Neighbourhood health check

Scoring neighbourhoods in Great Britain based on accessibility to health-promoting and health-damaging features of the built environment.

Data Service: Geographic Data Service (GeoDS)
Coverage: Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland)
Time period: Snapshot (April 2024 to December 2025)
Updated: Every few years
Access: Open

What it is

Our health and wellbeing are often shaped by where we live. That includes access to a GP, the local park, air quality, a thriving high street and what’s on it (such as takeaways, betting shops, greengrocers or pubs).

The Access to Healthy Assets & Hazards (AHAH) index is an open data product from the Geographic Data Service (GeoDS). For every small area in Great Britain, the index measures how easy it is to reach neighbourhood assets that support and promote good health, as well as those that don’t. The index then combines these measurements into a single score, built from indicators such as:

Health services – GPs, hospitals, pharmacies, dentists and leisure centres.
Green and blue space – parks and open green areas, rivers, lakes and coast.
Air quality – nitrogen dioxide, particulates and sulphur dioxide.
Retail environment – fast food outlets, gambling venues, pubs and bars, and vape and tobacco shops.

The scores reflect accessibility to these indicators, rather than whether residents use them. A higher score marks a less healthy environment. Produced at small-area level on current census boundaries, AHAH slots straight into the census, deprivation and health datasets researchers already use. It’s now in its fifth edition, it is free to download or browse on a map.

Explore the data, mapmaker and other resources

How researchers can use it

Start to see what a neighbourhood’s features, like access to GPs, parks or fast-food outlets, can tell us about the story of that place.
Compare any neighbourhood in Britain with any other, since every area is scored on the same measures.
Compare AHAH indicators and composite scores with other neighbourhood-level measures of determinants of health and wellbeing (eg, average income, unemployment, education attainment, housing conditions)

How policymakers can use it

Draw on a ready-made indicator that is already built into the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ Fingertips profiles, with the latest edition included in the September 2026 update.
Target interventions, licensing decisions and green space investment at the neighbourhoods that stand to gain the most. An approach relevant to councils, integrated care systems, DEFRA, DCMS and the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government.
Use a consistent, GB-wide picture of the built environment to support national strategies.

Illustrative case study snapshot

AHAH can help us compare cities like Hull and Plymouth. Whilst the two English ports are of near-identical size and density, they offer very different conditions for a healthy life. More than half of Hull’s neighbourhoods fall into the three least-healthy deciles, with its healthier pockets located at the city’s edges. Whereas in Plymouth, healthier pockets are spread far more evenly, with over two in five neighbourhoods sitting in the healthier deciles.

Access and availability

The full index is free to download from the GeoDS catalogue at data.geods.ac.uk, and anyone can look up a postcode and see how their neighbourhood scores on GeoDS Mapmaker (mapmaker.geods.ac.uk).

Powered by SDR UK

Bringing together GP and hospital locations, park and coastline boundaries, air pollution readings, and retail data on takeaways and betting shops, then working out how far every neighbourhood sits on average from each one, is a substantial job. It’s more than any single research project could take on. SDR UK’s funding has enabled the Geographic Data Service to build the index, keep it up to date, and make it free to use. That means researchers, councils, government and community groups can all start from the same dataset, rather than building their own from scratch.

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