Technical note
How the unpaid-care map was calculated.
This note explains the data, geography and assumptions behind the Hidden Week map. The central idea is simple: take the unpaid-care hours reported by people aged 65 and over in Census 2021, count them cautiously, and show how that hidden labour is distributed across local neighbourhoods.
Who is counted?
The main data source is Census 2021 table RM113, provision of unpaid care by age. The public story uses the category “Aged 65 years and over”, so the figures count older people who provide unpaid care. The figures refer to Census Day, 21 March 2021.
In plain terms, this is about older people who provide unpaid help or support because someone has long-term physical or mental health conditions, disability, or problems related to old age.
The table identifies the age of the person providing care, not the age of the person receiving it. This is older people delivering unpaid care, not a count of care delivered to older people.
How are care-hours estimated?
RM113 gives unpaid care in broader bands than the main unpaid-care topic summary. To avoid exaggerating, the map uses a lower-bound estimate:
- 19 or less hours is counted as 1 hour.
- 20 to 49 hours is counted as 20 hours.
- 50 or more hours is counted as 50 hours.
The result is a conservative minimum number of unpaid care-hours per week. Many people in each band will provide more than the lower-bound value used here, especially in the 19-or-less and 50-plus categories.
What does the map height show?
For each lower layer super output area, the map calculates:
Minimum unpaid care-hours provided by people aged 65+ per week ÷ residents aged 65+ × 100.
This gives a comparable local burden: minimum unpaid care-hours provided by people aged 65 and over, per 100 residents aged 65 and over each week. Across the five Tyne and Wear local authorities in the map, this is at least 726,492 unpaid care-hours per week.
Why not age-standardise this?
The map is designed to show the actual burden of unpaid care being carried by older people in local places, not the underlying age-adjusted propensity to provide care. Standardising by residents aged 65 and over makes places more comparable, but it does not remove every compositional difference inside older age.
That is not a flaw for this purpose. If a place carries more care because it has more older or disabled residents, that is still real work being carried by real people. A different analysis could age-standardise within older age groups to ask a different question.
Deprivation, health and disability
Deprivation is shown using the English Indices of Deprivation 2025, specifically the Index of Multiple Deprivation decile. D1 means the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in England, and D10 means the least deprived 10%.
Bad or very bad health comes from Census 2021 table TS037. Disability limited a lot comes from Census 2021 table TS038. These are shown to identify places where unpaid care, poor health, disability and deprivation stack together. These are area-level context measures. They should not be read as proving that every older carer in a high-burden ward is themselves in poor health or deprivation.
Geography
The geography is lower layer super output areas in Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland. These are small statistical neighbourhoods, not named communities. For the public map, LSOA counts are aggregated to wards using the official best-fit lookup. The raised surface keeps the small-area pattern visible, while the ward columns and labels make the burden readable through named local areas.
Limitations
These are self-reported Census data from 2021. The figures do not show whether care is adequate, whether carers are supported, or whether the person receiving care lives in the same household. The care-hours total is deliberately conservative and should be read as a lower-bound estimate.
The figures identify older people providing care, not the age of the person receiving care. They should therefore be read as unpaid care provided by residents aged 65 and over, not as unpaid care for older people aged 65 and over.
The deprivation data are from IMD 2025, while the care, health and disability data are from Census 2021. The deprivation overlay should be read as area context, not as proof of causation.