Local Elections

Local Elections are coming up on the 2nd of May (2024 as of writing) - so please vote if you can! In celebration of our favourite time of the year I have made some charts, with the kind help of Jon Lawson. You can visit his site here where he collects all sorts of fascinating information on local election data.

The main thing I wanted to track was deprivation, as I was curious if there was a measure for ward based deprivation. It turns out there isn't! But we can aggregate one by collecting up the LSOAs, Data Zones and Super Output Areas from across the UK with their deprivation and distributing them to the various wards, weighted by population. You can see my efforts to do this on Github.

Deprivation goes roughly from a scale from 0-100, 0 being the least deprived and 100 being the most. It is also broken down by decile - the 10th decile being the least deprived, the 1st being the most. Each decile has an equal number of wards.

The first resulting output of this was a table of wards by deprivation. It turns out the most deprived ward (as of this year) can be found in Derry City, Northern Ireland. The least deprived is in Surrey, England (located in the home counties). You can find your own ward here too - I suggest using the search feature though.

The next chart I made tracks the overall trends of party performance by deprivation decile. You can see Labour has been doing well in recent years by their strong performance across the board. The Liberal Democrats tend to do very well locally as well, as well as outperformance by independent / other candidates (generally local issues).

I hope you find this as interesting I do - let me know what I should chart next! As well as this - please do check out Jon for his dedicated and amazing work.