Ian Diamond explains why UK policymakers need to understand the significance of recent trends
The components of population growth have been changing faster than at any time in my 45 years of working on population data. For example, people’s expectations of how long they will live have been increasing more slowly of late, while there are signs of widening inequality in the way different social classes view the prospect of a healthy life. Additionally, net migration has been very high.
Most strikingly perhaps, there have recently been major declines in the number of births in England and Wales, prompting commentators this year to warn that the levels of childbearing are worryingly low.
What’s undeniable is that all these changes have implications for policy across government, whether it is identifying the appropriate mix of housing to be built, planning our health and education systems or forecasting the future shape of the labour force. Changing population dynamics, of course, also feed into forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.
All of this underscores how crucial it is for policy professionals and analysts to work closely together.
In this article I will focus on the recent declines in childbearing, discuss some of the potential reasons and look a little into the future. Let’s start with Figure 1. This shows the number of live births in England and Wales since the beginning of the 20th century. Several trends stand out, notably the declines and subsequent recoveries around the two world wars, and the ‘baby booms’ in the 1960s and 1990s (the second of these being partly a result of the children of previous booms having their own children). The boom around 2010 visible in Figure 1 is largely due to increasing numbers of migrants having children.
As well as looking at total births, we need to know how many children couples are having on average. Statisticians and demographers do this by calculating a ‘Total Fertility Rate’, or TFR, which measures how many children a woman would have if she were at the beginning of her reproductive life and experienced current rates of childbearing throughout that reproductive life.
This is shown in Figure 2 for the period since WWII. By way of background,
Figure 2 Source: How is the fertility rate changing in England and Wales?
each woman needs to have 2.08 children for our population exactly to reproduce itself. One can see that following periods of high TFRs post war the TFR fell below this number for the first time in 1973 and has stayed below since. However, the decline since 2010 has been unprecedented and at 1.48 the TFR is now lower than it has ever been. Indeed by 2029 deaths are likely to exceed births for the first time.
Why has this happened? The declines in the 1970s were attributed to a wide range of causes. Proximate determinants such as the widespread availability of effective contraception together with the 1967 Abortion Act enabled couples to have the children they wanted when they wanted; social and economic factors such as increased female education and employment further influenced choices.
The decline in childbearing since the 1970s has been accompanied by a remarkable and sustained change in the timing of childbearing. When I was privileged to work on this issue with the great British demographer, Professor Kath Kiernan, we used data from the cohort of British people born in 1946. Of those women, fully 50% were mothers by the age of 24. Figure 3 shows how this has changed to the point where only 20% of women born in 1997 were mothers at age 24. Figure 3 also shows that, relative to the 1946 cohort, a lower proportion of those born in 1969 became mothers. At a little under 20% this difference in the proportion of women becoming mothers is as high as we can find between birth year cohorts.
In summary, we have seen unprecedented declines in childbearing,
Figure 3 Source: How is the fertility rate changing in England and Wales?
particularly at younger ages. This has largely been driven by couples delaying having families, with a growing number never becoming mothers. That said, rates of childbearing have increased at older ages – women aged 40-44, for example, are having more babies, albeit from a low base.
Thus far we have looked at trends in the age of childbearing, but let us now turn to the number of children that people have. This fell from an average of around 2.3 (the famous nuclear British family) among women born in 1940 to around 1.9 and has stayed there for thirty years (Figure 4). Roughly speaking, a little under 30% of mothers born in 1977, the most recent cohort to finish their childbearing, have had three or more children and a little under 20% have had one child. But the modal number of children for this cohort remained two (38%).
So will the pattern of the past thirty years continue into the future, with
Figure 4 Source: Childbearing for women born in different years, England and Wales 2022
average completed childbearing staying at around 1.9? And what are the implications of this confluence of declining and delayed childbearing? We cannot be sure about the answer to the first question. We can say with certainty that there has been an unprecedented decline in childbearing at relatively early ages (see the right hand lower corner of Figure 4), due most notably to a reduction in partnering, people spending longer in education and housing challenges. Men, in particular, are living with their parents for a little longer than in previous years.
If our current cohorts of twenty-somethings are to maintain the levels of completed childbearing of the past thirty years, there will need to be further increases in childbearing amongst people in their thirties and early forties. In this case the length of a generation – the average time between births between contiguous generations – will continue to get longer.
There are several implications for policymakers in all this. First, when the mean age at childbearing is 23 (as it was in the early 1980s) women are likely to become grandmothers in their late 40s and will themselves have parents in their late 60s. However, if relatively more childbearing happens in peoples’ thirties (and even forties) couples will often end up looking after children when they are in their late fifties, at which point they are also likely to have aged parents. This has already given rise to the challenge of ‘sandwich caring’ with couples under pressure from two sets of dependents. Second, the increasing childlessness in later life presents challenges for caring as well as the potential for loneliness. Third, the combination of declining and delaying childbearing will likely impact on the size of the labour force and, with an ageing population, the proportion of the population in the labour force; this ‘dependency ratio’ is an important indicator in which groups will shoulder the burden of paying for the state. Fourth, there are additional implications both for future housing needs and for education provision. However, there are, of course, positives as well as negatives of people becoming parents at older ages. Parents are likely to have more emotional maturity and significantly higher financial stability facilitating a greater ability to assist a child in buying a first home or paying for more extracurricular activities.
In summary, social and economic policy is heavily dependent on understanding the UK’s demography shifts – I can’t believe the changes in the next 40 years will be any less dynamic than those of the last 40.
Sir Ian Diamond is the UK’s National Statistician. In future editions of the Heywood Quarterly Sir Ian will be looking at other trends of importance to UK policymakers.
