The Department told us that funding allocations were now catching up with changing levels of deprivation—some areas remained very deprived but were not as deprived as they had been in the early 2000s, while other areas remained less deprived but were significantly more deprived than they had been. This situation had created what on the face of it looked like a slightly peculiar pattern of some areas that were less deprived having larger funding uplifts than other areas that were more deprived.11