by Ian Shuttleworth, Queens University Belfast

The Government’s new Levelling Up White Paper focuses attention on trends in the movement of people within the UK. Ian Shuttleworth was cited by its authors – and he says longitudinal Census data can show us a richer picture than was revealed by the document.

When civil servants from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities were putting together their new White Paper, I was one of the researchers they consulted.

Had migration rates within the UK been falling in the long term as they had been in the US, they wanted to know? The issue is a matter of concern because it is considered a key factor in levelling up the labour market between regions.

If people are unwilling to move, that can lead to them working at a level that doesn’t fulfil their potential. And it has an effect on places, too. Over the years, patterns of mobility have left the UK with ‘steaming-ahead places’ in the South East and ‘left behind’ places elsewhere, the argument goes.

In particular, graduates are more likely to move to find suitable work – that means some areas tend to be abandoned by the more highly-skilled, leaving them with depleted levels of human capital and lower productivity. This has negative effects for richer areas, too, because it puts pressure on housing costs and living standards, which can also lower growth and productivity.

NHS Register data

The White Paper quoted a research paper by myself and my colleague Tony Champion from 2016, which used data from the National Health Service Register on people  moving between areas within the UK. However, the companion paper – which was also seen by the White Paper’s authors and which used Census data from the ONS Longitudinal Study, wasn’t directly quoted.

It’s worth looking at that second paper, though, because it gave a more nuanced picture.

The White Paper asks whether a long-term decline in inter-county mobility in the United States was replicated in the United Kingdom. It reports, correctly, that the overall level of internal mobility has fallen in the UK since 2001. It points to rising housing costs in London as a major factor, saying they lessen the wage premium and therefore dampen the incentive to move but that is not the full picture.

In fact, our LS research shows migration has dropped not just for graduates but for all groups of people. But we find that when it comes to moving, there’s still the same difference between graduates and non-graduates that there always was.

Surprising result

When we looked further back at the health service data to see if the USA experience of decline in geographic mobility since the 1970s had been mirrored in the United Kingdom, we were surprised by the result: In England and Wales there had been no substantial long-term decline in the overall intensity of between-area migration over that period, unlike for inter-county moves in the USA.

This was the case for both between-region migration and also the rate of migration within regions. There was a drop in migration for those aged 65 and over, but the rates for the other four age groups we looked at had been essentially stable or increased.

That surprising result was the reason we decided also to look at Census data from the ONS-LS: this confirmed the overall result but showed a more nuanced picture.

The Census data in the ONS LS showed us that as in the USA, there was a marked reduction in the level of shorter-distance moves – less than 10 kilometres – for almost all types of people. But in contrast to the US experience, the proportion of people in England and Wales making longer-distance address changes had declined much less.

So if we want to know what’s driving the trends, we could look more closely at the causes of the sharp reduction in shorter-distance moving in Britain as well as all moves in the USA. That, too, could help inform policy on ‘levelling up’ in the future.

Are People Changing Address Less? An Analysis of Migration within England and Wales, 1971–2011, by Distance of Move, by Tony Champion and Ian Shuttleworth, was published in 2017: . Popul. Space Place, 23: e2026. doi: 10.1002/psp.2026.

by Fran Abrams

Immigrant families often choose to live in neighbourhoods where there are others from similar backgrounds. But does this affect their children’s prospects? New research using the ONS- LS suggests policies aimed at desegregating neighbourhoods could make a difference. 

Many immigrant children grow up in segregated ethnic enclaves, which raises a question: Does this have an impact on their cultural assimilation, and if so, how? 

There is a difficulty in answering this question. New migrant parents who choose to live outside of such enclaves may be different from those who choose to live in ethnic areas. They may be better educated and may have a wider variety of different contacts. Maybe their language skills are better and that might open up a range of opportunities for them. But we don’t know which of those who do live in ethnic enclaves also have these skills.

Hard to unpick

So it’s hard to unpick what comes from children’s environment, rather than directly from their parents. It’s a complex picture. 

But using data from the Census for England and Wales alongside information from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, which tells us about first-generation immigrants’ cultural preferences and their neighbourhood choices, new research has come up with some answers.

The researcher, Yujung Hwang, used information on families with South Asian origins living in England and Wales, and asked if the area where they grew up made a difference to their children’s prospects later on. She was able to produce a picture of the outcomes of offspring from Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi families in Census 2011.

She asked if living in an ethnic enclave influenced whether these second generation migrants remained in a similar area, whether they kept the South Asian religion of their parents and whether they married someone from the same religion or ethnicity. For women, she looked at whether neighbourhood was linked to success in education and in work.

While some of those factors did not seem to be affected, she found, some of were significantly altered by neighbourhood effects.

Overall, the outcomes which showed the strongest effect were the likelihood of continuing to live in an ethnic enclave: those who grew up in such an area were 44 percentage points  more likely to continue living in one as adults.  Women who grew up in those areas were also less likely to graduate from college and less likely to go to work. 

Cohort differences

There were differences between the two age cohorts, though. Those born in the 1970s were 22 percentage points more likely to live in an ethnic enclave if they grew up in one. For women in that age group growing up in an enclave meant a 25 percentage point lower employment rate and a 29 percentage point lower rate of college graduation.

For those born in the 1980s, the only significant neighbourhood effect was on residency – the likelihood of staying in such an area was 55 percentage points higher for this group, though that could be at least partly because they were still unmarried and living with parents in 2011.

Once parental characteristics such as education, ethnicity, religion, employment status during childhood, and years since arrival were taken into account, there was no significant neighbourhood effect on the intergenerational transmission of religion or marriage preference.

This, the author suggested, could be explained by the fact that second-generation migrants were highly likely to remain and to marry within their parents’ religion and ethnic group, regardless of where they lived: there was no neighbourhood effect because both groups tended to conform to the ethnic and religious norm.

The results of the study point to possible policy implications: measures which support the ethnic desegregation of neighbourhoods could lead to the wider cultural assimilation of immigrant groups.

For instance, building social housing in diverse neighbourhoods could support the children of migrants in their educational and employment journeys.

Neighbourhood Effects on Intergenerational Cultural Transmission is a working paper by Yujung Hwang.