Millennials vs Boomers

This post is a little follow-up to a map I posted on Twitter recently, showing which areas of the UK had more millennials and which had more baby boomers. Here you'll find a couple more maps plus an interactive version. I've also shared the data along with it if you want to explore it yourself - and perhaps create different definitions for each of these categories. There are many different definitions for these groups but the ones I use here both have 19 separate birth years in them. Using this definition, millennials turned 16-34 in 2016 and baby boomers turned 52-70. Here's a more nuanced map graphic, with top and bottom 10 in terms of the millennial-boomer ratio.

You can see an even bigger version here

There's definitely some correlation between in where universities are and the areas with the highest proportion of millennials relative to baby boomers but it's not always as simple as that. It does help explain why West Wales has a blue tinge and a very slight millennial majority (Aberystwyth University - see also Lancaster) but in many more areas there are other factors. The area with the highest ratio of millennials to baby boomers is Tower Hamlets in London, with 3.9 millennials to every one baby boomer. West Somerset is at the opposite end of the scale, with two baby boomers to every one millennial.

Top 10s

You can explore all this yourself in the basic interactive web map I made. Move your mouse over an area to find out more, including total population and total number of millennials and boomers.

Quick, find some avocado on toast

The data come from the Office for National Statistics' mid-year population estimates for 2016 (the most recent data) and are for local authorities. You can get estimates for lower geographies, but I was only interested in local authorities here. Also, note that the data refer to the usual resident population for the UK as at 30 June of the reference year. The data are provided by administrative area, with single year of age and sex. In the spreadsheet I put in the folder, you can see data by area for each individual year, which is quite interesting in itself. There's also another spreadsheet with percentages and a chart that you can edit yourself. Here's a little extract, plus a gif of some area's age profiles.

Kind of like population pyramids, but not split by sex

Just note the Y axis changes to fit the data

For example, over 2% of the population of Christchurch was aged 90 or over in 2016, according to this ONS data. Birmingham had the highest total population (1.1m), including more than 7,500 people aged over 90. In terms of local authorities with the most millennials, the list goes: Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, Bradford, Tower Hamlets - not exactly in population order but not far off. Greater London had 2.6m millennials and 1.5m baby boomers (1.77 millennials to every one boomer). Finally, compare and contrast the population profile of Tower Hamlets and West Somerset, as shown below.

Quite a few youngsters here, clearly

The distribution is a little top heavy, it would appear

I was motivated to do this because I've been thinking more about differences, societal cleavages and inequalities recently in some of my academic work. I also saw something on this for US counties by the US Census Bureau in 2015 and more recently George Eaton did a piece on it last week. He called this the 'defining schism' of UK politics, though as things stand there is a lot of competition in the schism-sphere. But if we do want to look at things in terms of schisms, my original map is useful, though I do prefer the more nuanced one at the top of this post.

'The defining schism of UK politics'?

As for me, I'm neither a millennial or a boomer, so I guess I'm somewhere in the middle of this particular schism - so I thought I'd make a map and crunch some numbers in order to understand it better. Feel free to take the data and come up with some other figures for millennials vs boomers but I'm pretty sure the results will be similar; if not now, then in 18 months or so.

Notes: as ever, I made the maps in QGIS. The web map was done in Tom Chadwin's fantastic qgis2web. How dare I label you a 'millennial'!? Blame the US Census Bureau - I've stolen their definition. Baby boomer definitions also vary, and by country, but not by that much so as you'll see on the web 1946-1964 seems about right, but of course it's not fact - just my view.

Children living in deprived households in England

Not a particularly upbeat post title today, but it's an important topic too often overlooked. I wanted to shed some light on the matter because there are copious amounts of data on the issue, including those released as part of the 2015 English Indices of Deprivation, which I've explored in-depth in the  past though a series of maps. A recent Twitter message from freelance writer and HuffPost blogger Shumailla Dar prompted me to re-visit this topic (thanks) and since I had most of the data set up, I thought I'd do another map series - this time with the 'Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index' (IDACI) from 2015. See below for an example of what this looks like. In all maps, I've added a little inset to show the pattern from the overall Indices of Deprivation 2015, for comparison. I also show the percentage of each local authority's small areas in each decile on the IDACI measure nationally.

Quite a north-south divide in relation to income deprivation and children

Okay, so what is 'income deprivation affecting children'? It's the proportion of all children aged 0 to 15 living in 'income deprived' families. 'Income deprived' is defined as 'families that either receive Income Support or income-based Jobseekers Allowance or income-based Employment and Support Allowance or Pension Credit (Guarantee) or families not in receipt of these benefits but in receipt of Working Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit with an equivalised income (excluding housing benefit) below 60 per cent of the national median before housing costs'. Again, not the most exhilarating topic, but given the impact this can have on young people's lives, it's such an important one. If you want more information on the details, see the Indices of Deprivation Technical Report. Beyond the technicalities, here's how it looks on the ground in Middlesbrough, the local authority with the second highest proportion of children living in income deprived households (35.7% overall).

Second only to Tower Hamlets on this index

The Indices of Deprivation 2015 Research Report found, though a user survey, that whilst 99% of respondents had used the Index of Multiple Deprivation, the figure for IDACI was 69%. Still high, but it suggests a lot of people haven't looked at it, particularly since most respondents were people already working with the data in local authorities, universities, central government and charities. Most 'normal' people have very little idea that the data exists or what the patterns are like in their area - hence today's post. There is also a similar index which reports income deprivation affecting older people, but that's one for another day. Before showing any more maps, here's the top 20 local authorities across England in terms of the percentage of children living in income deprived households.

Source: DCLG, 2015, p. 23

Now for some more maps, before I provide a link to the folder with a map of every local authority in England. First of all, here's Tower Hamlets. Remember that the bars show the percentage of small areas (LSOAs) in each local authority that are ranked in each decile within England - which sounds a bit confusing, I admit. To give an example instead - for the map below, 54.2% of Tower Hamlets LSOAs are ranked within the most deprived decile in England on the IDACI measure. Just bear in mind that the maps present a relative picture for England as a whole and that, broadly speaking, red = bad and blue = good.

This issue is very well know, but persistent, in Tower Hamlets

Chiltern's at the other end of the scale - but note the single red area

A real mix of areas in Bury

Liverpool is a city of contrasts on this measure

What does any of this tell us? Of course, we know that some places are rich and some are poor and that this will inevitably have an impact upon children in those areas but these maps reveal nothing of cause and effect. Rather, I hope they will provide local agencies, analysts and residents with an opportunity to explore patterns related to income deprivation affecting children in their area and perhaps to think about a topic they hadn't before. It's certainly not a new issue but one that, I think, we could do a lot more about tackling. But that's a step too far for today because I just wanted to share these maps after running off a new batch after being prompted to think about it. 

Click here to go to the big Google Drive folder with all the maps

Files are ordered alphabetically, by local authority name

If you want to see comparable maps for the 2015 Indices of Deprivation overall, the 20% most and least deprived and other varieties of deprivation map, see my main IMD 2015 page. If you find any of these maps useful, feel free to use them and share them. 

Notes: you can find full details of the data and method on the government's English Indices of Deprivation 2015 web page, including the IDACI spreadsheet. I'm not a member of, or affiliated with, any political party in case anyone asks about the red and blue colour scheme! The labelling is a bit wonky in places owing to the variable coverage of OSM data. I did a version with Ordnance Survey labelling too but this had too many points, but hopefully some of the labels help identify key areas you are interested in.