Vulnerability maps | Areas that need support
We’ve created two maps to help you identify where water related support is most needed across our region.
These maps show areas where customers may be struggling with water bills or are missing out on the extra help available through our Priority Services Register (PSR).
How You Can Use These Maps
- target your outreach in areas with high water poverty or low PSR sign-up
- help more people register for support
- use the data to support funding bids or shape your community engagement work.
Our maps
Water Poverty Map
This map highlights areas where households are likely to spend more than 5% of their income (after housing costs) on water and sewerage bills — a common measure of water poverty.
Priority Services Gap Map
This map shows the difference between the number of households who are likely to need extra support (e.g. due to age, disability, or health conditions) and those who are actually signed up to our Priority Services Register.
How the maps work
Water Poverty Map
We have obtained household income estimates from CACI, a data analytics company that specialises in household income and demographics. Learn more about CACI’s Ocean dataset and Paycheck tool that are used to derive income estimates.
We combine this with anonymised billing data to simulate a bill to income ratio for each household that we can match data for.
If a household’s bill is more than 5% of their income, it’s flagged as being in water poverty. The results are grouped by local area (LSOA) to protect privacy.
This provides an understanding of how water poverty varies across our region – though it is based on estimates, as actual bill to income ratios for each household in our region are not known.
Priority Services Gap Map
We worked with the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE), a national charity that helps people manage their energy and water use. Learn more about CSE Home - Centre for Sustainable Energy
CSE used Census data and other public sources to estimate how many households in each area are likely to be eligible for PSR
We compare this with our own PSR records to find areas where people may be missing out on support.
