How We Built Service Pressure

Every number Polis publishes has a methodology behind it. For most users, the score is enough — a constituency scores 78 on Service Pressure, and that tells you something useful about the weight of demand on local public services relative to the rest of the country. But for journalists, researchers, campaigners, and anyone who needs to cite the number in work that matters, "trust us" is not sufficient.

This is how Service Pressure works. Every input, every weight, every design decision — laid out so you can assess whether our choices match your analytical framework.

The Architecture

Service Pressure is a composite index scored 0 to 100, computed for all 650 parliamentary constituencies in England and Wales. It combines two equally weighted pillars: Economic Distress and Public Service Strain.

50% Economic Distress measures whether people in a constituency are falling through the floor financially. It draws on three sources:

Unemployment rate (40% of Economic Distress). Source: ONS claimant count by parliamentary constituency, published quarterly. This is the proportion of working-age residents claiming unemployment-related benefits. We use claimant count rather than the ILO unemployment measure because claimant count is available at constituency level and updates more frequently.

Food bank usage (35% of Economic Distress). Source: Trussell Trust distribution data, normalised per 1,000 households. Food bank usage captures a dimension of hardship that unemployment statistics miss — the point at which household income, whatever its source, fails to cover basic needs. The data is annual, which means it lags, but the signal it carries is distinctive.

Insolvency rate (25% of Economic Distress). Source: Insolvency Service statistics by constituency. Personal insolvencies — bankruptcies, individual voluntary arrangements, debt relief orders — measure financial distress that has progressed beyond temporary hardship into formal legal proceedings. It receives the lowest weight because it is a lagging indicator and captures only the fraction of financial distress that enters the legal system.

50% Public Service Strain measures whether the services people depend on are under pressure:

Crime rate (60% of Public Service Strain). Source: Home Office police-recorded crime statistics, mapped to constituencies via Community Safety Partnership boundaries. Crime is weighted more heavily within this pillar because it is the most granular and frequently updated of our public service indicators, and because it captures both the direct impact on residents and the demand it places on policing and courts.

NHS waiting times (40% of Public Service Strain). Source: NHS England Referral to Treatment pathway data, mapped from NHS Trust to constituency via GP registration catchments. This measures how long residents wait between GP referral and hospital treatment — the queue that most directly affects people's experience of the health service.

The Normalisation

Raw numbers are not comparable across constituencies. An unemployment rate of 5% means something different in a constituency of 70,000 residents than in one of 110,000. A crime count of 3,000 means something different in central Manchester than in rural Northumberland.

Each sub-indicator is percentile-ranked across all 650 constituencies. A constituency at the 80th percentile on unemployment has a higher unemployment rate than 80% of all constituencies. This ranking is then weighted according to the formula above and combined into the final 0-100 score.

The result is a relative measure, not an absolute one. A score of 78 does not mean 78% of some threshold has been breached. It means the constituency faces substantially more combined pressure than the national average across these six dimensions. The national average is 31.4. A score above 50 places a constituency in roughly the top decile.

Why These Six Inputs

The selection criteria were straightforward. Every input must be:

1. Publicly available. No paywalled, proprietary, or FOI-dependent data. Anyone can verify our inputs.
2. Regularly updated. Annual at minimum, quarterly or monthly preferred. Stale data produces stale scores.
3. Available at constituency level or mappable to constituency level via standard geographic lookups.
4. Measuring something citizens actually experience. Abstract economic indicators that residents never encounter in daily life are excluded. Unemployment, food banks, insolvency, crime, and NHS waits are things people live with.

We deliberately excluded indicators that measure capacity rather than pressure — hospital bed counts, police officer numbers, school places. Capacity is an input to policy; pressure is what citizens feel. A constituency with fewer police officers but lower crime is not under more pressure than one with more officers and higher crime.

We also excluded survey-based measures of satisfaction or wellbeing. These are valuable but introduce response bias that mirrors the engagement gap problem Polis exists to expose: the communities least likely to respond to surveys are often the ones under the most pressure.

The Worked Example

The Channel Crossings Local Impact analysis offers a sharp illustration of what Service Pressure reveals in practice. Consider two constituencies at opposite ends of the dispersal spectrum.

Middlesbrough scores 78 on Service Pressure. Its unemployment rate sits in the top decile nationally. Its crime rate is among the highest outside London. Its NHS waiting times are above the national average. Its food bank usage is in the top quartile. Before any asylum dispersal policy is applied, this is a constituency where public services are already stretched to their limits.

Wokingham scores 14. Its unemployment rate is among the lowest in England. Crime is minimal. NHS waits are below average. Insolvency is rare. This is a constituency with spare capacity across every dimension we measure.

The dispersal ratio between them is 203 to 1. Middlesbrough houses 101.7 asylum seekers per 10,000 population. Wokingham houses 0.5. The policy that produces this distribution is not measured by Service Pressure — but Service Pressure measures the baseline conditions into which that policy is applied. And the baseline conditions are not close.

This is what the score is for. Not to make an argument about dispersal policy — reasonable people disagree about that — but to provide the factual foundation that any argument about dispersal policy requires. When someone says "asylum seekers should be housed where there is capacity," Service Pressure quantifies what capacity looks like across the country. When someone says "dispersal areas are struggling," Service Pressure measures the struggle.

What It Does Not Measure

Transparency requires acknowledging limits as clearly as capabilities.

Service Pressure does not measure housing conditions, educational outcomes, air quality, transport connectivity, or any of the dozens of other dimensions that affect quality of life in a constituency. Adding more indicators would not necessarily improve the score — it would change what the score measures and introduce additional mapping and normalisation challenges.

It does not measure the quality of public services, only the pressure on them. A constituency with excellent but overstretched NHS services and one with poor but underutilised services might score similarly. The score captures demand-side pressure, not supply-side quality.

It does not capture informal support systems. Communities with strong mutual aid networks, religious institutions providing food and shelter, or robust local charity sectors may experience less felt hardship than their score suggests. These networks are real and important — but they are not measurable at constituency level from public data.

The data has currency limits. Unemployment figures lag by a quarter. Food bank data is annual. Crime statistics are rolling 12-month totals. NHS waits are monthly snapshots. The score is a composite of the most recent available data, not a real-time reading.

Service Pressure doesn't measure what people say online. It measures what's happening in the real world.

Why It Matters

The value of Service Pressure is not the number itself. It is the number in combination with everything else Polis measures.

A constituency with high Service Pressure and high online engagement is one where material conditions and political voice are aligned — the system is working as intended, at least in terms of signal generation. A constituency with high Service Pressure and low engagement is one where the feedback loop has broken. A constituency with low Service Pressure and high engagement is one where online voice exceeds material conditions — potentially useful for understanding where political mobilisation is most effective, regardless of underlying need.

The score exists to make these comparisons possible with actual numbers rather than impressions. Every weight is published. Every source is public. Every constituency can be examined individually. If you disagree with our weighting — if you think NHS waits should count for more than crime, or that food bank usage is a better signal than unemployment — you can make that argument with reference to a specific methodological choice rather than a vague objection.

That is the point. Not to produce a number that ends debate, but to produce one that makes debate more precise.

Service Pressure scores for all 650 constituencies are available on the Polis dashboard. The underlying data sources update on different schedules — see our data freshness page for current coverage.