housing shortage. There may be other causes. There could be cultural factors. It may be that immigrant families are more accepting of providing a home for their married children. I don't know. The inclusion of civil partnerships as families will have a small effect as will other factors. But whatever the actual causes, the pace of increase is rapid and it provides yet more signs stress of caused by a lack of housing. I requested regional data from ONS and it was kindly and swiftly provided. The data is based on the Labour Market Survey and does tend to bounce about a bit when the sample size is reduced. So I used three-year averages for comparisons. The graphs show where multi-family households are more concentrated (middle graph) and the growth rates since the late 1990s (bottom graph). What is very clear is the relatively high proportion of multi-family households in London. The graph may well understate the true position, because there was a sharp rise in 2012. Using the 2012 data would put the number of multi-family households at about 25 households in each 1000. Looking at the growth rates in England at least there does seem to be a north-south divide. The increase in multi-family households is lowest in the northern regions and in the West Midlands. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland stands out as the only area to see a drop in the number of multi-family homes. This leads one to wonder whether this is down to a faster increase