2021 Census: the most up-and-coming areas of England and Wales outside London, including Liverpool and Bristol

Analysis of census data reveals the areas of England and Wales where deprivation levels are falling fastest

If you’re looking to get on the property ladder or relocate to another area, you might be wondering where the up-and-coming parts of England and Wales are.

It’s a question the census can help us to answer.

One of its results is a measure of household deprivation. By comparing the scores from the 2011 census with those from the 2021 census, we can see which council areas are less deprived than they were before.

There are lots of possible ways to measure household deprivation, and the method used by the Office for National Statistics doesn’t take income into account.

Instead, it looks at four different measures: unemployment, low qualification levels, poor health and bad housing.

Across England and Wales as a whole, more than half of households (52%) were deprived in at least one of these four possible ways when the census took place in 2021 - that’s 12.8 million households.

But this is a fall from the decade before, when the figure was 58%.

At local authority level, out of the 10 council areas which saw the biggest fall in deprivation levels, nine were in London.

Topping the table was the London borough of Newham, where the proportion of households classed as not deprived climbed from 25% in 2011 to 39% in 2021.

This was followed by the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Southwark, Islington and Greenwich.

But there are also plenty of places outside the capital where deprivation levels are declining.

Here are the areas of England and Wales outside London where the proportion of deprived households fell the most between 2011 and 2021.

The City of London and Isles of Scilly have been omitted from our analysis because of their small populations.

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