Key findings

• • In 2011, one in five people in England and Wales (20 per cent) described their ethnic group as other than White British compared with 13 per cent in 2001.

• • The population other than White British, White Irish and Other White has doubled in size since 1991, from 3 to 7 million, while remaining a small minority of the total population in 2011 (14 per cent).

• • The Black African ethnic group has grown faster than any other minority group in the last two decades, doubling in 1991-2001 and 2001-11 to reach 990,000 in 2011.

• • Ethnic diversity is increasing in all parts of England and Wales, and at a faster rate in those places where minority ethnic groups were fewest in 2001.

• • Minority ethnic groups remained clustered in certain diverse urban areas, most notably London.

• • There has been continued ethnic group mixing within families. The number of people identifying with a ‘Mixed’ ethnic category increased by 82 per cent between 2001 and 2011 to more than a million.

• • The proportion of mixed households has grown in 346 out of 348 local authority districts in England and Wales. Excluding one-person households, one in eight households now have more than one ethnic group.

• • New measures in the census show that the majority of people from minority ethnic groups describe themselves as British, do not have a minority religion, and speak English as their main language.

Context

British society is becoming increasingly ethnically diverse. This is a pattern that has been documented throughout the post-war period and more widely since the inclusion of an ethnic group question in the 1991 Census (Rees and Butt, 2004). Prior to the 1950s, the minority ethnic population was small and largely confined to a small number of dockland areas (Peach, 1996). The post-war immigration to Britain was initially dominated by people arriving from the Caribbean who quickly became outnumbered by those from South Asia, whose immigration was tied to events in the New Commonwealth countries (Coleman and Salt, 1996). By 1991, a youthful age structure meant many groups were growing rapidly through an excess of births over deaths.

This chapter and the next describe the growth of ethnic diversity between 1991 and 2011 in England and Wales. This chapter shows how it is occurring in all parts of the country, and not just in those places where minority groups are most clustered.