Deprivation

Summary Points for Commissioners

• • All overall measures at the Local Authority level show Blackpool has become relatively more deprived since 2007
  • The 2019 index ranks Blackpool as the most deprived of 317 Local Authority areas in England, based on both the average LSOA score and concentration of deprivation measures, and is also now the most deprived Local Authority based on the lesser-used rank of average score measure
  • Blackpool has the 6th highest proportion of LSOA’s ranked in the 10% most deprived, down from 7^th in 2015
  • Blackpool ranks in the bottom 3 local authority areas across 3 of the 7 domains, with only Barriers to Housing and Services ranked outside the bottom 25
  • 39 of 94 Blackpool LSOAs are in the 10% most deprived in the country, up from 36 in 2015, with 96% of LSOA’s now ranking in the bottom half of the deprivation deciles
  • Blackpool continues to have no LSOA’s in the 30% least deprived in the country, the same proportion as in 2015
  • 8 LSOA’s are ranked as less deprived than in 2015, whilst 84 LSOA’s are ranked as more deprived than in 2015

Introduction

The 2019 English Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) was released on 26^th September 2019, updating the 2015 index. It is made up of baskets of indicators covering 7 topics, or “domains”, which are weighted according to their perceived contribution towards deprivation as follows:

Individual indicators within the index are subject to change depending on the availability of the data, but MHCLG treats the different iterations of the index as comparable. The indices therefore show change over time in relative deprivation levels.

The index ranks four different geographies:

• • Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) – these are units of geography smaller than Council wards and contain around 1500 residents. A rank of 1 indicates the most deprived LSOA, and of 32,844^th the least deprived
  • Local Authority (LA) level, based on an aggregated version of the LSOA data, where a rank of 1 indicates the most deprived local authority area, and 317^th indicates the least deprived
  • LEP area (ranked from 1-38)
  • CCG area (ranked from 1-191)

This page reports on the headline LSOA level and LA level rankings. There are several ways of measuring deprivation in all of these types of area. Explanations of the different rankings are provided throughout the page.

 Detailed Facts and Figures

Blackpool’s Deprivation Rankings since 2007

For the 2019 index, the MHCLG has reported the rank of local authority areas obtained from calculating the proportion of LSOA’s in the area which fall into the most deprived 10% in the country. This measure has not previously been reported by MHCLG, but their figures show that Blackpool now ranks as the 6th most deprived area, compared to 7th in 2010, with 41.5% of our LSOA’s (39 areas in total) now falling into this category.

Historically, the deprivation ranking usually quoted was based on an average for all LSOAs – based on the deprivation scores obtained from the indicators in each of the 7 domains. On this measure Blackpool remains the most deprived local authority area in the country, as can be seen in the table below. 

The other overall ranks are variations of these. The rank of local concentration is a reference to the “intensity” of the deprivation amongst the 10% most deprived of the population, rather than a reference to deprived areas all being in one part of Blackpool. It is calculated by adding up the number of people living in the most deprived areas until 10% of Blackpool’s total population is reached, and using the ranks of these LSOA areas to produce a concentration score, which is then compared to the figure for other areas to produce a rank. The rank of local extent looks at neighbourhoods in the bottom 30%.

In previous iterations of the Index, only the Employment and Income domains (the two domains with the most influence on the overall deprivation ranking) were ranked, based on the total numbers of people included in the calculation of the indicators. These are therefore different to the other ranks, as they cover numbers of people and not performance indicators. The change in these rankings therefore show that Blackpool has the 59th and 61st biggest number of people affected by deprivation in these domains compared to other Local Authority areas across the country.

Domain Rankings 2019

The MHCLG ranks each of the individual domains, plus the two other deprivation products calculated from the same source data – Income Deprivation affecting Children, and affecting Older People. These show how the relative position of Blackpool varies across the domains, with performance on Barriers to Housing and Services, Living Environment, and Education & Skills the only ones outside the bottom 10 authority areas.

Deprivation in Neighbourhoods - Lower Super Output Areas

The table below shows how the level of deprivation across LSOA’s has changed since the publication of the 2015 index. This shows how the overall fall in the rankings has played out at the local level, with the 2019 index an increase in LSOA’s in the 20% most deprived areas, compared 2015.

The chart below shows how the 2019 distribution compares to the regional and national picture. Blackpool has a greater proportion of areas in the most deprived deciles than the least deprived:

LSOA Map – Overall picture of Deprivation in Blackpool

The following map shows the picture on deprivation at LSOA level. The colours pick out the built environment of the area, with the colour representing the level of deprivation. The boundaries of the LSOA’s are included within the ward boundaries to understand the granularity of deprivation within each ward;