Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, pursuant to the Answer of 11 December 2024 to Question 17562 on Local Government Finance, what deprivation data her Department will use.

The government is taking immediate action to begin addressing the challenges facing local government by ensuring that funding goes to the places that need it most in the 2025-26 Local Government Finance Settlement. We are taking difficult decisions to repurpose a number of grants to improve the value for money and efficiency of the grant funding we provide, including through the new Recovery Grant.

The grant is intended to be highly targeted, meaning that not all authorities will receive an allocation. We have published a full methodology alongside the provisional Settlement, and we are consulting until 15 January on allocations. The Recovery Grant will go to places where, weighted by population, deprivation outweighs council tax raising ability. The metrics used are based on the most recent publicly available data: the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation, the mid-2023 population estimate, as published by the Office for National Statistics, and 2024 council taxbase data.