Mayor shares his thoughts on deprivation statistics

THE Mayor of Middlesbrough has given his views on new government figures known as the English indices of multiple deprivation.

- By DANIEL HODGSON Local democracy reporter

Labour's Chris Cooke, who has been the elected mayor in the town since May 2023, highlighted areas of improvement compared to the last set of measurements, which were taken in 2019.

So far, there has been one headlinegrabbing figure, which is that half of Middlesbrough's neighbourhoods are classed as 'highly deprived,' meaning these areas are amongst the 10% worst-affected in the country.

This measurement sees Middlesbrough as the hardest hit local authority in the land.

Micro areas within Newport ward are particularly negatively affected, but that didn't stop some people from speaking positively about the area.

In an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Mayor Cooke was asked to expand on his initial reaction to the figures, when he had pointed to "areas of improvement" while recognising the challenges.

With the overwhelmingly negative picture painted by the statistics, he was asked where he saw the improvement as being. He spoke about the specific measure of income deprivation, where Middlesbrough has gone from worst affected in 2019 to eighth worst affected in 2025 - this improvement has translated into both children and older people indexes.

In education and health there have been minor improvements in Middlesbrough's position relative to other local authorities.

The seven different categories of deprivation are not weighted evenly in the wider measurement, with employment worth 22.5% of the overall amount, while a category such as crime constitutes 9.3%.

Mayor Cooke pointed out that three of the Tees Valley local authorities are in the top 10 of the employment domain of deprivation, meaning these councils are some of the worst affected by this metric.

He said: "I think we need to take a real hard look about how we can localise more jobs because that's clearly not happening."