Introduction

The Radical Statistics Group is a longstanding independent network where members and interested citizens critically evaluate statistics and research, and use them to promote democratic causes. Its 200- plus members include not only statisticians, but also research workers and campaigners on a variety of issues, mainly in the UK. It focuses on statistics relating to public policy making, health, education and general welfare. Discussion takes place via an email-based discussion list and social media, through a range of publications, and face-to-face at the annual conference and other meetings. The group works directly to promote clearer understanding and better usage of statistics, but much of its impact comes through providing support to actions by members and others on specific issues of public policy and governance.

The group has changed with the times. While its organisation was originally based on ‘subgroups’ allied to radical health, education, anti-racist, peace and democratic movements, there are fewer active subgroups now – just as there are fewer such social movements – currently in the UK. The group's journal contributions have become more academic, often taking articles from students and young researchers, or from more experienced academics who wish to try out new ideas – or to reach an audience which is sympathetic to politically progressive sentiments.

Throughout these years the Group has frequently returned to themes of statistical literacy, the availability and reliability of data especially on neglected issues, and the social functions of quantitative analysis. Although many of its members are academics, the organisation has focused on debate and practical support for campaigning organisations, while encouraging contributions from non-academic writers without seeking a standard style or length. Open annual meetings discuss the Group's future activity but rarely set an organisational policy.

Despite its own members’ relative diversity of opinions, Radical Statistics has maintained a perspective critical of the establishment. Statistical practice is seen as closely related to economic interests, especially through the funding of data collection and analysis, as argued in the concluding chapter of Statistics in Society (Dorling and Simpson, 1999b). The Group has frequently asked ‘whose interests are being served?’ and allied its publications and meetings to campaigns of antiracism, of publicly funded healthcare, of teachers’ working conditions, and against weapons of mass destruction.

Key findings

• • Ethnic group is not a fixed characteristic during a person's life.

• • Four per cent of all people chose a different ethnic group in 2011 than in 2001. This is twice the level of instability found for the decade 1991 to 2001.

• • Among the main ethnic group categories, 1 per cent of White British in 2001 changed their ethnic group when asked again in 2011. Four per cent of Bangladeshi and 26 per cent of White Irish groups changed their ethnic group.

• • A larger proportion of those in Mixed and ‘Other’ ethnic groups changed their recorded category (for example, 43 per cent of ‘Mixed White & Black African’ in 2001 identified with another census category a decade later).

• • This should concern official statistical agencies responsible for setting ethnic group response categories in censuses and surveys, because ‘Mixed’ and ‘Other’ categories are the fastest growing groups as a result of natural change and international migration.

• • A change of ethnic group category in the census is often due to a person's background fitting more than one category; it need not involve a conscious change of ethnic identity.

• • The main categories of ethnic group can be compared from one census to another, but the residual ‘Other’ categories cannot. A recommended comparison of most stable groups identifies seven groups for comparison from 1991 to 2011, and 12 groups for comparison from 2001 to 2011.

• • When a category names a region or a country, someone born there is more likely than others to stay with that category.

Introduction

Statistics of ethnicity are often treated rather like birthplace, sex or date of birth, as if there is little doubt about either the categories that have been used or their acceptance by respondents to the question. But while the measurement of ethnicity has become a norm in Britain and many other countries, the categories used are not at all fixed. And its reliability is limited: four in every 100 people asked their ethnic group in 2001 changed their answer when asked again in 2011. This chapter explores that reliability, asking why recorded ethnicity may change over time, and who is most likely to change their ethnic group.

Those who collect and review statistics of ethnicity are in no doubt about their fallibility.

Introduction

The chapters of this book have highlighted the ethnic dimension of Britain's diverse population. When averaged across an ethnic group, the characteristics of individuals have striking differences compared to other groups’ education, health, housing, employment and location within Britain. The analysts who have presented and interpreted these chapters have explained many of these differences by referring to the historical development of Britain's ethnic diversity, through immigration, adjustment, integration and contribution to the life of this country.

In this chapter we discuss the implications of these findings for three main policy areas that have motivated the government to measure ethnicity. The first is the set of policies that address inequality brought about by discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnic or national background that has been illegal since the first Race Relations Act of 1965. The second area of policy addresses the diversity of preferences and needs that are associated with ethnicity, and the respect for these differences that goes hand-in-hand with equal access to services. The third area is concerned with community relations in a diverse society, which more recently has been associated with community cohesion and national security issues.

The last but no less substantial part of this chapter attempts to clarify some of the concepts and measurements that such policies require of social statistics, and asks how far we can rely on ethnic group differences to direct public policy.

Discrimination

Despite improvements in the health, employment, education, housing and neighbourhood deprivation of minority ethnic groups over the last 20 years, clear disadvantage persists in comparisons with the average experience of the White British group. The Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups continue to have poorer health and higher unemployment than the White British majority. Household overcrowding disproportionately affects people in the Bangladeshi and Black African groups. Black African men and women continue to face disadvantage in the labour market with lower levels of labour market participation and, along with Black Caribbean men and women, higher rates of unemployment if they are available for work. In 2011, Black Caribbean and Black African men's unemployment among 25- to 49-year-olds was 1 in 6, 10 percentage points higher than the 6 per cent of White British men of the same age.

Ethnicity is at the centre of major political debates in Britain. From diverse perspectives, politicians and campaigners have highlighted differences between ethnic groups in where they live, the skills and education they are provided with, the jobs they have and the healthcare they receive. The measurement of these ethnic group differences has become increasingly complex as identities evolve, and more people mix within families, neighbourhoods and workplaces. Comparisons made 50 years ago between immigrants from the British New Commonwealth as a whole and the average experience of UK residents are now made between family origins of many more world regions, between immigrants and their children and grandchildren born and educated in the UK. The context of social policies has moved from race relations to also encompass the management of immigration and the integration of immigrants, religious discrimination and the relationships between ethnic and religious claims and state services, as well as the state's response to terrorist threats.

In this book we show what the largest government statistical enquiry has to say about the dynamics of ethnic identity and inequality in contemporary Britain. The chapters draw on data from the decennial censuses of population in England, Wales and Scotland, which have asked a question on ethnic group since 1991. The first section shows how ethnic groups have grown, the places they are most diverse, how they perceive their national identity, and how ethnic identity changes over time. The second section looks at whether minority ethnic groups are residentially segregated and continue to face disadvantages in health, housing, employment, education and neighbourhoods.

This chapter introduces the concept of ethnicity, its measurement in the UK context, and the identities and inequalities that these data and other collected statistics have been able to identify. The chapter ends with a short description of the book and a section of reference material that is used throughout the book.

What is ethnicity?

Measuring ethnicity is fraught with difficulty because researchers try to reduce a subjective and dynamic concept to a categorisation that is meaningful to individuals and, at the same time, manageable in data analysis. Bulmer (2010) suggests an ethnic group is a collectivity within a large population with shared identity defined by kinship, religion, language, shared territory, nationality or physical appearance. The importance of these dimensions in what shapes ethnic identity will vary from person to person.

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.

Key findings

• • Immigration and family-building have contributed to the rapid growth of Scotland's minority ethnic groups who, by 2011, numbered 850,000, or 16 per cent of Scotland's residents.

• • The largest minority is ‘White: Other British’ numbering 417,000 in 2011, an increase of 10 per cent over the decade. About three-quarters of this group were born in England.

• • Each minority group increased its population during the last decade.

• • The African population grew rapidly, from 5,000 in 2001 to 30,000 in 2011. This growth was mainly from immigration, and was focused on areas beyond those where African people had mainly lived before.

• • Other minority populations also dispersed across Scotland during the decade, growing faster outside of those areas in which they were most likely to be resident in 2001. The one exception is the Chinese population that has grown most in the student areas near universities where it was already concentrated.

• • Change in the census question itself has added diversity, now identifying the Polish population, for example. At 61,000, they are the second largest minority in 2011.

• • One in six of Scotland's households of two or more people have more than one ethnicity represented.

• • Individuals with a ‘Mixed or multiple’ ethnic group number 20,000 people, or 0.4 per cent of the population.

• • Over half of Scotland's residents in 2011 who were born outside the UK had arrived in 2004 or more recently. Immigration has increased more rapidly in Scotland in the past decade than in the rest of Britain.

• • Scotland's diversity has increased both overall and in every local authority district. All of Edinburgh's population and two-thirds of Glasgow's population live in wards that are more diverse than Scotland as a whole. Both have become more diverse, and their diversity has spread more evenly through their cities, as it has through Scotland as a whole.

Introduction

It has been recognised for some time that there are distinctive aspects to ethnic diversity in Scotland. The reasons for this are, in no small part, historical: significant Irish immigration to Scotland in the 19th century, especially to the west of Scotland, created a large migrant labour force, as did the migration southwards of displaced Highlanders who were seen as being culturally, if not ‘racially’, distinct by lowland Scots.

Key findings

• • Half of the population born abroad and living in England and Wales arrived in the UK aged 15-29. This is an age when they are economically productive and are unlikely to require or be eligible for state benefits.

• • All ethnic groups in England and Wales have grown in size since 2001 through more births than deaths, apart from White British and White Irish groups. Most have also grown through net migration into England and Wales.

• • The excess of births over deaths is because minority ethnic groups have a young age structure, not because of high fertility.

• • The fertility of most groups has increased a little in the 2000s, but overall there is less difference in family size between ethnic groups than in past decades.

• • For most ethnic groups whose first major immigration to the UK was over a generation ago, growth through further immigration is not as much as their ‘natural’ growth within England and Wales through an excess of births over deaths.

  • – Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups have each grown by about 50 per cent during 2001-11, and mostly because more people have been born than have died.

  • – For the Black Caribbean group, whose main immigration to the UK was now 60 years ago, growth has been less than 5 per cent; it was almost entirely due to the excess of births over deaths rather than further immigration.

  • – The Indian group is an exception among established minority ethnic groups: it has grown through immigration during the period 2001-11 more than through an excess of births over deaths.

• • During the 2000s, the Other White (including most Eastern Europeans), Black African and Chinese ethnic groups added rapidly to their population from further immigration as well as from natural growth. Each grew between 70 and 100 per cent in total during the decade.

• • The ‘Mixed’ groups have a very young age structure. Their growth was mainly due to children born in the decade. A smaller but significant growth of about 25 per cent was through immigration.

• • The White Irish group in England and Wales reduced by 18 per cent over the decade, from an excess of deaths over births, from net emigration, and from a net movement out of the White Irish ethnic group largely to the White British group.

Key findings

• • Britain's cities are more ethnically diverse than ever before. Slough, Luton and Leicester are the first local authorities outside London that are already plural, where no ethnic group is in the majority.

• • The census itself has changed how Britain's diversity is measured, by dividing White into White British, Irish, Gypsy or Irish Traveller, and Other White.

• • Cities labelled by politicians as ‘segregated’ are, in fact, the most diverse. For example, Bradford and Leicester both have more than 1,000 residents from each of 15 ethnic categories measured in the census, and over 30,000 residents from diverse groups that the census labels as ‘Mixed’ or ‘Other White’, ‘Other Asian’, ‘Other Black’ or simply ‘Other’.

• • Increased diversity over a decade is small but steady: every local authority district except Forest Heath has increased its diversity since 2001.

• • A projection of ethnic diversity suggests that the future will include many local authorities where White British is not the largest group, but no other single ethnic group is likely to become the majority of any city's population.

• • The future of Britain is a greater variety of diverse areas.

Introduction

Plural cities is a concept used in discussions about how local government policies might change when the population is so ethnically mixed that no one group is the majority.

Local government deals with diverse areas on an everyday basis: not only ethnic and cultural diversity, but also the needs of young adults and older people, those in rural and urban neighbourhoods, those with powerful organisations to represent them, and those without. The changing ethnic composition of an area is a guide to changing needs inasmuch as it may indicate a variety of preferences for housing size, for types of school meals, for care of older people, for cultural and entertainment facilities, for funereal procedures or for other aspects of local services. Increasing ethnic diversity may also require and indicate resilience and an ability to cope with change, including the arrival of new migrants. Diverse areas offer a variety of resources and cultures to visitors and traders.

Managing ethnic diversity through appropriate services and by making connections between diverse cultures is an established area of study and practice in the UK and internationally (Wood et al, 2006; Reza, 2012). Needs are best measured directly by a variety of social indicators (see also Chapter Two, this volume).

Introduction

This chapter reviews the available approaches to understanding and interpreting local population change, in the context of government policy for community cohesion and this book's emphasis on social cohesion. There is some agreement among academics and government that the ethnicity of residential patterns and friendship networks should not be given prominence when identifying targets for social policy. But indicators of population change are nonetheless essential contextual information for social programmes. Furthermore, claims that residential segregation is dangerous and friendship networks are polarised are still so commonplace that they require addressing in the first part of this chapter. The second part reviews existing advice on local demographic monitoring and provides further practical guidance to assist policy makers to develop the necessary contextual information for the evaluation of local initiatives.

Claims

Since 2001, Britain's ethnic geography has been seen as threateningly polarised. The contexts in which the policies of community cohesion developed early in the 2000s have been rehearsed already in this book. ‘Parallel lives’, ‘communities living in fear’ and ‘the challenge of diversity’ were threads that ran riot through local policy. Largely as a response to the disturbances in the Asian areas of northern towns of England in 2001, to the radical Islamist terrorist attacks on the United States (US) in the same year and to the United Kingdom (UK) military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, common thoughts about what makes a viable, safe community have been racialised, internationalised and Islamified.

By 2004, the government's review of its community cohesion programmes chaired by Ted Cantle decried official statistics for not providing the means to measure local residential segregation, which needed to be ‘broken down’ (Cantle, 2004). A year later, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) responded to the London terrorist bombings in a speech entitled ‘Sleepwalking to segregation’ (Phillips, 2005). He identified the emergence of ‘fully fledged ghettos’, residential segregation and narrow ethnic friendship networks as encouragements to terrorism. Others made a further link from ethnicity and segregation to immigration, insisting that levels of immigration were too high to allow successful integration, including the high-profile examples of the academic Mike Poulsen (2005), the political campaign MigrationWatch UK (2006) and the government minister Phil Woolas (quoted in The Times, 2006).