Ethnic Minorities: Indians make up 1.5% of population

ONE IN FIVE people living in Greater London are from an ethnic minority group. In the North, ethnic minorities account for 1 per cent of the population.

For the first time, Regional Trends includes information on the distribution of Britain's ethnic minorities. It confirms that ethnic minorities are concentrated within the large conurbations but also paints a more complex picture of their distribution on a sub-regional level.

Members of ethnic minority groups are generally much younger than the rest of the population. In 1991, a fifth of the white population was aged over 60, compared with one in 20 of ethnic minority groups.

The largest ethnic minority is Indian which comprises 1.5 per cent of the UK population. The major clusters are in the East Midlands and in the South-east. People of Caribbean origin, who live predominantly in London, make up 0.9 per cent of the population. Scotland and the North have the lowest proportion of resident ethnic minorities.

But there is clear clustering of ethnic minorities within regions. In Leicestershire, for instance, 11 per cent of the population is from ethnic minorities, while in the city of Leicester the figure rises to 28.5 per cent.