Tesseract Foundational Research: Population Health
The baseline a local health survey should be read against
When a council commissions a health-and-wellbeing survey, it asks residents to rate their own health, the same question the Census already asks the whole population. A survey read on its own is a number in a vacuum; read against the census baseline for that authority, it becomes a comparison. This assembles that baseline for every local authority.
The direction of travel
Local authorities carry a statutory duty to understand their population’s health through the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, and many run their own adult health-and-wellbeing surveys to do it. Those surveys lean on standard harmonised questions, and self-rated general health, a single item that predicts mortality and service use remarkably well, is among the most common. The Census 2021 asks the whole population that exact question. The baseline exists; it just is not laid out per authority ready to compare against.
The method: a full-population anchor
We pull three Census 2021 measures for every local authority in England and Wales, self-reported general health, disability under the Equality Act, and provision of unpaid care, and combine them into one profile per authority. Because it is the census, this is the whole population, not a sample: it carries no sampling error and reaches every small area, which is exactly what makes it the right thing to read a local survey against.
The gradient is stark and familiar. Self-reported bad or very-bad health runs from 2.7% in the healthiest authorities to 9.6% in Blaenau Gwent, with Merthyr Tydfil (9.4%) and Blackpool (9.1%) close behind, the geography of health inequality, made measurable and comparable per authority alongside disability and unpaid-care prevalence.
Where this goes
Held next to a commissioned survey, the census baseline turns a raw local figure into a finding: better or worse than the population, and by how much. Extended, the same profile joins to deprivation and to our local property-market indicators to place health need in its economic context, the kind of combined evidence base a needs assessment or a targeting decision actually runs on.
Independent, self-initiated open research. Contains ONS data © Crown copyright and database right 2023, via NOMIS, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Explore the profile
Health, disability and unpaid care for all 331 authorities, and the reproducible build.
