Why It Matters Household Composition
Summary
We have analysed the composition of households in a selected postcode and broken them down depending on differences in the following criteria:
- If the household has an elderly resident or group of elderly residents;
- If the household has a singular resident, a family, or some other group of residents (like full-time students);
- The marital status of residents in the household; and
- If the household has any children.
Interpretation
One-Person Households
| Dataset | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Total Number of Households in the Postcode | This tells you the total number of households in the postcode. |
| Percentage of One-Person Households | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of just one person. |
| Percentage of One-Person Households with Residents Aged 66 Years or Over | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of just one person who is also aged 66 or over. |
| Percentage of Other Household Types with Dependent Children | This tells you the percentage of all other household types in your postcode that have dependent children. |
Dual Parent Families
| Dataset | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Percentage of Single Family Households with a Married or Civil Partnership Couple, or Cohabiting Couple | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of (1) a married couple, (2) a couple within a civil partnership, (3) a cohabiting couple, regardless of whether they do or do not children. |
| Percentage of Single Family Households with a Married or Civil Partnership Couple, or Cohabiting Couple, With no Children | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of (1) a married couple, (2) a couple within a civil partnership, (3) a cohabiting couple, with no children. |
| Percentage of Single Family Households with a Married or Civil Partnership Couple, or Cohabiting Couple, With Dependent Children | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of (1) a married couple, (2) a couple within a civil partnership, (3) a cohabiting couple, and they do have dependent children. |
| Percentage of Single Family Households with a Married or Civil Partnership Couple, or Cohabiting Couple, With All Non-Dependent Children | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of (1) a married couple, (2) a couple within a civil partnership, (3) a cohabiting couple, and they do have children but they are non-dependent. |
Single Parent Families
| Dataset | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Percentage of Single Family Households with Lone Parents | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of a single parent. |
| Percentage of Single Family Households with Lone Parents who have Dependent Children | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your postcode that are comprised of a single parent living together with children and the children are reliant on that parent. |
| Percentage of Other Household Types with Dependent Children | This tells you the percentage of all other household types in your postcode that have dependent children. |
Other Household Types
| Dataset | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Percentage of Other Household Types with Dependent Children | This tells you the percentage of all other household types in your postcode that have dependent children. |
| Percentage of Other Household Types of another Nature (all full-time students and all aged 66 years and over) | This tells you the percentage of all other household types in your postcode that are of another nature. These include households composed solely of full-time students and those with all residents aged 66 and over. |
Why the metric matters from a commercial inhabitant’s perspective
Commercial inhabitants will be interested to know the sorts of compositions that households live in now as it would have an impact on how profitable certain offerings are.
For example, property developers may find more of an uptake on dwellings in which more bedrooms have their own en suite bathroom in areas where households comprise more than one family unit, or homes with more of a variety of bedroom sizes.
Why the metric matters from a residential inhabitant’s perspective
Residential inhabitants may be interested to know that a high proportion of households with only one person in tend to indicate greater levels of wealth and well-being.
Therefore, such areas have a propensity towards high end goods and services. However, there are often low levels of community cohesion in areas where there are a high number of single person households containing young persons as they tend to be more mobile, highly economically active and less engaged in their community.
Health outcomes tend to be lower in areas with high levels of overcrowding, and wait times for social housing, however there tends to be an amenity value in having a higher number of large households because at any given time some members of the household are likely to be present.
Commentary
In England and Wales, households with six or more people rose 25 per cent between 2001 and 2011. Nowhere in the country has this been more evident than in London with it now being home to the highest proportion (3.9%) of households with six or more people. This sort of household saw the largest proportional increase between 2001 and 2011 at almost 50 per cent. The areas with the highest proportion of households with six or more usual residents were found in five boroughs in London, with Newham topping the table. This is due to the unique characteristics and demography of London and in particular areas like Newham. Generally, affordability of housing is a contributing factor - for instance a quarter of young adults in London live with their parents, up from one in six in the late 1990s, but also some cultures have more of an affinity for and propensity towards intergenerational living. The areas with the highest numbers of households with six persons or more have higher proportions of the population identifying with Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnic groups. Such areas have been identified as having high proportions of concealed families - one living in a multi-family household in addition to the primary family - such as grandparents living with their children. The high proportions of six or more people in households may be a result of closer familial ties in Asian cultures - such models of living were very common in London for people identifying as White English prior to the baby-boomer generation, when the number of households far exceeded the number of dwellings in London, and only changed after the Second World War when house building increased and the rate of growth of the number of households slowed.
One negative aspect of the rising number of households with six or more persons is that overcrowding can be an issue. Levels of overcrowding in London are more than twice as high as the rest of England for every tenure, at 13 per cent of the social renting households in London, 11 per cent of private renting households and 3 per cent of owner-occupiers. In real terms this was counted as a quarter of a million households in 2015. The top five local authorities with the highest percentage of their households overcrowded were all in London; Newham had the highest with one in four of its households overcrowded.
At the other end of the spectrum London used to have the highest proportion of one person households in England and Wales in 2001 (35 per cent) and by 2011 this had fallen as only 32% of households in London were one person households, which appears to relate to affordability of housing meaning people are more likely to like in a flat / house share than alone. One person households are still common in London owing to London’s young age structure, and our higher proportion of single persons than is the national average. Further London is home to many individuals who work in London but have a family home elsewhere.
36 per cent of all households in London include dependent children aged under 19, a slight increase from 33% in 2004. The proportion of households with children has changed little since 2004 for households that own their home outright (12 per cent in 2016) or who are in social housing (42 per cent) while it has risen slightly for households with a mortgage (49 per cent). However, there has been rapid growth in the proportion of privately renting households with children, up from one in five in 2004 to over one in three in 2016. In absolute terms there are now around 320,000 privately renting households with children in London, with around 580,000 children. Such statistics add to the growing clamour that if more affordable housing cannot be built at the rate necessary to ease overcrowding, the private rental market needs to be reviewed so that it can provide the stability and amenity value to tenants which has come to be associated with home ownership in the UK.
(Photograph: Russell Trebor, Wikimedia Commons)
Trivia
In the 1911 Census, in Stepney alone, there were more than 7,000 households recorded with three or more people living in a single-room home.
History
Household Composition in the seventeenth century in London when recordings from which more accurate demographic data could be taken began, households were relatively small as life expectancy was low (at approximately 33 years of age) and infant mortality rates were high so Londoners had relatively few children and elderly dependants. London in the late seventeenth century was not a city of children or the elderly. Instead, it was dominated by young men and women in their teens and twenties.
In the late eighteenth century to early nineteenth century households grew much larger as infant mortality declined and life expectancy was raised, due to better hygiene, living standards, child rearing practices and the decline of infanticide which had been caused by the stigmatisation of single mothers. This led to higher numbers of children both within married households and out of wedlock too. Londoners were also marrying earlier than the seventeenth century.
While rates of overcrowding in London are higher now than a decade ago, current levels of overcrowding in London remain far below historic levels of overcrowding. At the beginning of the 20th century there were around 1.5 million households in London, living in around one million dwellings, indicating very high levels of sharing and overcrowding. For almost a century from 1911 there was a fairly steady increase in the number of residential rooms per Londoner, as growth in the number and/or size of homes outstripped population growth (if any). In 1911 there were just 1.02 rooms for each Londoner, a figure which rose to 1.99 by 2001, only to fall back to 1.88 in 2011.
Until the mid-twentieth century, poor households in London often experienced extremely high levels of overcrowding. By the 1970s there were finally more homes than households in London, but rapid population growth meant that the number of households surged again so the surplus of homes narrowed to around 90,000 homes by 2011. The recent rise in average household size and the growing trend of two or more households sharing a home, or concealed families indicates that household growth would be higher still if more housing was available.