As I mentioned in my last post, I'm currently doing some work on child poverty and social mobility. I did this for English parliamentary constituency areas in 2011 but the problem I had then was that I didn't have a dataset that covered the entire UK at the small area level. Since then, however, I've been looking more into the HMRC's child poverty statistics and their revised local child poverty measure (linked to the Child Poverty Act 2010). To cut a long story short... I've mapped child poverty at the small area level for the whole UK - for those areas where child poverty is at 33.3% or higher (the UK average is 20.6%). The map is zoomed to London but you can zoom around and use the full screen version. Click on an area to find out more.
The highest value in the UK is in part of Springburn in Glasgow - with a value of 83.3% of children in poverty according to the HMRC definition. The highest value for anywhere outside Scotland is 75.0% in part of east central Manchester.
Some technical information... The small areas used are Super Output Areas in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, Data Zones are used. These have around half the population of Super Output Areas (around 800, compared to 1600). Using these smaller areas means that Scottish areas dominate the list of the highest child poverty neighbourhoods in the UK. In the HMRC definition, 'children' are all dependent children aged 0 to 19. They also provide data on child poverty rate for children under 16 and this figure is usually about a half to one percentage point higher (e.g. 21.1% for under 16 compared to 20.6% for the whole UK). The data are from the most recent release - 2010.
