The behavioural house indicator: A faster and real time small-area deprivation measure for England

Abstract

Researchers have been long preoccupied with the measuring and monitoring of economic and social deprivation at small scales, neighbourhood, level in order to provide official government agencies and policy makers with more precise data insights. Whist valuable methodologies have been developed, the exercise of data collection associated with these methods tends to be expensive, time consuming, published infrequently with significant time delays, and subject to recurring changes to methodology. Here, we propose a novel method based on a straightforward methodology and data sources to generate a faster and real time indicator for deprivation at different scaling, small to larger areas. The results of our work show that our method provides a consistent view of deprivation across the regions of England and Wales, which are in line with the other indexes, but also highlight specific flash points of deep rural and highly dense urban deprivation areas that are not well captured by existing indexes. Our method is intended to aid researchers and policy makers by complementing existing but infrequent indexes.