Wellbeing of Wales, 2023 - A Wales of cohesive communities

Author: Dr Steven Marshall

A Wales of cohesive communities: Attractive, viable, safe and well-connected communities.

Most of the indicators from the National Survey for Wales relating to cohesive communities have not been updated this year. The general point on change remains in that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had widespread effects on the lives of people in Wales as elsewhere which affected the indicators in the chapter in different ways.

Volunteering increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022-23 results show this higher level has been maintained (from 26% in 2019-20, to 29% in 2021-22 and 30% in 2022-23).

Loneliness, based on a composite of six separate measures, has remained largely the same over the last three years (2020-21 to 2022-23) and lower than 2019-20. Within the overall measure, the percentage that ‘miss having people around’ has followed a different pattern with a substantially increased percentage in 2020-21 and 2021-22 but with 2022-23 back to 2019-20 levels.

There was little change this year in the number of households that approached their local authority for support as they were threatened with homelessness. But there was an increase in the number of households assessed as homeless and the number of households in temporary accommodation in 2022-23 compared to 2021-22.

Data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (excluding fraud) in 2022-23 shows 6.6% of adults were victims of crime and 2.5% were victims of personal crime. Due to changes in how the survey was run during the pandemic, this data cannot be compared to the previous year.

Some of the indicators for cohesive communities are still relatively recent measures collected in the National Survey for Wales and it is therefore difficult to comment confidently on changes over time. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as changes in the way the National Survey is collected, also affect comparability with earlier data. But with that in mind, a number of measures related to community cohesion and engagement seem to have experienced positive change during the 2020s.

• Community cohesion indicators had been broadly stable since first collected in 2012 until a sizeable increase in 2020-21. The same year also saw a positive step change in people feeling they can influence local decisions. Whether the increases in 2020-21 and 2021-22 will be sustained will not become clear until data is available for a number of future years.
• There have been slight improvements over the long term in people’s satisfaction with their local area. People feeling safe after dark has remained relatively constant since first asked in 2016-17 and stood at 66% in 2021-22.
• The percentage of people volunteering had been falling but is another indicator that has seen increases in the 2020s. The national milestone to have 30% of people volunteering has been reached.
• Most of the indicators within this goal have had detailed analysis carried out to determine the factors that are linked with differences in the level of the indicator. There are connections between the different measures of cohesive communities, both the other national indicators as well as other measures collected in the National Survey related to this topic (for example, being satisfied with the services and facilities in the local area). The associations can easily work in either direction, for example, lonely people may be less likely to volunteer but also volunteering may help to reduce loneliness.
• Unlike earlier analysis, the most recent analysis based on the 2021‑22 National survey results shows that age, health and deprivation are important for some but not all of the indicators.
• People feel that crime has increased a lot in recent years, although the picture from recorded crime is more mixed. During the COVID-19 pandemic there was a decrease in most types of crime.
• It is not yet clear if there are any sustained behaviour changes as a result of the pandemic that may impact on the long term progress towards the goal.

Nearly two-thirds of adults agreed with all three measures of community cohesion (belonging to the local area, people from different backgrounds getting on well together, and treating each other with respect and consideration) in 2021-22 when data on this indicator was last collected by the National Survey for Wales. This is an increase on pre-pandemic years and a slight drop since 2020-21.

In 2021-22, 64% of people agreed with all three statements about their local area that make up the national indicator, while 95% agreed with at least one statement.

These figures have been broadly stable since they were first collected in 2012 until the sizeable increase in 2020-21. Whether the increases in 2020-21 and 2021-22 are a short-term effect of the pandemic (with communities coming together locally) and whether they will be sustained or partly sustained will not become clear until data is available for a number of future years.

There is no statistically significant difference between men and women on either the individual measures or agreeing with all three statements.

There is a clear trend towards increased community cohesion as deprivation in the area falls.

Figure 5.1: Percentage of people agreeing with statements about their local area, by year [Note 1]

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Description of Figure 5.1: Bar chart showing percentage of people who agree with three statements about their local area from 2012-13 until 2021-22.

Source: National Survey for Wales

[Note 1] The years 2015-16, 2017-18 and 2019-20 have no data associated with them.

Two-thirds of adults feel safe in various situations after dark.

The national indicator is the percentage of people that agreed with four statements about feeling safe after dark: at home, walking in their local area, travelling by public transport or travelling by car. In 2021-22, 66% of people felt safe in all four situations.  These results have remained relatively constant across the years since first asked in 2016-17.

Men feel safer (81%) than women (51%). There is a clear trend towards an increased feeling of safety as deprivation in the area falls, with 72% of people who live in the least deprived areas feeling safe in all situations compared with 54% of people who live in the most deprived areas.

Figure 5.2: Percentage of people agreeing with statements about feeling safe after dark, 2021-22

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Description of Figure 5.2: A bar chart showing the percentage of people agreeing with statements about feeling safe after dark in 2021-22. 96% felt safe at home, 97% felt safe travelling by car, 75% felt safe walking in the local area and 76% felt safe travelling by public transport.

Source: National Survey for Wales

[Note 1] 27% of people who were asked said 'Don't know' to the question about public transport and were excluded from the analysis. As a result, the proportion of people feeling safe in all 4 situations is lower than the individual results would suggest.

Overall, according to the 2021-22 National Survey, 89% of people say they are satisfied with their local area as a place to live, slightly higher than the results in 2020-21, 2018-19 and 2016‑17.

86% of people were satisfied that they were able to get to or access the services they need, slightly down on 2020-21 but an increase since 2018‑19 (83%). The latest slight fall was not statistically significant. This varied by the type of area with a significantly lower percentage of people from rural areas having a good access to services and facilities compared to those from urban areas (83% vs 87%). Unsurprisingly, occupants of hamlets and isolated buildings were the least satisfied with the access to services and facilities, with only 77% showing as satisfied on this indicator.

Figure 5.3: Access to good services and facilities by area, 2021‑22

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Description of Figure 5.3: Bar chart showing percentage of people who are satisfied with their access to services and facilities. 87% of people in urban areas are satisfied compared with 77% of people who live in hamlets and isolated dwellings.

Source: National Survey for Wales

Fewer than 60% of people (in 2021-22) said that municipal services such as community centres, secondary schools, libraries and youth or sports clubs were available in their local area. In contrast, over 80% said public transport links, shops and pubs were all within a 15 to 20 minute walk from their home.

More people now feel they can influence local decisions.

In 2021-22, 30% of people felt that they could influence decisions affecting their local area compared with 26% in 2020-21 and 19% in 2018-19. This is a marked increase since before 2020 and may reflect real change as a direct result of the pandemic, but it requires monitoring in future survey years.

Figure 5.4: Percentage of people who feel they can influence decisions affecting local area, 2012–13 to 2021-22

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Description of Figure 5.4: Bar chart showing the percentage of people who feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area. In 2021-22, 30% reported they felt they could influence decisions, this compares with 19% in 2018-19. The 2021-22 result is higher than in all years since first asked in 2012-13.

Source: National Survey for Wales

Results from online data collected as part of the National Survey 2022-23 show that 30% of people say they volunteer for clubs or organisations. This compares with 26% in 2019-20 (when the survey took place face-to-face) and 29% in 2021-22 (when the volunteering questions were asked as part of the online module for the first time). In all years people most commonly volunteered for charities and sports clubs.

Social interaction has been shown to be beneficial to personal wellbeing and volunteering is an aspect of social interaction that has proven positive benefits in terms of both health and wellbeing.

Figure 5.5: Percentage of people volunteering by type of organisation, 2022-23

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Description of Figure 5.5: Bar chart showing the percentage of people volunteering, by type of organisation, in 2022-23. People are most likely to volunteer for charitable organisations (10%), or sports clubs (8%).

Source: National Survey for Wales

The national milestone for the volunteering indicator is to “increase the percentage of people who volunteer by 10% by 2050, demonstrating Wales’s status as a volunteering nation”. This means reaching a figure of 30% by 2050. This milestone has been met in 2022-23 but, with the uncertainty around how sustainable the increases seen during the COVID-19 pandemic will be, it is still not clear if this level will be maintained.

The National Survey collects data using the De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale which covers both emotional and social loneliness.

In 2022-23, based on all six measures, 13% of people in Wales were found to be lonely, the same as in the past 2 years (2021-22 and 2020-21) and lower than in 2019-20. However, there are some marked variations in the percentage of people who say they feel lonely in each of the individual measures:

• In 2022‑23, 36% of people said they missed having people around which is the same as in 2019-20. However, this was higher in the years between these dates during the COVID-19 pandemic with 53% in 2021-22 and a peak of 71% in 2020-21.
• The percentage of people who report that they have people they can trust completely increased from 59% in 2019-20 to 67% in 2020-21. This was maintained in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
• From 2019-20 to 2021‑22 there were increases in the percentage of people who said they had enough people they felt close to, as well as in the percentage having enough people they could rely on. The figures for 2022-23 at 83% and 77% respectively, were slightly lower but not a statistically significant change from 2020‑21.
• The most recent results (2022-23) from the National Survey for Wales suggest that younger adults (aged 16 to 44) are more likely to feel lonely than those aged 65 and above.

Figure 5.6: Percentage of people feeling lonely by reason and year

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Description of Figure 5.6: Bar chart showing the results for 2019-20 to 2022-23 and the six questions asked to create the measure of loneliness. Overall, the responses to the statements show that people are less lonely in 2022-23 compared with 2019-20.

Source: National Survey for Wales

A new national indicator was set in 2021 which will measure the status of digital inclusion. The definition for this indicator will be informed by the result of ongoing research on a minimum digital living standard commissioned by Welsh Government and undertaken by the University of Liverpool.

In the meantime, results from the National Survey in 2022-23 show that 93% of adults personally use the internet at home, work or elsewhere, which remains unchanged from last year. The survey currently also asks questions about digital activity and the skills people have. These are grouped into 5 types of skill:

• Handling information and content
• Communicating
• Transacting
• Problem solving
• Being safe and legal online

The latest data is from 2021-22, where 78% of internet users had performed activities that related to all 5 of these skills compared with 73% in 2019-20.

The ‘no-one left out’ approach to supporting homeless households into emergency accommodation has been in place since March 2020. Management information collected since the start of the pandemic indicates that more than 37,300 people who were previously homeless have been supported into emergency temporary accommodation between March 2020 and May 2023.

In 2022-23 the number of households assessed as being threatened with homelessness was similar to in 2021-22, however the rate for prevention for at least 6 months has dropped below 60% in 2022-23, for the first time since legislation changed in 2015. Before this drop, homelessness had been successfully prevented in around two-thirds of cases since 2017-18.

The number of households assessed as homeless, and the number of households assessed as unintentionally homeless and in priority need have both increased in 2022-23 compared to in 2021-22, by 7% and 25% respectively. Households successfully relieved from homelessness remained relatively stable from 2016-17 to 2019-20 but has been dropping since then, from 41% in 2019-20 to 30% in 2022-23.

The number of households in temporary accommodation at 31 March 2023 was 5,481. This number has increased rapidly since last year and is now more than double the 2,325 households in temporary accommodation at that time.

Management information captured from local authorities since August 2020 shows the estimated number of rough sleepers has fluctuated between 51 and 161 individuals since August 2020. On 31 May 2023 there were an estimated 154 individuals sleeping rough throughout Wales, with Newport, Cardiff and Pembrokeshire having the largest estimated numbers of rough sleepers.

In 2021 there were an estimated 40 deaths among homeless people in Wales, compared with 22 in 2020 and 33 in 2019.

A new national indicator was set in 2021 which will measure the percentage of people who have confidence in the justice system. Data is not yet collected for this indicator.

Most people don’t experience crime. In the last year police recorded crime has increased whilst the proportion of adults who are victims of crime has remained relatively stable.  

Data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (excluding fraud) in 2022-23 shows 6.6% of adults were victims of crime and 2.5% were victims of personal crime. Due to changes in how the survey was run during the pandemic, this data cannot be compared to the previous year. These are the lowest figures in the available time series (from 2015-16) when the percentages were 14.7% and 4.4%. Year on year the proportion has fallen since this time and for context comparable percentages in 2019-20 were 9.2% and 2.6% respectively.

Police recorded crime increased in 2022-23 by 3%, following a 17% increase in 2021-22. There were increases in 4 of the main offence categories including sexual offences and theft offences. Violent crime and criminal damage and arson saw no percentage change compared with 2021-22. Drug offences and possession of weapons offences decreased compared to 2021-22. It is likely that the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions introduced as public health measures in March 2020 have had an impact on the incidence of many types of crime in 2020-21 and to a lesser extent in 2021-22.

Reported fraud and computer misuse offences have fallen by 11% in Wales between 2021-22 and 2022-23 although the rate remained the same at 5 offences per 1,000 population in Wales.

Latest data on perceptions of crime from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) in 2022-23 shows 41% of people in Wales believe crime has risen a lot nationally in recent years, a reduction compared with previous years. The percentage of those believing crime in their local area has risen a lot are much smaller (11%). The latest data on violent crime in Wales from the CSEW shows incidence of violent crime in Wales rose to a rate of 29 per 1,000 adults in 2022-23.

Figure 5.7: Police recorded crime per 1,000 population, 2002-03 to 2022-23

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Description of Figure 5.7: Line chart showing the rates of police recorded crime per 1,000 population since 2002-03. The chart shows theft offences have seen the biggest change in rates falling from more than 50 per 1,000 population to around 20 per 1,000 population. Rates of violence against the person offences have been increasing since 2013-14 and since 2018-19 have the highest rate of those shown. Criminal damage and arson saw a fall in rates until 2016-17 but since this time have been stable. Public order offences had the lowest rate per 1,000 population until 2021-22 when the rate rose above that of criminal damage and arson, rates in this category have been rising since 2015-16.

Source: Police Recorded Crime, Office for National Statistics

Further analysis of the 2021-22 National Survey data included regression analysis to highlight significant factors for some of the indicators:

Feeling safe in a local area (National Survey for Wales): April 2021 to March 2022

What factors are linked to people feeling able to influence decisions affecting their local area?

What factors are linked to people being satisfied with the area that they live in?

What factors are linked to people agreeing that their local area has a sense of community?

Other research and analysis that may be of interest.

Measuring your impact on loneliness in later life (Campaign to end loneliness)

Loneliness in the general population: prevalence, determinants and relations to mental health (BMC Psychiatry)

Local elections in Wales (The Electoral Commission)

Advance voting pilot evaluation (The Electoral Commission)

The following data sources were used in this narrative:

Homelessness

Statutory homelessness open data tables (StatsWales)

Homelessness accommodation provision and rough sleeping monthly management information

Estimates of deaths amongst homeless people (Office for National Statistics)

Crime

Crime Survey for England and Wales Perception data (Office for National Statistics)

CSEW violent crime incidence comes from the Personal crime Incidence open data tables (Office for National Statistics)

Police Recorded Crime Open data tables (Home Office)

Police Recorded Crime 2022-23 (table P2 and P11) (Office for National Statistics)

Mid Year Estimates (StatsWales)

Other data

All other data are from the National Survey for Wales.