The Townsend Index was developed in Great Britain by Peter Townsend, a former Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. It was created to identify variations in social class between northern and southern Great Britain. The concluding Black Report drew separations between the SES of the north as being influenced by social and material deprivation (Townsend, 1982). The original studies included the counties of Northumberland, Cumbria, Tyne and Wear, Durham, and Cleveland - regions with uneven distributed among the wards and counties.

The Townsend Index is a useful index for the calculation of deprivation within the GVRD because it is considered as an established index and as such has shown its ability to show the changes of deprivation over the years.