Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of using smaller geographic units in assessing deprivation at local levels.

The indices of deprivation provide an assessment of deprivation at the lowest possible spatial level for which data is available, this is the lower super output level. These are aggregated up into functional spatial outputs for users of the Indices to use. The Indices provide the most granular assessment of local area deprivation across all the domain indicators included for which data exists. The methodology for the Indices of Deprivation has been consulted upon, as it is a national statistic, and reflects the best fit to respond to the range of different needs from users.

Further details of the methodology behind the Indices of deprivation are found on gov.uk here.