To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether he made an assessment of the potential merits of using the Indices of Multiple Deprivation to prioritise investments through the UK Community Renewal Fund.
Answered on
13 April 2021
To ensure the UK Community Renewal Fund reaches the most in need, we have identified 100 priority places based on an index of economic resilience across Great Britain which measures productivity, household income, unemployment, skills and population density.
We are committed to transparency and a methodological note explaining how the 100 priority places were determined has been published: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-community-renewal-fund-prospectus/uk-community-renewal-fund-prioritisation-of-places-methodology-note .
The IMD (Index of Multiple Deprivation) does not represent a ‘one size fits all’ solution to measuring economic need. Not all of the variables it considers are relevant to the particular interventions we want to support through the UK Community Renewal Fund, and some of the variables it does not consider, such as productivity, are central to the policy goals of the Fund.