Crawley’s age profile

A few weeks back, I was speaking at a community group meeting and was asked a question involving ‘high level’ of young adults in Crawley. There was a particular context to the question which I won’t go into, but it came as a surprise, because as I told the questioner, Crawley actually has an unusually low number of young adults.

We can see this in a breakdown for the constituency pulled together by the House of Commons Library from the ONS’s mid-year population estimates a couple of years back.

As the graph shows, Crawley’s population over-indexes compared to the national picture when it comes to children and the majority of working ages, but under-indexes when it comes to young adults, those in middle-age and pensioners.

The narrative for this is one which I have often heard repeated at the council over the years:

• People are born here, some go off and get education or training out of town and those who do often don’t return.
• However, due to the very high concentration of employment in the town and comparatively cheaper house prices than central London, it’s a good place for people to settle down in the town as they get older and have children of their own, so as we move up the age pyramid we see population growth.
• Then, as people reach older ages and become better-heeled some move into adjacent areas to access larger housing, or retire to other parts of the country.

How far this is true, I don’t really know, but this age profile has existed in the town for at least the last few decades, so it’s unlikely to be recent factors affecting things.

Overall, I don’t see any grounds for concern in the way the age profile breaks down, but I do find it useful to understand the rough demographic composition of the town when taking decisions in order to understand how it is likely to affect the community.