Who’s thriving, striving or merely surviving in GB today?
The Financial Precarity Classification presents the first national atlas of financial precarity in Great Britain, illustrating geographic variation in the types of challenges local communities are facing.
Moving beyond conventional income-based definitions of financial precarity, this classification captures its broader socioeconomic and spatial drivers. By mapping financial precarity at a fine spatial scale, this geodemographic classification reveals how economic vulnerability varies across different localities, highlighting the uneven geography of financial insecurity between rural and urban areas, city centres and peripheries, and coastal and inland communities.
The classification integrates a range of measures that capture differences among households at the Lower layer Super Output Area (LSOA) level, across five interconnected domains: employment, income and benefits, household assets, financial liabilities, and resident lifestyles. The result is a two-tier nested classification, comprising five Supergroups and 13 nested Groups.
All processing steps and methodological details are documented in a peer-reviewed paper published in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. Pen portraits of the supergroups and subgroups, describing the contextual characteristics of each classification group, is also available. These and the data can be accessed via data.geods.ac.uk.
All data are available to access via application from data.geods.ac.uk and visible through our interactive web mapping tool mapmaker.geods.ac.uk
Where are local communities struggling the most?
The most financially insecure supergroup, E: Highly Vulnerable Families neighbourhoods exhibit:
- High levels of unemployment and lower rates of income
- Higher rates of problem gambling, outstanding debts and housing cost
- Very low rates of savings and investments or other property assets
- The highest rate of children living within low-income households
Residents of these neighbourhoods:
- Trend towards younger or middle-age groups
- Live in overcrowded social or privately rented houses
- Many live in non-single households with their school-age dependent children, including numerous lone parents
- If employed, work in semi-routine or routine occupations such as sales, operative and elementary jobs
- Have lower education attainment than residents of other areas
- Are heavily reliant on social benefits like Universal Credit (UC), as well as amassing outstanding debts
These neighbourhoods are predominantly located in and typically clustered around the peripheries of the centres of large or medium-sized cities, such as London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leicester and Birmingham.
With a population of 1.18 million people, Birmingham has the largest number of neighbourhoods (359) that fall within Supergroup E: Highly Vulnerable Families, more than half (54%) of its neighbourhoods.
Within this Supergroup, the majority of neighbourhoods are classified as Group E12: Underprivileged Dependents. This group appears more frequently around the inner zones of northern England cities like Birmingham.
Group E12 is the most financially vulnerable of the 13 groups, with the highest rates of UC claimants and County Court Judgements (CCJ) debt value. Residents of these areas are typically younger (under 44), have poorer health (with higher rates of Personal Independence Payment [PIP] claimants), and experiencing severe financial hardship.
Birmingham also ranks in 8th place among local authorities with the most neighbourhoods classified as Supergroup D: Financially Precarious Families, with 122 (19%) areas falling within this supergroup. These are mainly clustered in a halo around its boundaries.
The Supergroup D: Financially Precarious Families exhibits:
- Lowest gross disposable household income (GDHI) per head
- Higher rates of lone parents with dependent or non-dependent children
- Higher incidences of poor health and disabilities (with high rates of PIP but moderate UC claimants)
- Higher unemployment
Residents of these neighbourhoods:
- Often work in blue-collar occupations. Employment tends to be in operational and elementary occupations, routine or semi-routine, serve and sales jobs
- Often live in socially rented housing, and with limited car ownership
- Tend to have a relatively lower level of education
- Tend to have poorer health
Most of Birmingham’s neighbourhoods within this supergroup are classified as Group D09: Ageing Renters (79 LSOAs). The group is characterised by a higher proportion of one-person households over 65, who live in areas with the lowest rental prices on the outskirts of urban areas. Relative to the supergroup, residents present a marginally better financial situation, with better employment and property ownership characteristics, a slightly higher GDHI per head, and less debt; but have higher outstanding personal loans.
To the north in Sutton Coldfield, residents of these neighbourhoods live cheek-by-jowl with those of Supergroup C: Mature and Financially Secure neighbourhoods, highlighting the value of this multidimensional classification to uncover hidden inequalities among populations at fine spatial scale.
Notably, there are no neighbourhoods in Birmingham classified as Group B04: Young Striving Families.
A multidimensional framework for understanding economic instability and vulnerability
The Financial Precarity Classification provides an evidence base for more informed policymaking and targeted interventions aimed at mitigating financial insecurity.
Local authorities can use the classification to provide debt advice, benefit support, and financial education towards high-precarity neighbourhoods, or optimise housing, transport, and employment initiatives to better support areas of concentrated vulnerability.
More broadly, the classification may facilitate the spatial equity of fiscal and welfare policies, ensuring that interventions address the varying needs from rural and urban areas, city centres and peripheries, and coastal and inland communities.
All data are available to access via application from data.geods.ac.uk and visible through our interactive web mapping tool mapmaker.geods.ac.uk
NOTES
The analysis excludes London boroughs, which would otherwise feature predominantly among the top 10 local authorities by neighbourhoods classified as ‘A: Emerging Financial Climbers’ and ‘E: Highly Vulnerable Families’.
The data for this research have been provided by the Geographic Data Service (GeoDS.ac.uk), a Smart Data Research UK Investment: ES/Z504464/1.
