We’ll do a full report on last night’s council meeting in a few day’s time. But for tonight we ‘d like to mention an interesting statistic that we heard at the meeting.
Our district has the third lowest recorded rates of migration in the whole of England. This isn’t to do with migration in and out of the country – it seems that comparatively few people move in and out of our district.
The figures come from the 2001 census:
1st for migration : Oxford 25.6 percent
2nd : Cambridge 24.9 percent
.
.
. : Average for Great Britain 12.1 percent
.
: Rochford 8.0 percent
: Knowsley 8.0 percent
Lowest in England: Havering 7.7 percent
So forget the stereotypes of close-knit mining communities in the north of England, or remote rural areas where you are an ‘incomer’ even if you’ve lived there for 30 years. It’s our district where people ‘take root’ and comparatively seldom move away.
Oxford and Cambridge presumably come top because of their universities, but is there anything else that we can deduce from this?
Well , first of all the figures seem reasonable – when we call on people’s doors at election time , we see the same familiar faces for many years! And when there are new residents in a house, they’ve often moved from another part of the district.
Secondly, our district is generally a pretty middle-class place with high levels of owner-occupation. It’s not particularly fashionable, but we have decent schools and a low crime rate. We don’t attract the super-rich, but maybe once people have moved to our district and settled, there aren’t many other residential areas within their price range that are better than here.
Any thoughts from anyone on this???