Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, for each year from 2010 to date, how many UK households there were (1) with a non-UK born household reference person, (2) with a UK-born household reference person, and (3) with a household reference person for whom the country of birth was not known.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority. I have, therefore, asked the Authority to respond.

Lord Green of Deddington
House of Lords
London
SW1A 0PW

12 October 2021

Dear Lord Green,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question requesting data for how many UK households there were (1) with a non-UK born household reference person, (2) with a UK-born household reference person, and (3) with a household reference person for whom the country of birth was not known (HL2843).

The Office for National Statistics is responsible for undertaking the Labour Force Survey (LFS), from which these estimates of household reference person by country of birth have been derived. Table 1 shows the number of households by the household reference person’s country of birth in the UK from 2010 to 2020¹.

The table contains estimates of the number of households for household reference persons who are UK born, non-UK born or whose country of birth is missing. The totals of each column may not add up to the total households figure due to rounding, and estimates are rounded to the nearest hundred. As the estimates are based on a survey, they are subject to sampling variability. This is because the sample selected is only one of a large number of possible samples that could have been drawn from the population.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

1. A household reference person (HRP) is the householder who owns the accommodation; is legally responsible for the rent; or occupies the accommodation as reward of their employment, or through some relationship to its owner who is not a member of the household. If there are joint householders, the one with the highest income is the HRP. If their income is the same, then the eldest one is the HRP.