Key findings

• • Residential segregation, the extent to which an ethnic group is unevenly spread across neighbourhoods, has been decreasing steadily over the last two decades.

• • Neighbourhood residential mixing is increasing – segregation has decreased within most local authority districts of England and Wales, for all minority ethnic groups.

• • In over two-thirds of districts, segregation decreased for the Black Caribbean, Indian, Mixed and Black African ethnic groups, between 2001 and 2011.

• • There is increased residential mixing between the White British and minority ethnic groups and, while White British segregation has increased slightly in many districts, segregation remains low for this group.

• • There has been increased ethnic diversity in previously less diverse neighbourhoods, and those identifying with the White British group are more likely than ever to live next door to someone of a different ethnic group to their own.

• • There are few districts that have seen a large increase in segregation; this has occurred in areas where there are small numbers of people in a particular ethnic group, and not in the areas where minority ethnic groups are most populous.

• • There has been increased residential mixing in inner and outer London. In outer London, for example, segregation decreased by 12 percentage points for the Bangladeshi ethnic group and 11 percentage points for the Chinese ethnic group.

• • Large cities such as Leicester, Birmingham, Manchester and Bradford have seen a decrease in segregation for most ethnic groups.

• • The processes associated with changing residential segregation are multifaceted, but an important mechanism for decreasing segregation is movement away from existing clusters of an ethnic group or groups.

Introduction: ‘segregation’ in debate

This chapter considers how far the increased ethnic diversity in England and Wales discussed in Chapters Two and Three has been accompanied by the growth or decline of ethnic group concentrations in neighbourhoods. Are people mixing more in their residential environments, or have neighbourhoods become more ethnically segregated? The chapter explores how ethnic group residential segregation is changing nationally and at the neighbourhood level. It uses the widely applied Index of Dissimilarity to show how segregation has changed for all ethnic groups between 1991-2001-2011. The chapter begins by discussing in brief the contemporary policy context and academic literature surrounding British ethnic segregation. The next section is an analysis of how segregation has changed for each ethnic group, for England and Wales, before exploring smaller geographical areas, and considering the geography of these changes.