Ribble Valley and Hyndburn: nine miles apart, thirteen times the load

Nine miles. Two different countries, on paper.

Council	On asylum support	Per 10,000	Rank of 361
Hyndburn	426	49.0	2nd
Burnley	471	46.7	4th
Pendle	441	44.0	9th
Preston	407	24.7	47th
Blackpool	236	16.5	94th
Ribble Valley	24	3.6	230th

Ribble Valley borders Hyndburn, Burnley and Pendle. All four are Lancashire districts, all four fall under the same Serco prime accommodation contract for the North West, and the same company decides placement across all of them. Three are in the national top nine per head of population. The fourth is in the bottom half.

Why the split is this sharp. Dispersal accommodation is procured from the private rented sector, so it follows cheap housing rather than population. Ribble Valley has the most expensive housing in Lancashire and almost no dispersal stock. Hyndburn has the cheapest, and 426 people on support in a district of 87,000.

What changed since this page was written. It originally compared Ribble Valley with Blackpool, on the position at 31 December 2025, and put the gap at 8.5 times. Blackpool’s supported population has since fallen from 577 to 236, so it is no longer the Lancashire outlier and the comparison has moved to the authorities that are: Hyndburn, Burnley and Pendle. The gap is wider now than the one this page originally reported.

The dispersal system is meant to share the load. Across one district boundary in East Lancashire it varies by a factor of thirteen.