Phil Rodgers: Sex, religion and politics - what the Census tells us about Cambridge today

By Phil Rodgers

It’s nearly two years since we filled in our Census forms, and all the number-crunching is starting to produce results.

Here’s a look at what the recently published Census data has to say about Cambridge. The portrait that emerges is of a young, diverse, mobile, growing city, with an increasingly international population, and still just about more religious than not.

Population

The Census counted 145,700 people in Cambridge, up by 21,800 in 10 years. This wonky blue Christmas tree shows the city’s population profile, in five year age bands, males on the left, females on the right, while the black line shows the corresponding picture for the whole of England.

The graphic is from the county council's excellent Cambridgeshire Insight website, which uses Census and other data to provide all sorts of insights into the county’s population. As you can see, it shows that there are a lot of young people in the city - half the population is 31 or younger. This isn’t just because of the students - it’s not until age 40 that the Cambridge population falls back to the average for England, and it stays well below that level for older groups.

As well as being young, the Cambridge population is also very mobile - 24 per cent of us changed address in the year before the Census, and this number may have been lower than normal due to the pandemic.

Nationality

One of my favourite numbers from the 2011 Census was that 23 per cent of Cambridge residents have a non-UK passport. In the new Census this has increased to 28 per cent, reflecting the increasingly international makeup of the city’s population.

Of course, the University of Cambridge attracts many people from overseas, and in a few parts of its new Eddington district over 80 per cent of residents have non-UK passports. There are also plenty of international workers in the city’s technology and life sciences industries.

The lowest proportion of non-UK passport holders is in Cherry Hinton, which in many ways is the part of Cambridge that’s most like the rest of England, but even here it’s 24 per cent.

The figures for country of birth are even more striking - a whopping 38 per cent of Cambridge residents were born outside the UK; 18 per cent in Europe, 12 per cent in Asia, 4 per cent in the Americas, and 4 per cent in the rest of the world.

Sex

For the first time, the 2021 Census asked over-16s about sexual orientation and gender identity, and as you might expect, Cambridge is a good deal more diverse than England as a whole. 80.5 per cent of the city’s residents said they were “straight or heterosexual”, 12 per cent chose not to answer, and 7.5 per cent said they were “lesbian, gay, bisexual or other (LGB+)”, compared to 3.2 per cent for England overall.

The LGB+ figure was highest in the student areas of the city, at 13 per cent in Market and Newnham, and 11.5 per cent in Castle. Once again Cherry Hinton was most like the rest of England, with an LGB+ figure of 3.6 per cent. One per cent of Cambridge’s over-16s said they had a gender identity different from their sex registered at birth, about twice the rate for England as a whole.

Religion

Across England, the Census showed that Christians are still the largest religious group at 46 per cent, while 37 per cent said they had no religion. Cambridge is almost exactly the other way round, with 45 per cent of no religion and 35 per cent Christian.

In both cases there’s been a definite shift away from Christianity over the last 10 years. However, if you include Cambridge’s other religious groups - 5 per cent Muslim, 2 per cent Hindu, and about 1 per cent each Buddhist, Jewish, and Other - then believers very slightly outnumber non-believers. The remaining 10 per cent of people chose not to answer the question.

Politics

The Census didn’t ask people about their political opinions - that’s what elections are for - but demographics certainly matter for Cambridge politics, which has moved firmly leftwards in recent decades. It’s easy to forget that Cambridge used to be a fairly Conservative place - in the last century, Conservatives won 24 of the 29 elections for Cambridge MP. However, in this century the city has become first a Lib Dem/Labour marginal, and more recently a fairly safe Labour seat, while Conservative support has faded to just 16 per cent.

There’s not much sign in the Census data that this trend will be reversed any time soon - Cambridge’s young and mobile demographic means the city is likely to stay to the left of the nation’s political centre. While many of the non-UK passport holders can’t vote in General Elections, a lot of them can and do in local elections.

There’s plenty more data from the latest Census still to be published. Over the next few weeks we are due to get details on how deprivation, age, and sex relate to health and disability; about education, employment, health and housing for different ethnic groups; estimates of vaccine effectiveness; as well as data about unpaid carers. The picture for Cambridge may well be quite different from the rest of the country.

It’s been suggested that the 10-yearly Census should be scrapped, and the government should spend the money on surveys and other data sources instead. I think this would be a real shame - the Census has been going for over 200 years, and as well as giving a unique snapshot of the life of the country, it’s an invaluable resource for people researching their family history.

The Capturing Cambridge website, run by the Museum of Cambridge, is a great example of this - it has details of Census returns from the 1800s, showing house by house where people lived and what work they did. It’s hard to know whether our emails and social media will survive 200 years from now, but it’s a fair bet that our descendants will still have the portrait of our lives from the 2021 Census.

Phil Rodgers has lived in Cambridge since 1984. Married with two daughters, he works as a developer for a city software firm. You can read more from him on his blog, and look out for his column each month in the Cambridge Independent.