UK household overcrowding by country of birth
The ONS’s latest publication of data from the 2011 Census explores living arrangements in the UK, which includes breaking the information down by the country of birth of the household’s family reference person[1].
The first thing to note is that three-quarters of households with a UK born family reference person have two or more rooms of living space per person (a room in this context being anything other than a bathroom, toilet, cupboard, hallway etc.). On the other end of the scale, only 1.1% of households have less than one room per person. However, 7.8% of non-UK born households have less than one room per person. This might suggest that overcrowding is largely a problem for non-UK households, however it is not that simple. There are vast differences when breaking down non-UK households into country of birth.
Irish-born households are in fact less crowded than UK-born households; 80% have two or more rooms of living space per person. Looking to the other extreme, households from Somalia show high levels of overcrowding: a massive 28.2% have less than one room per person. Breaking that figure down, 10.6% of Somali households have less than two thirds of a room per person, 53 times the proportion of UK born households in the same situation, which stands at 0.2%.
Source: ONS
These figures show the impact of time on the living arrangements of immigrant communities. Irish-born households have the lowest proportion of dependent children, show an older age structure and have high numbers of widowed people. All factors which lead to people living alone, or without a lot of family around them. On the other hand, the more recent influx of Somali born households show the highest proportion of people with three or more dependent children, and the highest number of lone parent families.
Oliver Hicks-Pattison, Researcher, Tooley Street Research
June 25th 2014
[1] This was previously known as the ‘head of household’. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_366963.pdf