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Cllr. Karl Love – East Cowes posted the following interesting information on Facebook today.
The Census – Office for National Statistics (ONS)
The Isle of Wight, the population size has increased by 1.5%, from around 138,300 in 2011 to 140,400 in 2021. At 1.5%, the Isle of Wight’s population increase is lower than the increase for the South East (7.5%).
There has been an increase of 24.7% in people aged 65 and over, a decrease of 5.3% in people age 15 to 64 and a decrease of 6.3% in children aged under 15 years.
We can see from this that while our aging population is expanding we have fewer people to service our employment and care needs. In Adult Social Care we can see we are already short of carers and we must recruit workers from the mainland to service our needs. However, we also still have people not in employment and need to motivate them into work for the better good of our Island population.
We can also see why schools are facing challenging times with government funding allocated according to the actual mumber of children and young people attending a school. Fewer children = less funding and this will make some schools unsustainable unless we are able to attract more families to our Island to work and service our community needs. There lies another problem, Housing. We do not have sufficient affordable housing available now, to home everyone and the amount of available brownfield land for building on is small. Therefore we must build more housing and build upwards = flats and apartments or loose important green field and open spaces . Our Island Plan is therefore a critical policy in its making. Many councillors are finding the development of a new Island Plan testing and challenging. We must have a plan or we leave our Island wide open to the will of others, developers and government directing rather than local people shaping our own futures and destinies.
A low birth rate and reducing population, aging communities and a reducing workforce has serious implications to be addressed. If we don’t have the right kind of affordable housing we will face even greater challenges ahead.
These are the issues which the ONS highlights and this knowledge helps our council and communities to plan. It’s a difficult task with or with out politics occurring.
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