Disadvantaged areas have smallest families

Bevan Foundation Director Victoria Winckler has commented on new figures from the Office for National Statistics that show that Wales’s disadvantaged communities have the smallest families.  Speaking to the Western Mail on 13^th January 2014, she said:

“It’s noticeable that most – although not all – of the local authorities with small families are in relatively disadvantaged parts of England and Wales, where the economy has been declining for some time, and it may be that economic pressures mean that people in these areas feel unable to afford to have larger families. It’s also striking that parts of rural Wales have relatively larger numbers of children although they don’t appear in the top 10 – again, it’s not clear why.

However, she warned against linking figures on family size with benefit claims.

“In my view it would be very dangerous to draw conclusions from this data about benefit claimants,” she said.

“The vast majority of families are in work. Only one in six people of working age claim an out-of-work benefit. Of these, just over two-thirds have a dependent child.

“The vast majority of families claiming an out-of-work benefit in Wales have one or two children – there are less than 14,000 out-of-work families in Wales with three or more children.”