Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, if he will make it his policy to account for population age in the Covid-19 Relative Needs Formula.

When developing the Covid-19 Relative Needs Formula, the Government used data provided by councils themselves through monitoring returns. We used this data to test potential drivers of this reported covid-related expenditure. Total population and deprivation, as well as a consideration of how costs of delivery?vary?across the country, were found to have a good statistical fit with this data.