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Homes and Commuting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2023

Danny Dorling  and
Bethan Thomas
Danny Dorling
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

The Census is the main record of the UK housing stock. It also provides the most comprehensive survey of how people travel daily from that housing to places of work, of whether they own or rent where they live, including tying all that to what employment each might have. For example, in 2011 there were 413,000 households where the person who filled in the Census form and took responsibility for the household was a full-time student. Of those households, 238,000 were living in private rented accommodation, and these types of household constituted 1.0% of all households in England and Wales. The household reference person (HRP) is the first adult to be named in the Census form. The most common type of household by the job (or previous job, if retired) of the HRP and property tenure were the 2.3 million households living in mortgaged property where the HRP was also an administrator or in a lower managerial position. In 2011, 9.8% of all households in England and Wales were of this kind: they constitute the highest bar in the graph below.

This and subsequent graphs in this chapter use the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SeC).

To be able to buy property, to pay a mortgage or pay the rent, several members of each household often now work. There has been a rapid reduction in households with only one earner, especially where house prices and rents have risen fastest. However, there are still people who have never worked who own property outright. In fact, as the graph above shows, there are more such people, possibly mostly elderly women who were housewives, than there are people who have never worked who rent privately! Of those who commute to work or study in England, a majority travel by car or van each day. Just over a seventh travel by public transport, a tenth of people now work from home most of the time and almost a fifth get to work by some other means, including walking, cycling, being a passenger in a vehicle or driving a motorbike.

The car availability statistics are for England and Wales because compatible data were not available for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Type
Chapter
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People and Places
A 21st-Century Atlas of the UK
 , pp. 191 - 222
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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