local public services - despite the high taxes we pay, and pockets of deprivation hidden by the overall average level of affluence.”

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