Where Digital Deprivation bites hardest across England and Wales in 2026
- oliverjohnson4
- Apr 30
- 6 min read
Point Topic's 2026 Broadband Digital Deprivation Index helps highlight the communities most at risk of falling behind — and the data is now free to access at local authority level.
Broadband coverage has improved markedly across England and Wales over the past decade. Full fibre rollout is well on its way, and headline availability figures look increasingly encouraging. Yet adoption — whether people actually get online with a usable service — tells a more complicated story. In communities facing compound socioeconomic disadvantage, a cable passing the door does not translate into a connected household.
Point Topic's Broadband Digital Deprivation Index (BDDI) was built to explore this. Now in its 2026 edition, it covers all English and Welsh local authorities and draws on twelve indicators across three dimensions: the quality of available infrastructure (Supply), the capability of the resident population to use digital services (Skills), and the affordability and practical accessibility of connectivity (Access).
Scotland and Northern Ireland have not yet published updates to their Indexes of Multiple Deprivation. The models will be updated when they are available.
What the 2026 data shows
BDDI scores across English local authorities range from 4.40 to 9.54. A lower score indicates greater risk of broadband non-adoption. The mean sits at 6.88.
The geography of risk is consistent with previous releases, but the 2026 model captures it with greater precision. The highest-risk authorities — those below a score of 5.5 — are concentrated along the east and west coasts, in post-industrial northern England, and in rural areas distant from service centres. Kingston upon Hull ranks first (highest risk), with Barrow-in-Furness, East Lindsey, Blackpool, and North Kesteven close behind.
At the other end of the distribution, the lowest-risk authorities are predominantly London boroughs and the Surrey commuter belt. City of London, Richmond upon Thames, Elmbridge, and Milton Keynes occupy the top positions — reflecting strong infrastructure scores, younger demographic profiles, and materially lower rates of income and employment deprivation.
The gap between these two ends of the distribution is not narrow.
Three dimensions of non-adoption
The BDDI structures deprivation risk across Supply, Skills, and Access — a framework that reflects how adoption actually fails in practice.
Supply captures infrastructure availability via the Broadband Infrastructure Index (BII): technology type, operator presence, and measured throughput. At local authority level, infrastructure is rarely the dominant barrier — but for specific postcodes and rural communities, it is decisive. West Devon (rank 6) and South Hams (rank 14) are the clearest examples in the 2026 data: areas without high headline poverty rates, but where physical remoteness and poor connectivity compound each other.
Skills covers adult qualification levels, population age profile, and — new in 2026 — English language proficiency. The skills dimension is most discriminating in coastal and former industrial areas: Barrow-in-Furness, East Lindsey, Scarborough, and Lincoln all show qualification levels significantly below the national average.
Access is the strongest differentiator across the distribution. Disability prevalence, employment deprivation, and income deprivation show the three largest normalised differences between the highest and lowest-risk authority groups. These factors are correlated by design: compound disadvantage — income and employment deprivation co-occurring — represents a deeper exclusion risk than either indicator captures alone.
Five new indicators in 2026
The 2026 release incorporates five indicators not present in the 2023 model, each selected on the basis of conceptual relevance and empirical contribution assessed against Ofcom LA-level take-up data.
Poor condition housing (proportion of homes failing the Decent Homes standard) delivered the highest marginal R² contribution of the five new indicators.
Employment deprivation, though highly correlated with income deprivation, adds explanatory value and aligns with the IMD 2025 framework.
English language proficiency captures a concentration of risk in inner-city communities that would otherwise be obscured by the LA-level aggregation.
Homelessness rate — measured as acceptances of housing assistance per 1,000 households — introduces a low-correlation signal for housing instability as a distinct barrier to digital participation.
Access to services (travel time to key public service destinations) is the only new indicator not explicitly flagged in Ofcom's 2025 digital disadvantage report, and extends the model's sensitivity to rural isolation.
Scores from the 2026 BDDI are not directly comparable to 2023 outputs. The methodology note accompanying the dataset is clear on this point.
What the scorecard reveals about individual authorities
Point Topic's BDDI dashboard presents results at local authority level in a scorecard format, decomposed across Supply, Skills, and Access with comparison against the national average for each dimension.
The scorecard for South Staffordshire — shown below — illustrates the diagnostic value of this disaggregation. With an overall BDDI score of 4.06 (rank 100 of 296), the authority sits in the high-risk tier. But the stage-level breakdown is revealing: its Access score (0.776) is marginally above the national average, while its Skills score (0.509) is materially below, and its Supply score (0.390) reflects an infrastructure position that is also below average. The risk profile here is not primarily one of poverty or affordability — it is one of capability and connectivity combined, pointing toward a different intervention mix than a similarly ranked urban authority with acute income deprivation.
This kind of decomposition is available for all English and Welsh local authorities.
Free access to the LA-level data
The BDDI dataset is available free of charge on request at LA level.
For local authorities, combined authorities, housing associations, and digital inclusion practitioners looking to understand where to concentrate effort, the LA-level dataset provides a practical starting point: it identifies which authorities face the greatest compound risk and what is driving it. That is sufficient for strategic prioritisation, funding bids and benchmarking against neighbouring areas.
LSOA-level data: we can help you zoom in
The LA-level dataset tells you there is a problem and roughly what kind. The LSOA-level data tells you where, specifically, to act.
England contains around 33,000 Lower Super Output Areas, each covering approximately 1,500 residents. At that geography, the variation within a single local authority is often as large as the variation across the national distribution. An authority that scores in the middle of the LA rankings may contain LSOAs in the bottom decile nationally — concentrated in particular wards, estates, or coastal strips — sitting alongside LSOAs with comparatively low risk. An authority-level score averages across all of that.
For teams doing operational policy work, that averaging matters. Digital inclusion outreach has a cost. Device loan schemes, digital champions programmes, subsidised connectivity offers, and NHS digital access initiatives all require decisions about where to deploy limited resource. Targeting those interventions at the ward or neighbourhood level — rather than spreading them across an entire local authority — depends on knowing where within the authority the risk is actually concentrated.
The LSOA-level BDDI data provides that granularity. Each LSOA carries a full BDDI score and the underlying factor values — infrastructure, qualifications, age profile, income and employment deprivation, housing security, disability, and remoteness — at the sub-authority level. That allows practitioners to identify not just which neighbourhoods are highest risk, but which specific barriers are most acute in each, and therefore which type of intervention is most likely to move the needle.
A local authority digital inclusion team, for example, might use the LA-level data to confirm that their authority is in the top quartile for risk nationally, and to understand that the dominant drivers are skills-related rather than infrastructure.
The LSOA data then allows them to map that skills deficit to specific wards, overlay it against existing programme coverage, and direct outreach accordingly.
The same logic applies to housing associations targeting tenants at risk of digital exclusion, to NHS integrated care boards mapping digital access against patient cohorts, and to operators making decisions about where targeted social tariff promotion is most likely to convert.
LSOA-level data is licensed per local authority at £500 per LA. For teams covering a defined geography — a combined authority, a county, or a specific programme area — this provides a bounded and predictable cost for a level of analytical precision that LA-level data cannot offer.
Point Topic's BDDI covers all England & Wales local authorities. Data reflects indicators as at 2026-01-01. The underlying deprivation data draws on England IMD 2025 and Wales IMD 2025 and Ofcom and Point Topic broadband data. Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are covered by separate datasets using equivalent national indices. A planned BII-Mobile variant will extend the supply-side model to incorporate Ofcom mobile coverage data.
Contact: isabelle.anderson@point-topic.com
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