Blackpool's pressure is adult social care, not asylum or SEND growth

Correction, 12 October 2026. This page was headlined “Blackpool is worst on three of the four pressures we track. Asylum is no longer one of them.” It said Blackpool was highest of 25 areas tracked on recorded crime (142.8 per 1,000, average 81.0), adult social care spend (£724 per head, average £532) and EHC plan growth (+51.2%, average +39.1%). Those figures came from 25-authority files typed into this site’s source by hand in April 2026, with no raw file or script behind them, and they could not be traced to ONS, NHS Digital or DfE tables. The files gave adult social care and SEND figures for district councils, which run neither service, and filed Preston, Staffordshire and Worcestershire under the wrong area codes. This site now holds the published SEND and social care figures for every council, so Blackpool is compared with all of them: it is near the top on social care spend, and its SEND growth is mid-table. The crime row is removed, because this site does not set recorded crime beside asylum support; UK Demographics publishes crime in its own context.

Blackpool’s pressure is adult social care.

Domain	Blackpool	Rank	England	Period
Adult social care gross spend per adult	£884	4th of 153 councils	£627	2024-25
Growth in pupils with an EHC plan over five years	+70.0%	56th of 144 councils with a five-year figure	+65.4%	2020/21 to 2025/26
People on asylum support per 10,000	16.5	94th of 361 UK authorities	n/a	30 June 2026

Sources: DHSC, Adult social care finance report, England: 2024 to 2025, Table 14, over residents aged 18 and over; DfE, Special educational needs in England, 2025/26; Home Office, Immigration system statistics, regional and local authority data.

Correction, 31 August 2026. This page previously said Blackpool was worst or near-worst on every domain, and gave its asylum figure as 577 people at 40.0 per 10,000. That was the position at 31 December 2025. At 30 June 2026 Blackpool has 236 people on asylum support at 16.5 per 10,000. Blackpool’s own place page was already showing the newer figure while this page showed the older one.

The three rows are not the same vintage: social care is 2024-25, SEND the 2025/26 school year and the asylum figure 30 June 2026.

Blackpool remains the most deprived local authority in England on IMD 2019, and adult social care spend follows deprivation and age rather than dispersal policy. Asylum accommodation has moved out of Blackpool faster than the national average: 16,021 people were in hotel accommodation across the UK at 30 June 2026, against 30,657 six months earlier.

In the composite. On the four-domain pressure index, recomputed on published data, Blackpool scores 67.5 and ranks 46th of the 285 English authorities with all four domains. The full table is in the recomputed pressure index.

Where the asylum load actually sits in Lancashire now is in Four Lancashire authorities are in the national top nine.