More than a million people in England are living in pockets of hidden hardship, meaning that they could be missing out on vital help because their poverty is masked by neighbours who are better off, new analysis has revealed.
Ethnic minorities are most likely to be caught in these small areas of intense deprivation, which are not shown by existing measures used by local and national governments to target anti-deprivation funding.
The hidden hardship affects an estimated 1.3 million people, according to a government-funded research programme by geographers at Queen’s University in Belfast. The most acute examples include pockets of Aylesbury, London, Oxford and Manchester, analysis for the Guardian shows.
Responding to the findings, a spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said: “We are committed to transforming our approach to data so we have right information to make better decisions and target money to where it’s most needed.”
About 220,000 Pakistani people and nearly 200,000 Bangladeshi people are among the most deprived 10% of the population, but do not live in areas currently ranked as such.
Waves of gentrification are behind the phenomenon in many areas, meaning the wealth of incomers has masked the reality of cramped housing, ill health, low educational attainment and high unemployment for others.
The researchers have created a new ethnic group deprivation index (EGDI) by drilling into millions of responses to the 2021 census. They said it exposed “stark geographical inequalities between ethnic groups” living in close proximity.
“Without this evidence, some communities could go without essential support to improve their prospects in life,” said Prof Christopher Lloyd at Queen’s, who helped lead the research as part of a £1m project with a team of international academics. “We have had requests from local authorities to share this data and plan to support them in using it to develop effective policies that target the people and places most in need.”
For example, on the Leamouth peninsula in Tower Hamlets – where the existing measures of deprivation rank it in the least deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in the country – there is a community of Bangladeshi people who are among the most deprived 10%.
And in an area of the Finham suburb of Coventry, which ranks as among England’s least deprived areas, are households from African backgrounds whose deprivation levels are among the worst nationwide.
Civil servants working out where to deploy resources to tackle poverty have used the index of multiple deprivation (IMD) for decades. The IMD breaks the country down into thousands of neighbourhoods and places each into one of 10 categories from the most to the least deprived. The IMD has been used by central government to target school grants and money for the troubled families programme, and by town halls to make funding bids.
Lloyd and his colleague Prof Gemma Catney said: “Members of these ethnic groups are much more likely to miss out on neighbourhood interventions because they live in areas which are not collectively highly deprived.
“These are places where deprivation for at least one group is hidden. Any whole-population measure would mean these groups would miss out on interventions aimed at the most deprived 10%.”
There are hopes the index could help local and national government and charities tackle stubborn ethnic inequalities in British society. For example, the 2021 census showed that almost half of Bangladeshi people were unemployed or economically inactive compared with just over a quarter for white English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British people. Similarly, only 42% of black Caribbean people report very good health versus 64% among African people.
John Pritchard, an intelligence analyst at Oldham council, welcomed the index, which he said was “a novel and useful way of looking at the data on both ethnicity and deprivation”.
“New perspectives often provoke new questions and conversations, and potentially novel solutions,” he added. “It is early days: we need to work with the researchers to better understand what the index is telling us.”
Tower Hamlets in east London, where the huge affluence of Canary Wharf sits alongside some of Britain’s most deprived people, is also understood to be examining the index. The Bangladeshi group living in one neighbourhood (around Cambridge Heath) are ranked 19th in England out of a possible 69,000 for deprivation while people who identify as “other white” are ranked 58,254th.
“This level of granular analysis helps to understand how stark inequalities can scar neighbourhoods,” said Dr Shabna Begum, the interim co-chief executive of the Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank. “Different communities ostensibly live side by side but are in reality a million miles from each other in terms of their differing housing, health, education and employment experiences. Without attending to these complexities we risk continuing to design and support policy prescriptions that don’t deal with the actual problems.”
The researchers at Queen’s described the existing IMD as “a vital tool which shows multiple forms of deprivation but not the unequal experiences of different ethnic groups”. So they have zoomed in further by assessing the deprivation for each ethnic group in an area.
The EGDI reports deprivation per neighbourhood and per ethnic group for overall deprivation, as well as by its constituent four domains: employment, housing, education, and health.
This article was amended on 18 December 2023. On the Leamouth peninsula, it is a Bangladeshi community that is ranked in the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in the country, not a Chinese community as an earlier version said.