Townsend Deprivation Index

Townsend Deprivation Index#

Last modified: 12 Sep 2025

UK LLC provides a 2021 version of the Townsend Deprivation Index for England and Wales at the Census Output Area level.
More information about this dataset is available here.

Townsend Index#

The Townsend index (1989) is a relative indicator of material deprivation, which has been widely used to identify socio‐economic confounding in crime, education, and health research in England. This dataset is a 2021 version of the Townsend Index Jephcote and Gulliver (2025).

1. Summary#

townsend_england_wales

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Dataset Descriptor Dataset-specific Information
Name of Dataset in TRE PLACE_townsend_england_wales
Citation (APA) University of Leicester, Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability and City St George's, University of London, Population Health Research Institute. (2025). Place based data: Townsend Index England Wales. UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC). https://doi.org/10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00436-01
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Owner University of Leicester and St George's, University of London
Authors Calvin Jephcote (University of Leicester) and John Gulliver (City St George's, University of London)
Temporal Coverage 01/2021 - 12/2021
Geographical Coverage England and Wales
Participant Count None
Number of Variables 6
Number of Observations 188879
Key Link https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2025.109304
Keywords townsend,index,deprivation
Latest Extract Date TBC
Specific Restrictions to Data Use None
Build a Data Request https://explore.ukllc.ac.uk/

2. Variables#

townsend_england_wales

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Variable Group Variable Description Source Date range of data
Deprivation townsend_q5 The 'Townsend index' converted into quintiles (5 classes). Quintile 5 represents 20% of the COA communities that were considered the most deprived in 2021. University of Leicester, City St George's, University of London 2021
Deprivation townsend_q10 The 'Townsend index' converted into deciles (10 classes). Decile 10 represents 10% of the COA communities that were considered the most deprived in 2021. University of Leicester, City St George's, University of London 2021
Geography ctry Country Office of National Statistics 2011
UK LLC avail_from_dt None UK LLC None

3. Metrics#

TBC

4. Version History#

TBC

5. Documentation#

We are currently building a documentation storage system which will host useful documents related to datasets and data owners. We will surface these documents on Guidebook.

6. Useful Syntax#

Below we will include syntax that may be helpful to other researchers in the UK LLC TRE. For longer scripts, we will include a snippet of the code plus a link to the UK LLC GitHub repository where you can find the full scripts.

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