Deprivation (JSNAA)

What is deprivation?

In England, deprivation is measured using The Indices of Deprivation 2015 (IMD 2015). It is based on seven different domains of deprivation:

• Income Deprivation
• Employment Deprivation
• Education, Skills and Training Deprivation
• Health Deprivation and Disability
• Crime
• Barriers to Housing and Services
• Living Environment Deprivation Each of these domains is based on a basket

Combining information from the seven domains produces an overall relative measure of deprivation.

How is deprivation data used?

• National and local organisations use the Index of Multiple Deprivation, sometimes in conjunction with other data, to distribute funding or target resources to areas.
• It is widely used across central government to focus programmes on the most deprived areas.
• Locally, it is often used as evidence in the development of strategies, to target interventions, and in bids for funding.
• The voluntary and community sector also uses the Index, for example, to identify areas where people may benefit from the services they provide.

Deprivation and health

• Deprivation is a well-known correlation with health.
• The more deprived areas in England suffer from worse health outcomes across the Public Health Outcomes Framework.
• There is a near 20 year gap between the healthy life expectancies of those that live in the most and least deprived areas of England.

Deprivation in South Tyneside

• The IMD ranks each small area in England from 1 (most deprived) to 32,844 (least deprived). Each small area has about 1,500 residents. Small area rankings are averaged to give local authority rankings.
• Across the 7 domains, South Tyneside has the following rankings (higher rankings indicate more deprivation and are out of 326 authorities):
  • Income: 15^th
  • Employment: 7^th
  • Education: 98^th
  • Health: 15^th
  • Crime: 186^th
  • Barriers: 163^rd
  • Living: 313^th

• South Tyneside has 102 small community areas ranking from 102^nd out of 32,844 small areas in England to 31,633^rd. The higher the ranking, the more deprived.
• Go to a map of English IMD

Interpreting deprivation data

• Deprivations data is often given in quintiles (groups of 5) or deciles (groups of 10) with:
  • 1 being the lowest and most deprived
  • 5 or 10 being the highest and least deprived.
• IMD is a measurement of relative deprivation and not affluence.  It can be used to compare two or more areas.
• Because methods for calculating deprivation change with each release (the previous score came out in 2010), scores between releases for the same area cannot be compared.
• An summary infographic on how IMD scores can and cannot be used can be found here.

Go to IMD data in Fingertips

Additional resources

Due North: Report of the Inquiry on Health Equity for the North

Last updated: March 2016