Data sources & methodology

Every figure on My Area UK comes from a free, official source, most under the Open Government Licence. Here’s each one, its coverage and how current it is.

How we calculate the My Area Score

The My Area Score is a single 0–100 livability index for each English local authority, built from eight open indicators. Each indicator is turned into a percentile ranking within England— so 100 means best-in-England on that measure and 0 the worst — and measures where lower is better (crime, council tax, the two affordability ratios, the claimant rate) are inverted so that higher always means better. The score is the weighted average of those percentiles:

• Crime (recorded crime per 1,000, ONS/Home Office) — 20
• Housing affordability (house-price-to-earnings 12 + rent-to-earnings 8, ONS) — 20
• Schools rated Good or Outstanding (DfE/Ofsted, min. 8 rated) — 15
• Life expectancy at birth (OHID Fingertips) — 15
• Low deprivation (English Indices of Deprivation 2019) — 10
• Employment — out-of-work claimant rate (ONS/Nomis) — 10
• Low council tax (Band D, MHCLG) — 10

Where an indicator is missing for an area (for example too few Ofsted-rated schools), it is dropped and the remaining weights are re-normalised, provided at least five of the eight are present; each area page shows how much of the full weighting its score is based on. Because every indicator is ranked within England, the score compares English areas with each other and isn’t published for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, whose underlying statistics use different methods. It’s a broad guide, not a verdict — see each individual panel for the raw figures.

How we calculate deprivation

Each nation publishes its own deprivation index over small neighbourhoods. For England we use the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2019 “rank of average rank” (1 of 317 = most deprived). For Scotland (SIMD 2020) and Wales (WIMD 2019) we calculate the share of the council’s neighbourhoods that fall in that nation’s most-deprived 10%. The plain-English band (“more/less deprived than average”) is derived from that position; the national average share is ~10% by construction. Because the three indices use different methods, deprivation figures are comparable within a nation, not across nations.

Corrections

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