Material deprivation

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has updated its method for estimating material deprivation, making the latest data for the financial year ending (FYE) 2024 not directly comparable to previous years. Since this is the first year using the new method, only one year of data is available. Due to sample size issues, single-year estimates for different UK countries and regions aren't published. Historically, a three-year average has been used, but recent changes exclude data from FYE 2021.
Because of these changes, DWP can't update the usual three-year estimates for Wales right now. We plan to release an article in early summer explaining the changes and providing some single-year estimates for Wales, along with confidence intervals. The release date will be announced at least four weeks in advance. For more details, you can refer to the DWP Technical Report.

We have not published material deprivation estimates for the financial year 2020-21 in the report below. This is because the 2020-21 data collection process was impacted by COVID-19, and for many breakdowns of headline estimates (including UK country estimates) it is not possible to make meaningful statistical assessments of trends and changes in the most recent year compared to the pre-coronavirus level.

We have instead published an article of measures of poverty (linked below) which describes the data quality issues, and presents Welsh poverty-related figures using the 2020-21 Households below average income data alongside confidence intervals and additional warnings. We are doing this to ensure full transparency, but advise against use of the unreliable 2020-21 dataset for Wales. Please refer to material deprivation data in the report below for the latest National Statistics for Wales.

The report here contains data on the percentage of children in Wales who are living in material deprivation and low income and the percentage of pensioners in Wales who are living in material deprivation (see metadata for more details).