Part Of Queensway Jumps Into Top 3 Of Relative Deprivation In Wales

The Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD) has been released today, showing a part of Queensway jumping from 9th to 3rd in Wales in a ‘most deprived’ area ranking.

The WIMD is the official measure of relative deprivation for small areas in Wales. It is designed to identify those small areas where there are the highest concentrations of several different types of deprivation.

The WIMD is made up of eight separate types of deprivation: income; employment; health; education; access to services; community safety; physical environment and housing. It is noted that WIMD does not measure the level of deprivation in a small area, but rather whether an area is more or less deprived relative to all other small areas in Wales.

Queensway 1 in Wrexham was ranked 9th in 2011, but is now 3rd in Wales as the overall most deprived LSOA – which is ‘lower layer super output areas’, a technical term for a geographic hierarchy designed to improve the reporting of small area statistics in England and Wales.

The local authority with the highest proportion of LSOAs in the most deprived 10 per cent in Wales was Blaenau Gwent (23.4 per cent), while Monmouthshire had no LSOAs in the most deprived 10 per cent.

The overall picture is similar to that of WIMD 2011, with seven of the ten most deprived LSOAs from WIMD 2011 remaining in the ten most deprived areas in WIMD 2014.

You can view more information from today’s release here, and we will post up when the Welsh Government interactive mapping features are launched which will allow easier access to the raw data via a google maps-esque website.

Until then you can use the visualisation mapping tool that created the above image by clicking here.

A thread has been started on the Wrexham.com forums to debate this post – you can read it here…