Census 2021 will probably be remembered as the one in which Christianity became a minority religion in England and Wales.
On census day, 21 March 2021, 46.2% of people identified themselves as Christians, compared with 59.3% of the population in the 2011 census, a 13-percentage point drop in a decade.
A key finding from the census helps to explain this: the significant rise in people identifying as of no particular faith at all.
The number of people identifying as Christian dropped by 5.5 million in the past decade. While all the other major religions witnessed increased numbers, the deficit in those identifying as Christians was comfortably surpassed by the increase of 8.5 million who stated no religion, rising to 22.2 million. That’s more than a third of the population of England and Wales, up from a quarter just a decade ago.
Almost all local authorities have registered an increase in the proportion of those stating no religion, with more than half of the population of 10 councils saying they are not religious.
Although small – 0.6% of the population in England and Wales – the number of people in the “other religion” category (a religion other than Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim or Sikh) grew by more than 100,000 in the decade between the last two census cycles.
The most common of these is paganism with close to 74,000 adherents in England and Wales including three of every 1,000 residents in Ceredigion, Cornwall, Somerset, Isle of Wight, Powys and Gwynedd.
Spiritualist, Spiritual, Wicca and Shamanism are also among the top ten most common religions.
This latest census release isn’t just about religion. The 2021 census has shown that some of England’s biggest cities are becoming more diverse, with more than half of the population of Leicester, Luton and Birmingham now of ethnic minority background.
Slough now has the highest ethnic minority population of any council outside London at two-thirds of the population, up from 54.3% a decade ago.
Across England and Wales the ethnic minority population has increased from 14% of the population in 2011 to 18.3% in the 2021 census.
How people see themselves was also captured, with a slight decrease in people who identified with at least one UK national identity but a large fall in those identifying as “English only”.
The number of people who see themselves as being English-only fell dramatically from 58% to just 15% of the population in 2021. Conversely more than half of the population described themselves as “British only” last year compared with 19% a decade ago. Meanwhile one-in-50 people identifies as having both a UK and non-UK identity.
The proportion of people speaking English or Welsh as their main language fell only slightly from 92.3% to 91.1% in the past 10 years. But while Polish has remained the second-most common main language there have been many other changes in the past decade.
The most noticeable has been in the number of people whose first language is Romanian, with 472,000 speakers now compared to 68,000 a decade ago. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian speakers have all seen their populations increase.
But Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Arabic are on the decline, as is French, which fell out of the top 10 other main spoken languages this year.
At the bottom of the table were Irish Traveller Cant (36 people said it was their main language), Ulster Scots (16) and Manx Gaelic (8).
