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Worklessness by ethnicity group

Proportion of London's working-age population who are not in paid work by ethnic group (2012 and 2022 Q4)

Every major ethnic group in London has seen a fall in the proportion of people who are not in paid work in the decade up to 2022.

People of Pakistani/Bangladeshi background have the highest rates of not being in paid work, with 37.1% of the working-age population not working. This is, however, down from 48.5% a decade ago.

White people have the lowest rate of being out of work (19.9%) closely followed by people of Indian background at 21.1%. White people have also seen the smallest fall (of 6.4 percentage points) in the last decade.

The definition of worklessness used here includes unemployment as well as many types of economic inactivity including looking after the family/home, students, long term and temporary sickness etc. (see Reasons for not working for a full list of these groups). Therefore because of the large size of this group of people, the changes in unemployment caused by COVID-19 would not be expected to make large differences to this indicator.