Statistics

Our plans to update the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation

November 20, 2024 by lisaclark No Comments | Category Education, Health and social care, Housing, Money and Tax, SIMD

By The SIMD team

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is a tool for identifying the places in Scotland where people are experiencing disadvantage across different aspects of their lives. It is the Scottish Government’s standard approach to identifying areas of multiple deprivation in Scotland, and is widely used to identify opportunities to improve the lives of people in Scotland.

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation is produced by considering how deprived an area is across seven domains. These are:

• Income
• Employment
• Education
• Health
• Access to services
• Crime
• Housing

By combining data across these seven domains, SIMD can help improve understanding about the outcomes and circumstances of people living in the most deprived areas in Scotland. This in turn can help with effective targeting of policies and funding.

Our plans to update SIMD

To ensure that SIMD remains as useful as possible, it is updated periodically to reflect changes in the underlying data and opportunities for improving the indicators. In particular, SIMD is updated when data zone boundaries, the small geographical areas used to construct SIMD, are updated following a Census.

Following the publication of the 2022 Census, the Scottish Government consulted on updates to data zones. The consultation closed on 1 October, with finalised data zones expected to be published before the end of 2024.

SIMD was last updated in 2020, and work has now started on planning the next update. We currently anticipate publishing in the latter part of 2026 in order to incorporate data using the 2022 Census data zones.

As part of the preparation for the next SIMD, we will also review the current indicators and work with data suppliers to make sure the underlying data are still robust and relevant. Proposed changes will be discussed with our internal advisory group and key stakeholders, and communicated to our users.

If you have any questions about our plans, please contact the SIMD team.

Tags: Data Zones, Deprivation, SIMD, SIMD Update

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