What was claimed
Nearly all major English cities are majority non-white now.
Our verdict
This is false.
Are England’s cities ‘majority non-white’?
A post on Instagram claims that “nearly all major English cities are majority non-white now”.
This is false. The latest data we have access to shows that in England’s cities, the majority of the population is white.
Honesty in public debate matters
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What is the ethnic makeup of England’s cities?
The most recent data shows that the majority of the population in London is white. The latest estimates from 2019 show that the largest single self-identified ethnic group was ‘White British’ at 43.4%. And together the ‘White British’ and ‘Other White’ groups add up to 58%.
These figures were calculated using the 2011 census, another population survey of around 550,000 respondents, and mid-year population estimates. They are also technically ‘experimental statistics’, meaning they are newly developed so still undergoing evaluation.
For other major English cities, we only have data from the 2011 census as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) doesn’t plan on releasing data from the 2021 census on ethnicity until at least October 2022.
In 2011, 66.6% of the population in Manchester, 57.9% in Birmingham, 85.1% in Leeds and 83.7% in Sheffield reported being white. This includes white people who are British, Irish and ‘any other white background’. It does not include those who said they were mixed, where one of the ethnicities was white.
Leicester was the city closest to being majority non-white. In 2011, 50.5% of the usual population in Leicester reported being white.
Although this data is now over ten years old, we could find no evidence that the majority of these cities are no longer white. Census data is considered the “gold standard” for the ONS as a source for estimates of the population’s ethnicity.
No credible source
While the image on Instagram plausibly looks like a headline in an online publication, which may give the claim some credibility, if you search the phrase “Nearly all major English cities are majority non-white now”, no such news articles appear.
The search on Google only finds other versions of the post on Instagram and another picture-sharing website.
Image courtesy of Anna Dziubinska
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because it’s not true that most of England’s cities are majority non-white now.