New IMD: What does this mean for Northumberland?
25th Nov 2025
As we herald the arrival of the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2025 – which, crucially, contains a dedicated Rural Supplementary Report examining deprivation in rural areas for the first time, our Chief Executive Andy Dean shares his thoughts on what this means for our community.
What is the Index of Multiple Deprivation?
The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) is England’s main tool for understanding where people are experiencing the greatest challenges. It looks at small neighbourhoods across the country and ranks them according to factors like income, health, education, crime, housing and access to services. Government bodies - and many funders - use the IMD to help decide where support and investment should go.
A new IMD was published on 30 October by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). This 2025 edition is the seventh version and replaces all earlier ones.
For the first time, the release also includes a substantial Rural Report - 111 pages produced with Defra - exploring what deprivation looks like specifically in rural areas and how it can be better measured.
How do rural areas fare?
At first glance, rural England seems relatively well-off. Only 9% of the 30% most deprived neighbourhoods nationally are in rural areas (compared with 34.1% in urban areas).
On the face of it, this paints a rosy picture. But the picture changes when you look closer.
The IMD shows that rural homes are much more likely to be in poor condition: 27.8% of rural households are considered to be in “poor condition”, compared with 14.2% in urban areas. Issues like distance from services, lack of public transport, digital connectivity and higher living costs make life far more difficult than headline figures suggest.
ACRE (Action with Communities in Rural England) welcomed the improvements in the 2025 IMD, but stressed that some long-standing rural concerns are still not fully addressed:
“In our view, the IMD 2025 is a step forward from the 2019 version, showing good progress on several of the issues that have most concerned rural stakeholders in the past. However, not all of our concerns have been tackled, so there remains more to do.”
The view from rural Northumberland
The IMD is a crucial resource, particularly when it comes to allocating investment and support – but the kind of deprivation that exists in rural areas is harder to spot and it is important not to overlook vulnerable rural residents who may be isolated and struggling in ways that aren’t captured in the publication.
Andy Dean, Chief Executive of CAN, puts it plainly:
“The Index of Multiple Deprivation is used by many organisations and funders to determine where they target investment and activity. However, rural agencies and organisations have long argued that dispersed deprivation in rural areas is too often over-looked by such analyses. This is why government has taken the welcome step to start looking at the specific rural issues that exist and how these might better be represented.
“As our colleagues in ACRE state, there is still much to do to better reflect rural issues and we’ll keep working to this end. It is critical that our statutory agencies and major funders take a step back from the headline statistics of IMD and consider the rural perspective. Quite rightly, funds need to be targeted at ‘deprived’ areas – but consider the position of vulnerable people with no access to transport, no local service provision, fragile infrastructure, and poor (or no) digital access. Rural deprivation may be less visible but, unfortunately, it is still there.”
While the new IMD brings helpful progress, it still overlooks much of the hidden hardship in rural Northumberland. We will keep pushing to make sure our communities’ real challenges are seen - and properly supported.