Manchester leads UK in reducing inner-city deprivation: report

Manchester has recorded the largest decrease in inner-city deprivation in Britain, a new report shows, bolstering Mayor Andy Burnham’s argument that he could replicate the city’s economic revival nationwide.

Burnham, the frontrunner to replace Labour leader Keir Starmer, has placed Manchester’s economic performance at the center of his campaign, describing ‘Manchesterism’ as a political philosophy that favors a more interventionist approach to the economy.

As Burnham prepares to contest the Makerfield byelection ahead of a potential leadership challenge against Starmer, the Centre for Cities report found that Manchester made an outsized contribution to falling inner-city deprivation levels across the country since 2010.

Between 2010 and 2025, Manchester recorded a 17-percentage-point drop in deprivation rates for neighborhoods close to its city center, the largest decline among the 63 UK towns and cities analyzed by the thinktank.

The analysis used the indices of multiple deprivation for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, benchmarks compiled from data on employment, education, health, crime and other metrics. It found that London and Liverpool also made significant contributions to the overall decline.

Nationally, the share of inner-city neighborhoods ranked among the 20% most deprived in a combined index for all four nations fell by seven percentage points, from 38% to 31%.

The report defined ‘inner city’ as all neighborhoods immediately adjacent to a place’s center. For the largest cities, such as Manchester, this was determined by plotting a ring extending 1.3 km to 4.5 km from the center, where urban neighborhoods give way to suburbs.

In inner-city Manchester, 58.4% of neighborhoods ranked among the most deprived in 2025, down from 75.7% in 2010.

In the Makerfield byelection, Burnham is standing in one of the Greater Manchester constituencies farthest from the city center, on the western fringes of the combined authority in the borough of Wigan.

According to the Centre for Cities, deprivation rates rose in some parts of urban Britain. Seven of the 10 cities and towns with the largest increases in deprivation rates across their entire urban area were in the north and Midlands, including Derby and Sunderland.

Andrew Carter, the thinktank’s chief executive, said the government needed to ‘back metro mayors’ because the report showed big cities with devolved powers had outperformed smaller cities and towns.

‘Government needs to continue to back mayors to deliver and ensure their plans for fiscal devolution reward metro mayors for the steps they take to boost local growth,’ Carter said.