Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD) 2025 technical report - Employment domain

The purpose of this domain is to measure the proportion of working-age people involuntarily excluded from the labour market. This includes people who may want to work but are unable to do so due to unemployment, sickness or disability, or caring responsibilities. The domain has a relative weight of 20% in the overall index. 

The domain has one indicator made up of several components, a cross-sectional snapshot of working age people in receipt of unemployment-related benefits, expressed as a percentage of the estimated population aged 18 to 66 in an LSOA.

Percentage of working age people in receipt of employment-related benefits

Type of indicator

Percentage

Numerator

The numerator is a count of individuals aged 18 to 66, averaged over 12 separate monthly timepoints from April 2022 to March 2023, who were entitled to:

• Jobseeker’s Allowance (both contribution-based and income-based)
• New Style Jobseeker’s Allowance
• Employment and Support Allowance (both contribution-based and income-related)
• New Style Employment and Support Allowance
• Incapacity Benefit
• Severe Disablement Allowance
• Carer’s Allowance
• Income Support
• Universal Credit (UC) claimants in the following conditionality groups:
  • no work requirements
  • planning for work
  • preparing for work
  • searching for work

Denominator

The overall (de-duplicated) count is then expressed as a proportion of the working age population of the LSOA. The denominators are the mid-2022 small area population estimates (SAPE) published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 25 November 2024.

Source and time period

• Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), April 2022 to March 2023
• ONS: mid-2022 small area population estimates

Additional notes

A full description of the criteria and data sources is included in the English indices of deprivation 2025 technical report (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, MHCLG), with some further detail here.

DWP analysts used the Registration and Population Interaction Database (RAPID) to identify the caseload receiving at least one of the benefits listed above at each timepoint, and merged this with the DWP Customer Information System (CIS) to identify the geographic location of the claimant at each timepoint.

To account for seasonal variations in employment deprivation, 12 separate sequential monthly timepoints from April 2022 to March 2023 were taken and the average number of claimants across the 12 monthly cuts calculated.

Comparability with WIMD 2019

The employment deprivation rates are not directly comparable with those for WIMD 2019. Some of the reasons for this are:

• a change in coverage of the Welsh indicator to include those involuntarily excluded from the labour market due to caring responsibilities (those on carer-related benefits and UC conditionality groups covering carers and parents of young children)
• a change in the underlying welfare system with rollout of UC replacing several other benefits (known as legacy benefits) and using different eligibility criteria
• an underlying increase in the number of claimants for health related reasons (DWP), and a sharp increase in unemployment claimants during the pandemic that had not returned to the pre-pandemic baseline in this data
• a different definition of ‘working age’ as 18 to 66 (it was 16 to 64 for WIMD 2019) to reflect the change in retirement age, and for comparability with England
• prisoners are now included in the denominator, as some benefits (e.g. UC) may apply during initial custody periods 

The indicator values are ranked, then ranks exponentially transformed to form domain scores for use in the calculation of WIMD 2025. The domain has a relative weight of 20% in the overall index.

The introduction of Universal Credit (UC) has a significant impact on the way WIMD's employment domain is measured.

The main policy change since WIMD 2019 is the expansion of UC, replacing most means-tested benefits except New Style JSA and ESA. Between 2023 and 2026 the remaining legacy benefit claimants are being moved onto UC in a process called Managed Migration. This created challenges for the domain, including:

• difficulty identifying claimants involuntarily excluded from the labour market (i.e. it’s not easy to directly match legacy benefits to their UC equivalents), which could lead to some UC claimants being missed and others being incorrectly included
• inconsistent geographic rollout impacting consistency of data
• complications producing a non-overlapping claimant count because of multiple DWP databases with differing coding structures 

The English indices of deprivation team at the MHCLG have worked with the key data suppliers, DWP, to develop a new employment deprivation indicator for small areas in both England and Wales that incorporates both UC and legacy benefits. 

To mitigate the UC rollout issue, the indicator uses data from April 2022 to March 2023, predating Managed Migration, ensuring more consistent national coverage. 

We have adopted the approach recommended by DWP and MHCLG and support better comparability between indices for different nations of the UK, where appropriate.

The addition of two new indicators in the housing domain has led to a small increase in its weight from 7% to 9%. To allow for this, the weight for the employment domain has been reduced slightly from 22% to 20%, but this remains the second highest weighted domain.