Updates and additions to the North West Poverty Monitor

By Tom Pottrill, Policy Officer at Resolve Poverty

Resolve Poverty has today updated the North West Poverty Monitor, a resource which reveals the scale and nature of poverty across Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. It covers seven themes: poverty and deprivation, education, fuel and food insecurity, housing and homelessness, the labour market, social security and debt, and national poverty data. It is designed to equip public bodies, charities and other organisations across the North West with the evidence they need to tackle socio-economic disadvantage.

The Poverty Monitor has today been updated with several new indicators for the North West, and national poverty data has been updated following the latest release of Households Below Average Income (HBAI) data in March 2025.

Updates to North West data include:

• Relative child poverty rates before housing costs per electoral ward in 2023/24, based on new HBAI data
• Proportion of people claiming Universal Credit per electoral ward in February 2025
• Proportion of households claiming Universal Credit per electoral ward in November 2024
• Proportion of households claiming Universal Credit with child entitlement per electoral ward in November 2024
• Proportion of children known to be eligible for Free School Meals per local authority in 2023/24
• Economic activity status per electoral ward, based on Census 2021
• Life expectancy at birth per electoral ward in 2021, based on the 2016-2020 average
• Population estimates per electoral ward in 2022, based on Census 2021.

Updates to national poverty data, based on 2023/24 HBAI data, include:

• Relative poverty rates after housing costs (AHC) by family type
• Relative poverty rates AHC by ethnic group of the household
• Relative poverty rates AHC by number of children in the family
• Relative poverty rates AHC by disability in the family
• Relative poverty rates AHC by housing tenure of the household
• Relative child poverty rates AHC by economic status of the household
• Relative child poverty rates AHC by couple/lone parent family.

Data is presented through a combination of charts, maps and tables, including several interactive visualisations so that users can identify and compare specific data.

Across the Poverty Monitor, most figures are shown at a local authority level, although some visualisations demonstrate the picture at a more local level – such as by electoral ward. Many of today’s updates are available for each ward in the North West region.

Click here to access the North West Poverty Monitor.

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This article is featured in our Greater Manchester Bulletin.

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