Mapping the ‘hard edges’ of disadvantage in England: adults involved in homelessness, substance misuse and offending

There is growing policy interest in the UK in adults who exhibit severe and multiple disadvantage, combining homelessness, substance misuse, and offending. Triangulation of administrative datasets enables estimation of the scale and characteristics of these overlapping groups, and geographical mapping permits quantitative examination of the area types associated with these extreme forms of disadvantage. It is shown that measures from different data domain systems correlate well and that the geographical variance in prevalence is greater than for many comparable indicators. Emergent themes include the centrality of poverty, the legacy of deindustrialisation, the role of certain types of urban centre, and the spatial distribution of services and institutions. Wider implications for debates on the definition, measurement, and causation of poverty are drawn out, while the future prospects for the use and linkage of administrative data in this field are considered.