Somalis in the United Kingdom

[8] When the British merchant navy started to reduce in size in the 1950s, many of these migrants moved to industrial cities such as Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester, where labour was in great demand.

[50] The driving forces behind this secondary migration included: a desire to reunite with family and friends;[8][52] a rise in Dutch opposition to Muslim immigration; Somali opposition to housing policies which forced them to live scattered in small groups all over various cities rather than in a larger agglomerated community;[53] a restrictive socio-economic environment which, among other things, made it difficult for new arrivals to find work;[54] and the comparative ease of starting a business and acquiring the means to get off social welfare in the UK.

Along with other groups from the Arab world, Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, these populations were also sometimes collectively identified in a non-racial, political sense with the epithet "black" or its then neutral equivalent "coloured" in order to underscore their common experience of colonial subordination.

[85] December 2018 saw the publication of the 2021 Census White Paper, which proposes further changes to the ethnicity classification - specifically, the addition of a tick box for the Roma population, and a ‘search as you type’ facility to make it easier for people of Somali origin to use the write in under ‘Black African’.

[93] Peter J. Aspinall argues that "the census is primarily designed to serve the needs of government and cannot meet the requirements of local authorities where particular groups outwith the category system may cluster.

Examples include the Somalis and Yemenis in Sheffield, the City Council arguing that a new approach to capturing a wider range of ethnic groups is needed where their numbers are not significant nationally".

She explains: "If a man is unemployed, brings in no income, spends what his wife earns or receives from social security on khat, will not help with domestic chores, and colludes with nagging in-laws – then a woman may feel better off without him".

[101] Writing in 2006, refugee education expert Jill Rutter reported that research suggested between 20 and 70 per cent of Somali households in Britain were headed by single females.

[115] Research conducted for the London Borough of Camden, published in 2002, notes that levels of religious adherence and interpretations of Islam within the Somali community varies according to social class.

[71][117][118] Analysis of Labour Force Survey data by the Institute for Public Policy Research, published in 2008, shows that in 2006/07, 48 per cent of the working-age Somali-born population of the UK had no qualifications.

[124] A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research attributes the low employment rate to the newness of the Somali community and to the fact that most immigrants came in search of asylum rather than through labour migration channels.

[130] Analysis of Labour Force Survey (LFS) data by academic Lavinia Mitton suggests that 22 per cent of Somalia-born adults in the UK have experienced difficulty finding and keeping work due to a lack of English-language ability.

[131] Mitton and Aspinall also argue that logistic regression analysis of LFS data from 2003, 2006 and 2009 indicates that an ethnic penalty existed for Somalis even after other factors impacting employment, like English language proficiency, work experience, health, age, religion and marital status, had been taken into consideration.

[132] According to the Home Office, 64 per cent of Somali refugees had a low level of English language skills at the time of their asylum decision in the UK, which hindered their ability to find employment.

[137] Poly Styrene (born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said), whose father was Somali, was a member of the punk rock band X-Ray Spex, and later a solo artist.

[138] Ahmed Ismail Hussein Hudeidi, who died in London of COVID-19 in April 2020 after having settled in the city, was described by the BBC as "a founding father of modern Somali music".

[145] A 2006 survey by the International Organization for Migration suggests that Somalis in the UK prefer to read newspapers such as Metro to improve their English-language skills, although listening to radio was more popular.

[160] Additionally, visual artist and writer Diriye Osman's short stories have garnered literary recognition,[161] as has comedian and actor Prince Abdi's stand-up.

[169][170] Other prominent Somali athletes in the UK include paralympic bronze medalist Abdi Jama, who was born in Burao and plays wheelchair basketball internationally for Great Britain.

[191][192][193] Some local education authorities in England make use of so-called "extended ethnicity codes" in order to capture data on more specific groups of pupils, including Somalis.

According to these statistics, in the school year 2010–11, the proportion of Somali pupils being awarded five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including in mathematics and English, was 23.7 percentage points below the average for all groups of 56.9 per cent.

[204] Academic research has shown that British Somalis' ability to access healthcare "can be restricted through health service institutions' difficulties in recognising their linguistic and cultural diversity and is limited by combined wider social, political and economic effects".

[229] As a result of these concerns, the Home Office commissioned successive research studies to look into the matter, and in 2005, presented the question of khat's legal status before the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

[225] In January 2013, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs also again cited insufficient evidence that the plant caused serious health or societal problems to warrant governmental control.

[234] Criticising the ban, House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee stated that it "was based not on any evidence of medical or social harm caused by its consumption, but by a desire to avoid the UK becoming a hub for the illegal importation of khat into other EU countries".

[264] In June 2014, Somalia's foreign minister, Abdirahman Duale Beyle, called on members of the Somali diaspora in the UK to return home to help rebuild the country.

[265] Somalis have a strong tradition in trade, with a long history of maritime enterprise stretching back to antiquity that includes possible commerce with ancient Britons based on rare commodities such as tin.

The researchers suggested that this in turn made it easier for the entrepreneurs to establish themselves in the area, hire personnel, exchange information regarding local business opportunities, and pool funds.

Consequently, the Somali establishments followed what they posited was the standard ethnic minority business paradigm of being mainly concentrated in very competitive markets, with finite return on investment and uncertain durability.

[275] In 2008, Dahabshiil's CEO, Abdirashid Duale, a Somali who has British citizenship, was awarded Top Manager of the Year by the International Association of Money Transfer Networks in recognition of the services the firm offers its clients.