Community Lens 2025
Match data sets to the areas you work in to learn more about the needs of England’s communities.
The Community Lens tool allows you to plot your postcodes over the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), the official measure of deprivation in England. The IMD is comprised of seven distinct domains of deprivation: Income Deprivation; Employment Deprivation; Education, Skills and Training Deprivation; Health Deprivation and Disability; Crime; Barriers to Housing and Services; Living Environment Deprivation.
To use to the tool, all you need to do is organise a list of the postcodes you want to know more about, and enter them in. These could be locations of members, beneficiaries, volunteers, service points, or operational assets.
The tool then generates intelligent sentences about how these postcodes are distributed according to IMD Deciles. It tells you what percentage of your postcodes are located in the best and worst performing areas of England. So if you are a food bank, you might learn that 90% of your food bank members are located in the 30% most deprived areas for Income, or 40% of your food bank locations are located in the 60% most deprived areas for Health and Disability.
Why do we have a 2025 and 2019 version of Community Lens?
The Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) are typically released every 5-6 years. This version of the Community Lens tool uses the IMD data released in 2025. If you would like to compare to the 2019 data, you can access the 2019 version of the Community Lens here.
