Deaths have outstripped births in the UK for the first time in nearly half a century, excluding the start of the pandemic, official figures showed on Tuesday.
Declining fertility and the demise of baby boomers means there are now more funerals than baby celebrations, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.
There were an estimated 16,300 fewer births than deaths in the UK in the year to mid-2023, the first time this has happened since the 1970s “baby bust”, if excess deaths during Covid are stripped out.
But the figures continue to show a growing population, up 1% in the year to 68,265,209 people, due to net international migration of 677,300.
The dominance of deaths over births was described by economists as “a stark reminder of Britain’s demographic challenges”.
With student- and migrant-friendly cities ageing more slowly or even getting younger, and rural villages ageing faster, policymakers will face divergent demands to provide more social care in some areas and more school places in others, said Charlie McCurdy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation thinktank.
The total fertility rate across England and Wales fell to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, from 1.55 in 2021, according to the ONS. The “replacement rate” to maintain a population needs to be at least 2.1 children per woman, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says.
However, demographers said births could again trump deaths in the near future, as the UK appears to be going through a transition whereby people will routinely have babies later, facilitated by advances in medical technology.
“Younger generations are postponing their childbearing, and so while fertility rates might be declining, there’s a chance that this could rebound,” said Dr Andrea Tilstra, a research fellow at Oxford University’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science.
“That could happen as these cohorts enter into their 30s, maybe even early 40s, and the ability to have children later in one’s life becomes the norm, supported by technology like IVF.”
Deaths outnumbering births was driven by Scotland, where the deficit was the largest on record and it was the ninth year in a row that more people died than were born. The overall population of Scotland grew, although only by 43,100 people, and this was down to immigration, figures from the National Records of Scotland showed.
Wales also recorded more deaths than births, while England and Northern Ireland recorded slightly more births than deaths, the mid-2023 population figures showed.
The baby deficit comes after several years of mothers leaving it later to have children, one of the common reasons given being financial pressures, including housing costs. Women born in the 1940s gave birth on average to almost two children before turning 30. That fell steadily to one child for women born in the mid-1970s, and plateaued before starting to fall again in recent years. Women born in 1993 – who turned 30 last year – had 0.8 children, on average.
At the other end of life, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease have been the most common causes of death in England and Wales since 2015, when they overtook heart disease (apart from two years at the start of the Covid pandemic).