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Overview

The Centre for UK Prosperity was launched in October 2020 with the goal of unlocking prosperity across all regions and communities in the UK. We know that genuine prosperity is about far more than building a strong economy or supporting individual wealth. True prosperity is only possible when all citizens, neighbourhoods, and communities are able to reach their full potential across broad aspects such as education, entrepreneurial activity, and community life.

While we support the Government’s focus on ‘levelling-up’ regions that have historically been left behind, we believe that we need to do more than just level-up regions to the status-quo. The UK stands at a ‘reset moment’, with more autonomy, flexibility, and control over its own destiny than at any other point for half a century. We need to embrace this moment with both hands and use the advantages that it brings to support as many of our regions and local communities as possible into the ‘fast lane’ toward greater and long-lasting prosperity.

This is why, with the generous support of our donors, we have developed the UK Prosperity Index. It includes detailed data on levels of institutional, economic, and social wellbeing across the 379 boroughs, council areas, local government districts, and unitary and local authorities that encompass the four nations of the UK. The Index is specifically designed to be a transformational tool that allows citizens, local authorities, regions, and government to sharpen their understanding of what is working, track their progress over time, and hold leaders to account.

The UK Prosperity Index is a tool to better map and monitor the pathways to prosperity for all regions and local authorities of the UK. We believe it is the most ambitious and comprehensive index of its kind to date. However, no index is perfect and we are always looking to improve the UK Prosperity Index. You can help us improve our data by sending suggestions to ukprosperity@li.com.

Since the publication of the UK Prosperity Index 2021 report on 13 May we have taken the opportunity, following our ongoing engagement with local authorities, to update historical data and correct some indicators. These changes include:

Historical updates: Brought in historical data for a number of indicators (such as burglary), where it had not been included.
Latest year updates: Updated indicators, where they could have been used for the 2021 index (such as for Tertiary Education Provision and local elections).
Correcting specific indicators: Replaced or corrected indicators, such as when there were better alternatives available (for example, emissions indicators and the GVA per hour indicator).
Updating timing offsets: Reviewed and changed timing offsets where appropriate.
Correcting imputed variables: Reviewed and changed imputed values, particularly for areas where there is extensive need for imputation, such as Isles of Scilly, City of London, and Northern Ireland.
Updating values for boundary change authorities: A handful of local authorities changed boundaries in the last three years, so we checked that historical values best represent an analogue of the current boundary.

These changes have resulted in some minor changes to current and historic scores in the Index. The scores changed very little – for example, for the 2021 scores just two local authorities had their scores increase by more than 2% with a significant majority of local authorities experiencing a score change of less than 1% – although some rankings have shifted. However, the trends and major themes discussed in the report remain unchanged. A scatter plot of new and old scores can be seen below, demonstrating the strong correlation between old and new scores:

The materials available below and elsewhere on this website reflect the data changes, so differ slightly from the printed report. For more details you can download a technical briefing on the data changes below.