It’s Jaywick again. For the fourth time in a row the tiny, apparently unprepossessing seaside village overlooking the north sea just down the coast from Clacton in Essex has reluctantly claimed the unenviable title of England’s most deprived neighbourhood.
Top of the indices of multiple deprivation since 2010, Jaywick Sands, once a popular holiday destination for working-class Londoners, has become a emblem of “broken” Britain, an exemplar of economic neglect, austerity and social breakdown, compounded by geographic isolation.
Its local MP, Reform leader Nigel Farage, seemed unusually vague when asked about Jaywick’s travails on Thursday. Parts of it, he opined, seemed “depressed,” adding that he was “obviously sad that things aren’t improving more quickly”. Well, yeah.
In fact, Jaywick is, on official deprivation measures, chronically deprived: almost uniquely, it is in the 10% worst-ranked neighbourhoods in England across all seven indicators of deprivation, from employment to income, health, crime, access to housing, and environment.
This dismal data picture did not tell the whole story, claimed Tendring’s council leader Mark Stephenson. He said “progress” had been made since 2019, and paid tribute to the strength of the local community: “Jaywick Sands is a truly special place, full of heart, pride and real community spirit.”
Whatever the reality, Jaywick’s sticky position at the top of the rankings highlights a wider pattern of seemingly fixed relative deprivation. At council level, Blackpool, Middlesbrough and Birmingham’s position at the top of the rankings also suggest a static deprivation hierarchy, unmoved by political fashions for “levelling up”.
These left-behind town and cities are mainly post-industrial areas in the north and Midlands where living standards for many have been in reverse, where poverty levels are high and as a result, dissatisfaction with business-as-usual Westminster politics – spiced with a sharp resentment of the affluence of London and south-east – can be rife.
And yet, the 2025 indices also reveal a more dynamic story, in which the myth of the capital as an oasis where the streets are paved with gold and the spoilt inhabitants surf a non-stop wave of wealth and privilege, is abruptly undermined.
In 31 mainly inner London neighbourhoods, the latest index reveals, practically every resident child lives in an income deprived household. In data terms these neighbourhoods are small – 1,500 people on average, so this could refer to a housing estate or a group of streets – but large enough to be recognisably a “place”.
In the borough of Tower Hamlets, 71% of children live in income deprived households, the index reveals, In Hackney, it’s 64% and Newham 60%. It may come as a surprise to some that the percentage of children in low income households is as high (53%) in supposedly woke, wealthy Islington as it is in Burnley.
For the first time, the measures of income deprivation took account of high rents (a burden endemic to London, where a privately rented two-bedroom flat can easily be £1,800 a month). By measuring household income after rent was paid (previously it measured income before housing costs), a radically different picture emerges.
In many ways this seems academic. Anyone familiar with London understands profound hardship exists amid conspicuous wealth. Yet six years ago, when the last indices were published, some London boroughs were paradoxically falling down the relative deprivation ranking, despite the highest rates of child poverty in the country.
This may have political reverberations. The latest indices of deprivation will feed into the forthcoming local authority funding formula. Labour-run councils in the north of England are angry that the housing costs change will mean the promised reallocation of resources from the south may not be as generous as imagined.
For the mainly Labour-run boroughs of inner London, there is relief that official recognition of the dire impact of its dysfunctional housing market means their funding allocations may not be as depleted as anticipated. It is about time, they say, that extreme deprivation in the capital has been formally acknowledged.
