Geography in practice: trajectories of neighbourhood deprivation in England

Neighbourhood deprivation measures play a major role in identifying vulnerable communities in the UK, and in targeting resources to them. Official measures of multiple deprivation in each of the four nations of the UK are used to allocate billions of pounds of government money.

The success of schemes to reduce deprivation should be assessed by measuring changes in deprivation over time, yet this is rarely attempted. This is important because their impacts are likely to be a partly a function of the deprivation history of an area (e.g., deindustrialisation, population decline) and, more generally, the trajectory of deprivation, and not just its current state, is significant.

This webinar takes as its focus trajectories of deprivation in England using the Index of Deprivation (IoD) for several time points: 2004, 2007, 2010, 2015, and 2019 for common geographical areas (2021 Lower Layer Super Outputs Areas; LSOAs, which we consider as neighbourhoods).

The ranks for each of the seven sets of domains for each index are classified using a variant of k-medians adapted to longitudinal data. The end result is a set of trajectory clusters which differentiate, for example, LSOAs with persistently high or low deprivation over the study period and LSOAs with deprivation levels which have fluctuated.

The lessons learned from cases where deprivation has decreased, and also where it is stubbornly high, are being used to inform the work of Local Authority and other analysts. Understanding possible interventions associated with decreases in deprivation may help to shape similar schemes elsewhere.

This webinar is hosted by Professor Chris Lloyd (Queen's University Belfast).