Policy Watch
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Part Two: What does the 2021 census tell us about deprivation and tenancy in different areas (and why it’s important to be able to look at smaller geographic areas, to see just how much variation there is)
Part Two in PPR’s new policy series ‘A new look at housing: what the census data can tell us about social housing provision and deprivation’
The 2021 Northern Ireland census data is available under a range of geographies; the relevant maps were created by the NI Statistics and Research Agency and are available alongside the data.
The smallest, most detailed geographic level available for our purposes is the Super Data Zone (SDZ) (Figure 1 below shows the geographical map of the SDZs). Super Data Zones do not all have the same numbers of people living in them. There are 850 SDZs in total, and these fit within larger District Electoral Areas (DEAs), of which there are 80. The DEAs in turn fit within Local Government Districts, corresponding to our 11 local council areas.
For each SDZ, the census data gives estimates for several factors, including the level of deprivation and the quantity of homes of various tenures (principally social, private rented, and owned).
You can look up information about the Super Data Zone where you live here.
Figure 1: A map showing the Census 2021 Super Data Zones
The Picture of ‘deprivation in housing’ across Northern Ireland
The 2021 census included questions around deprivation in education, employment, health and housing. For the purposes of the census, a household was marked as deprived in housing if (1) it did not have central heating, or (2) it was overcrowded.
As a reflection of housing need, this measure of ‘deprivation in housing’ is incomplete; but the four ‘areas of deprivation’ taken together give an arguably more robust portrayal. Accordingly, going forward our analysis focuses on households that are deprived in either two, three or all of the designated areas of education, employment, health and housing. The Housing Executive designations of ‘housing stress’ and ‘Full Duty Applicant’ would be more precise indicators of housing need; but as explained in the previous blog, the Housing Executive neither uses the same geographies as the census data nor does it make public the geographies that it does use. This prevents the data from being matched up against or compared to any other dataset – even the Housing Executive’s own data on social house building.
With the census data, in contrast, we can look at the information available using meaningful geographies. Figure 2 below uses census data to map out levels of deprivation in each local government/council area in Northern Ireland.
Figure 2: Differences across SDZs in Local Government Districts in the proportion of households that are deprived in 2-4 measures of deprivation. The larger, purple triangles reflect average levels of deprivation in 2-4 areas within each Local Government District.
Each black triangle in Figure 2 represents a Super Data Zone in a given council area. The triangles have been ranked according to the proportion of households they contain which are deprived in 2 to 4 measures (housing, health, education, employment). So the triangles towards the bottom have lower proportions of deprived households. Those at the top have higher proportions.
Derry and Strabane has the highest proportion of households facing multiple deprivations; Lisburn and Castlereagh has the lowest.
Looking at these shows that Belfast has the greatest range, with some of its SDZs having less than one in ten of households facing multiple deprivations, but one SDZ having 60% of households living with multiple deprivations.
The purple triangles show the average proportion of households that are deprived in two to four of the areas of concern (education, employment, health and housing) in each Local Government District. Derry and Strabane has the highest proportion of households facing multiple deprivations; Lisburn and Castlereagh has the lowest.
What the census tells us about ‘housing tenure’ across Northern Ireland
In addition to deprivation, the 2021 census also included questions on housing tenure – that is, the levels of home ownership, private renting and social tenancy in any given area (see figure 3, for example, for tenure differences at Local Government District level).
Figure 3: Tenure differences across Local Government Districts
There is not a ‘statistically significant’ difference in provision across Local Government Districts. But looking at the green bars indicating social tenancies, it is clear from the above chart that Belfast and Derry and Strabane appear to have the highest proportion of households in the social rented sector – in both places, social tenancies make up more than 20% of the total.
Figure 4: The proportion of social housing in each SDZ, within each LGD. Each triangle corresponds with the % of social housing in one SDZ.
The census allows us to break this information down at a much more local level. Looking at social housing provision at the SDZ level in Figure 4 (above), there is a lot of variability within Local Government Districts. Again each triangle in this figure represents an SDZ. Those closer to the bottom horizontal axis – and there are many in each Local Government District – have no or very low levels of social housing. The triangles along the top of the graph, however, show SDZs where there is a very high percentage of households living in social homes: in one SDZ in Derry and Strabane, almost 90% of households reporting to the census said they lived in a socially rented home.
