Maps in this section include:

In this chapter we consider where different groups of families and households live in the UK, and how those distributions are changing. We also look at one particular attribute of people that can have an important impact on their families: their state of health.

The census has particular definitions of what constitutes a household and a family which we blur here as, in the vast majority of cases, most homes contain a single household which is also either a single family, a single person or a collection of unrelated individuals. Because we count people, rather than households or families, the differences in definition have little impact on our maps. We show the distributions of people not living in families here and of households who share dwellings in the next chapter.

We begin by considering the changing distributions of three groups of families with dependent children – 40.7% of all people live in such families. Of these, half (20.8%) now live in families where there are two adults and both are working, a quarter (9.7%) where one of two adults is working, and a sixteenth (2.5%) where neither parent is working. The remaining fifth of people living in families with dependent children are lone-parent households, the majority of which have no earnings. Both types of lone-parent households (earning and not earning), and two-parent households where both adults are working, are growing in number. We map the changing geography of three of these five groups: lone parents are becoming more common in particular cities, traditional two-parent one-earner families are reducing in number almost everywhere, and the proportions of two-earner families is rising most in the South, outside of the major cities.

Turning from people who care for their children, we next consider those who care for family and friends who are ill, and thus mainly for older people. One in ten people provide such care, a fifth of them for over 50 hours a week. The more hours of unpaid care a person provides for ill people in need, the more likely they are to live outside the South. The highest proportions of people who have neither childcare, nor responsibilities caring for older people, live in London.