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Nugget of the week | morsel of the month
Census 2021

Bolton Tobacco Control Plan 2022 - 2026

Smoking remains the biggest cause of ill health and early death in the UK (United Kingdom). Bolton aims to create a positive movement across the borough towards becoming Smokefree. Find out more in Bolton's Tobacco Control Plan 2022 - 2026

Director of Public Health's annual report 2023: Community matters

This year's annual report looks at the strengths and resources in our communities are helping them to stay well, sometimes referred to as a community asset-based approach. Find out more on the public health annual report page

Greater Manchester VRU's strategic needs assessment for violence

The Greater Manchester VRU strategic needs assessment for violence is now available from the Violence Reduction Unit website

2023/24 updates are also available

Bolton's violence prevention strategy

Bolton's violence prevention strategy 2024-27 is now available to view

Dementia in Bolton

Outputs from an in depth piece of work on dementia in Bolton are now available.

Access a range of local boundaries and geographies!

Check out the Geographies page of this website to see the range of geographies in use locally and download files for your own use. Includes a Bolton postcode lookup (giving geographical location of postcodes and which geographies they fall within) and a range of local boundary files in a variety of file formats.

Census 2021

The census provides an invaluable source of information on the population relating to a wide range of topics. Because (nearly) everyone fills it in, you can get information from it about very small areas.

Census resources:

Census maps - easy to use tool for viewing census data in a map format for various types of geographies
build a custom area profile - easy to use tool that lets you build a custom geography (or use existing ones) and see how various census data compares for your area and a comparator, such as England or the rest of Bolton.
Origin-destination explorer - for people moving house and commuting to work (pandemic will impact commute data)
Create a custom dataset - look at how several factors vary together in a combination you select and download as a dataset.
NOMIS - download pre-made tables of current and previous census data.
How life has changed in Bolton - the ONS has produced a series of reports looking at changes since the previous census at local authority level.
The ONS website provides informatation on exising and upcoming releases from the 2021 and previous censuses.

Census briefings:

Nugget of the week | morsel of the month

19th February 2025

61% of Bolton women aged 16-64 are in work, and 70% of men – both lower than the North West and Great Britain as a whole. People who are economically inactive (not in work or seeking work) are most likely to be long term sick or looking after family/ home.

In honour of the half term holiday, today we’re looking at the JSNA work page
These figures are from Bolton’s labour market profile which you can find under ‘the Bolton picture’ on the JSNA work page.
Being in work is better for your health than being out of work. Unemployment is bad for your health, but a bad working environment may contribute to poor health.
Healthy staff are more productive, take less time off sick, and do not necessarily need to retire early. An unhealthy workforce negatively impacts our economy and society
Find out more about work and health on the JSNA work page

12th February 2025

45% of Bolton children (33,000 individuals) live in poverty. This puts Bolton 12th highest local authority (out of 361) in the country.

This week we look at the deprivation & poverty page of the JSNA
The End Child Poverty coalition calculates figures for local authority and parliamentary constituency for child poverty, the latest are from 2022-23. You can find a link to this under poverty -> ‘specific types of poverty’.
Of our 3 parliamentary constituencies, the highest levels are seen in Bolton NE (50%) and Bolton SE & Walkden (49% - contains part of Salford). Although lower in Bolton W it still reflects over a third of children in poverty (38% - contains part of Wigan).
Many areas around the North West of England have seen increases in child poverty since 2015.
In response to this and other related challenges Bolton has developed a Tackling Poverty Strategy, which you can also find linked off this page.

5th February 2025

Nearly half (49%) of residents of Queens park and central ward have no cars or vans in their household; over two-thirds (72%) rent their home; and 2 in 7 (28%) live in a one bedroom property. These figures are all much higher than for Bolton as a whole.

This week we take a look at the neighbourhoods page of the JSNA website, your one stop shop for small area information.
Looking at smaller areas can help you identify similarities and differences, help you decide which areas might be best to target for your projects, and understand how differences between areas might mean you need to take a different approach for them. Lots of information is only available at Bolton level, so we’ve gathered this set of resources to help you find those that are available at more granular level. Do you know of something you think others would find useful that we haven’t got?
The nuggets above come from the 2021 census, a key source of information, particularly on small areas because (almost) everyone fills it in. This means we can dig down much further than we usually can from more frequently updated sources and still get robust insights.
You can find ‘pre-prepared area reports’ for all Bolton wards on the neighbourhoods page under ‘Useful resources for other types of small areas’
If the area you want insights for isn’t pe-prepared, you can make your own! The neighbourhoods page also links you to the census tools we’ve found most useful.

29th January 2025 - morsel of the month - January

Many Bolton 65+s hold no formal qualifications. 51% of women and 32% of men aged 65 and over living in Bolton hold no formal qualifications (Census 2021) - this is a nugget taken from this months's age friendly morsel

This month’s morsel is a sneak peek from the soon to be launched Bolton Age Friendly strategy, which has been co-produced with older people and partner organisations working with older people.
The morsel gathers together a snapshot of information about the topics that older people wanted the strategy to focus on, to set the context for the strategy and the actions that will run from it.
Feel free to reuse this morsel, but please credit Bolton JSNA and link to the ageing well page of this website when you do.
Check out the ageing well page for more information and data about ageing well and older people in Bolton.

22nd January 2025

In January 2025, there are 333,498 people registered with Bolton GP practices. From an earlier nugget of the week, you may remember that this is about 1 Toughsheet stadium higher than the Bolton population (302,383). This is the pattern we generally see in Bolton, with more registered patients than residents.

This week we explore the ‘GP practices’ section of the JSNA website.
NHS Digital produces a wealth of dashboards and data about GP practice activity, which you can find from the GP practices page under ‘The Bolton Picture’ -> general practice data hub. This nugget comes from the first link on this page Patients registered at a GP practice
In NHS-land, Bolton is an ‘ICB sub location’, our code is 00T (zero zero T)
Now you can explore Bolton data from NHS sources!

15th January 2025

15% of Bolton residents smoke, down from 24% in 2011. Bolton used to have worse smoking rates than England as a whole, but our rates are now similar.

Smoking is the most important cause of preventable ill health and premature death in the UK and one of the main causes of health inequalities.
If you look at this chart from the Office of Health Inequalities and Disparities (OHID)’s fingertips tool (which has lots of other useful information on it), it shows how smoking levels have changed over time in Bolton compared to England as a whole.
These figures come from survey data, surveys can’t ask everyone as this would be impractical and expensive. Instead a sample of people with similar characteristics to the population as a whole are asked, and statistics are used to tell what is a real difference what and might just be a fluctuation.
Yellow indicates that Bolton is similar to England, red that Bolton is worse than England, green would indicate that Bolton is better than England.

Find out more about smoking and other health behaviours on the Lifestyles and behaviours page

8th January 2025

Bolton’s population is now over 300,000

The latest estimates (mid 2023) give Bolton’s population as 302,383
This would fill the toughsheet stadium 10½ times over (stadium capacity 28,723)
2½ stadiums would be full of children under 18
A further 2 stadiums would be full of older adults aged 65+

Find out more about Bolton’s population and how it’s forecast to change on the Population page

JSNA webinars

Webinar 2 - inequalities

Bolton’s JSNA can be found on www.boltonjsna.org.uk and contains a wealth of information about the Bolton population, their current health, and the wide range of factors that affect health such as the physical and social environment people live in. This will be of use to people who need to consider information about Bolton in funding bids, service recommissioning, student projects, or equality impact assessments. Join this session to: Discover how an intelligence informed approach helped targeting of activities aimed at increasing Covid vaccination uptake where it was lowest; increase your understanding of the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, a core dataset for understanding small area socio-economic inequality, and resources about this on the JSNA website; and find out more about inequalities in relation to Bolton’s climate emergency.

Webinar 1 - what is the JSNA & how can I use it?

Bolton’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) is a statutory assessment of the current and future health and care needs of the Bolton population. Join this session for a guided tour of the JSNA website, and to hear about how it’s been used in relation to Bolton’s Fund community grants scheme and Bolton’s equality strategy.