We have updated the Children in Low Income Families (CiLIF) indicators from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) within Local Insight.
These indicators are designed to help you understand the number and proportion of children living in relative and absolute low income across local areas.
The updated data is now available in Local Insight across England, Wales and Scotland, and has also been added to the “Health (Children)” report theme. Northern Ireland data can also be provided as .csv if required.
There are two key changes in this release.
Previously, Local Insight included CiLIF data on a Before Housing Costs basis only. This release now includes equivalent indicators After Housing Costs, giving a fuller picture of child poverty in areas where rent or mortgage costs have a significant impact on household income.
The baseline year for the absolute low income measure has been updated from Fiscal Year End (FYE) 2011 to FYE 2025.
Both ‘Before Housing Costs’ and ‘After Housing Costs’ indicators are available broken down by:
These have been added as new indicators rather than replacing existing ones, so dashboards and reports will continue to work as expected. The older indicators will be archived in early 2027 to provide ample time for users to update their menu themes, dashboards and reports.
If you have any questions on this, you can get in touch with the OCSI support team at support@ocsi.co.uk
Children in low income families data is widely used to understand need, compare areas and support local planning.
The new After Housing Costs measures are particularly useful because housing costs can make a major difference to the amount of income families have available. Two areas may look similar before housing costs are considered, but quite different once those costs are included.
This update helps you to build a more rounded picture of child poverty and family need in the places you work with.
For this first release, absolute and relative low-income figures are identical. This is expected. Absolute poverty is defined as income below 60% of the baseline year’s median, uprated for inflation. When the baseline year is the current year (FYE 2025), the absolute threshold and the relative threshold are mathematically identical – both are just 60% of the current year’s median.
Over time, the absolute and relative measures will begin to diverge as the relative threshold changes with median income, while the absolute threshold remains fixed to 2025. You can read more on this in the DWP’s Methodology.
We have chosen not to collect the Output Area level figures from this publication because very small counts can be affected by rounding and suppression, this in turn has an effect on figures in other geographies created using the Local Insight aggregation methodology.
You can explore the new indicators by searching for CiLIF in either the Themes Manager, or within the Dashboard’s ‘Select Data’ option.
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