Methodology and sources
Every statistic on this site comes from a public dataset, and every calculation is listed below. Where we can't support a claim, we remove it. If you spot something that looks wrong, please email us — we publish corrections and note them here.
What this site is, and isn't
Blocked Britain tells constituency-level stories about how public services are unblocked by political choice, not by money running out. Central government is the currency issuer; local councils are not. Our framing draws on the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) literature, but the numbers on each page come from standard official sources: NHS Digital, NOMIS (ONS), the Charity Commission, 360Giving, and the English Indices of Deprivation.
We use real per-constituency data wherever it exists. Where a metric can only be published at national or regional level, we say so. We do not fabricate sector breakdowns, invent vacancy numbers, or downscale national figures to constituency level without saying we're doing it.
Data sources
| What it feeds | Source | Vintage | Notes and limitations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deprivation rank and decile; seven domain ranks (income, employment, health, education, crime, housing, environment) | English Indices of Deprivation 2025 (MHCLG), File 7 LSOA ranks, aggregated to constituencies via ONS NSPL postcode lookup | IoD2025 (published October 2025; underlying data ≈ 2022/23) | Covers England only (543 constituencies). Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are not ranked on this site because IMD 2025 doesn't include them and their national equivalents (WIMD, SIMD, NIMDM) use different methodologies that aren't directly comparable. |
| Employee jobs by sector per constituency | NOMIS Business Register and Employment Survey (NM_189_1), TYPE172 (Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies July 2024) | BRES 2024 | Covers England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland is not covered by BRES. Figures are ONS-rounded for disclosure control (typically to the nearest 25, 50, 100, or 500). Our six narrative sectors are built from SIC 2007 2-digit divisions: NHS = 86; social care = 87+88; construction = 41+42+43; education = 85; environment = 36+37+38+39; transport = 49+50+51+52+53. |
| GP practices, fully-qualified FTE GPs, patients per FQ FTE GP | NHS Digital General Practice Workforce, February 2026 — practice-level detailed file, aggregated per constituency using the Commons Library practice-to-constituency lookup | February 2026 | Covers England only. The denominator is TOTAL_GP_EXTGL_FTE: fully-qualified FTE GPs, excluding trainees, grant-paid and locum GPs. This matches NHS England's published ~2,200-patients-per-GP headline (63.7 million registered patients / 28,116 FQ FTE GPs = 2,266 nationally). |
| Registered charities per constituency, employees, volunteers, income breakdown | Charity Commission Register bulk extract, geocoded via ONS NSPL postcode lookup | Refreshed monthly | Covers England and Wales (the Charity Commission's jurisdiction). Scottish and Northern Irish charities are registered with separate regulators and aren't included. Charities without a public postcode are excluded from constituency totals — we don't assign grants to a constituency if we can't verify where the charity is based. |
| Grants received by charities headquartered in the constituency | 360Giving GrantNav | Refreshed monthly; individual grants span multiple years | Grants are attributed to the registered-office constituency of the recipient charity. National charities whose head office is in London or another major city will inflate those constituencies' totals even if most of their work happens elsewhere — see the caveat under every grant tile. Fuzzy name matching is used only as a fallback when a charity identifier is missing, with a strict similarity threshold, and only against charities that have a verifiable postcode. |
Calculations
Blocked score (0–100)
A composite of how under-resourced a constituency is relative to its deprivation need. Weights:
- 40% — deprivation severity from the overall IMD 2025 rank: a constituency ranked 1st (most deprived) scores 100, a constituency ranked 543rd scores 0, and values in between interpolate linearly.
- 30% — proportion of the seven IMD 2025 domains (income, employment, health, education, crime, housing, environment) where the domain rank places the constituency in the worst fifth of England.
- 20% — flagged if total grant funding to charities headquartered in the constituency is below the national median.
- 10% — flagged if patients per fully-qualified FTE GP exceeds the NHS England national average (~2,200).
Funding gap indicator
A high/medium/low flag derived from total grant funding relative to the national median and the constituency's deprivation decile. A deprived constituency with below-median grants is flagged HIGH; an affluent constituency with below-median grants is flagged LOW (the gap is consistent with the need).
Government funding dependency
The percentage of total charity-sector income in the constituency that came from government grants, according to Charity Commission annual return data. This is the aggregate across registered charities headquartered in the constituency — a single large commissioned provider can pull the percentage up.
What we don't publish
- Sector-level unemployment or vacancies per constituency. No UK public dataset breaks down unemployment or vacancies by occupation or sector at parliamentary constituency level. An earlier version of this site derived them from hardcoded national shares; we removed them on 10 April 2026 and replaced the labour-market section with real BRES employee-job counts, which exist at the correct level of aggregation.
- Per-constituency deprivation ranks for Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. IMD 2025 is English-only, and the devolved equivalents (WIMD 2019, SIMD 2020, NIMDM 2017) use different methodologies and years. We would need to reconcile them before presenting a cross-national ranking, and that's out of scope for now.
- Future forecasts or counterfactuals. We don't model what a given funding decision would do. We report the current state and link it to public sources.
Corrections
If something on this site looks wrong, please email contact@blockedbritain.co.uk. We publish corrections here and note them in our change log. We will always take down a number while we investigate rather than defend a number we can't support.
Last updated: 11 April 2026.