LONDON, Oct.4 (Xinhua) -- Over 1 million people in Britain, amounting to two percent of the country's over-16 population, identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a new report Wednesday.
Across Britain, Scotland has the highest number of LGB people, at 2.2 percent of the population, followed by England at 1.9 percent, with the LGB populations in both Wales and Northern Ireland both at 1.7 percent of their populations.
London had the largest proportion of the population who identified as LGB, amounting to 2.7 percent of people aged 16 and over living in the British capital.
The study also showed that people in the 16 to 24 age group were most likely to identify as LGB in 2016, accounting for 4.1 percent in that age bracket.
The ONS report also showed that males were more likely than females, 2.3 percent against 1.6 percent, to identify as LGB.
ONS said one likely reason for the pattern may be that younger people could be more likely to explore their sexuality, combined with more social acceptability of sexual identities today and the ability to express these.
Only 0.7 percent of the population aged 65 and over identified as LGB, whereas for 25 to 34 year olds this was 2.9 percent.
Overall, the population who identified as LGB in 2016 were most likely to be single, never married or civil partnered, accounting for 70.7 percent of the LGB population.
Emily Knipe, Population Statistics Division at ONS said: "In 2016, around 2 percent of the population identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB). This has increased from 1.7 percent in 2015, a statistically significant increase."
The report listed 1.2 percent as gay or lesbian and 0.8 percent identifying as bisexual. A further 0.5 percent of the population identified themselves as "Other", which means that they did not consider themselves to fit into the heterosexual or straight, bisexual, gay or lesbian categories. A further 4.1 percent refused to answer, or did not know how to identify themselves, it said.
Meanwhile, ONS said estimates based on the Annual Population Survey (APS) showed that 93.4 percent of the British population identified as heterosexual or straight.
