Summary:

• We have updated our UK Index of Multiple Deprivation dataset with deciles and quintiles for local authorities and Westminster constituencies.
• We have updated our UK Rural Urban Classification dataset to sort local authorities and Westminster constituencies into four categories. 
• We want to help you use our data for climate work – see our previous blog post for more details. 

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Back in 2020 we released a UK-wide version of the index of multiple deprivation (see original blog post). This is a dataset that uses multiple metrics of deprivation to rank all small neighbourhood sized chunks of the UK from most to least deprived.

This data is produced for each nation, but our dataset allows areas to be roughly compared across the whole UK (with a separate file for comparing just Great Britain, without Northern Ireland).

This is useful if you have postcode data you want to add information about deprivation to, but sometimes you want to be comparing the bigger areas like local councils and Westminster constituencies.

In the course of some of mySociety’s recent work,  we’ve added new sheets to the deprivation dataset that show the relative deprivation of UK councils and Westminster constituencies.

This works by using a population weighted average – where each neighbourhood’s raw score is multiplied by its population, added together for the authority/constituency and then divided by the total population. This new score can then be ranked and put into deciles.

Because local authorities and (to a lesser extent) constituencies, have different sizes at a national level, the deciles are based on the percentage of the population rather than number of councils or constituencies. So the 1st decile contains the councils with the highest deprivation, that collectively account for 10% of the population. 

If working with data that is entirely from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, it is better to use one of the official datasets that are derived from the national index.

If you want to use our data for climate related purposes, I run drop-in hours on Thursdays and Friday to talk about our data, or just email me! For more information on our climate data, see our previous blog post. 

You can sign up to our data newsletter to keep up to date with future updates.

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We’ve also updated the UK-wide Rural-Urban-Classification (RUC) dataset to include local authorities and Westminster constituencies. This is a dataset that combines the different measurements of whether a neighbourhood is urban or rural into a single UK wide dataset. 

Here my approach was slightly different. Our RUC dataset recognises three classifications (“Urban”, “Rural”, “Highly Rural”) as this was the best way of combining the different approaches from different nations. 

For each authority/constituency, we calculated the percentage of the population who lives in areas that fit these three criteria. Then, using a clustering approach, authorities/constituencies were split into four loose categories. 

• Urban – All, or the overwhelming majority of the population live in an urban area.
• Urban with rural areas – places with significant rural areas by volume, but generally where the population is concentrated in an urban area. 
• Rural – Less of the population is concentrated in urban areas.
• Sparse and rural – large rural areas with very dispersed populations.

All of these make sense on a spectrum, so at the margins some authorities will be more similar to ones in other classifications, than to the mean of that classification – but in broad terms these categories reflect different kinds of areas. The original population breakdowns are included if further processing work is useful.

If you want to use our data for climate change related purposes, I run drop-in hours on Thursdays and Friday to talk about our data, or just email me! For more information on our climate data, see our previous blog post. 

You can sign up to our data newsletter to keep up to date with future updates.

Header image: Photo by Héctor J. Rivas on Unsplash