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The dramatic effect of the pandemic on commuting patterns across England’s biggest cities has been revealed by granular data from the latest national census held in 2021, which coincided with the third and final Covid lockdown in the country.
An FT analysis of the recent release from the Office for National Statistics reveals the extent of the shift to homeworking by comparing it with responses to the previous census a decade ago.
Under normal circumstances, these decennial snapshots would be expected to reveal the impact of gradual national trends, or significant local changes in areas where the population has undergone sudden expansion or contraction.
But the most recent census was held on Sunday, March 21 2021, when England was still in the early stages of exiting its third national lockdown. It asked respondents where they were working the previous week, allowing the FT to produce detailed maps revealing stark national patterns compared with 10 years earlier.
The analysis found vast commuter corridors outside of Greater London were hardly used, with only a small portion of previously regular commuters travelling into the capital.
According to the FT’s analysis, just 2,729 (3.3 per cent) of adults in the commuter town of Woking south of the capital travelled into their workplace in the week before the 2021 census, compared with 9,207 (11.6%) a decade earlier.
To the north of London in St Albans, 4,550 commuted into the capital in March 2021, roughly a quarter of the 16,633 10 years earlier, despite the Hertfordshire city’s working population growing by more than 5,000 to 116,000 during this period.
The impact of homeworking is shown clearly in central London where many boroughs showed a jump of at least 10 percentage points between 2011 and 2021 of respondents both living and working in the capital.
Similar patterns are seen around Birmingham and Greater Manchester, the second and third biggest cities, with many commuter towns on its outskirts experiencing a drop-off in commuters heading into the city.
Differences in commuting patterns captured by the census could be at least partly accounted for by geographical variations in occupations and industries — including how well suited they were to remote working during the pandemic.
The ONS cautioned that “the national lockdown, associated guidance and furlough measures” will have affected the data they recorded. As a result, the value of the data for longer-term policy purposes is debatable.
However, not all the changes captured by the census are likely to have been temporary. Subsequent analysis by Tera Allas, McKinsey’s director of research and economics, last year suggested the proportion of people travelling to work was still below pre-pandemic levels in every UK local authority, with London lagging behind the rest of the country.
The data released by ONS covers England and Wales. Equivalent results for Scotland’s census, run separately by the National Records of Scotland, have not yet been released. Scotland’s census was delayed for a year by Covid and subsequently ran into problems with response rates falling below targets in every municipal area.
