UK Births to British-Born Parents Tumble to Lowest on Record
(Bloomberg) -- The proportion of UK births to two parents also born in the country slipped below 60% last year for the first time since records began, as the rising cost of living and lifestyle changes dented Britons’ desire to have children.
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Just 58.9% of live births in England and Wales were to families where both parents were declared as born in the UK, Office for National Statistics data released Friday showed. That’s down from 60.3% a year earlier and the lowest in a series stretching back to 2008. Some 37.3% of babies had at least one foreign-born parent, while in the remainder of cases, the location of birth of either the mother or the father wasn’t known.
Across England and Wales, about 24.7% of births were to couples where neither parent was from the UK, up from 23.1% in 2022. In London, where around 47% of the population was born abroad according to 2021 census figures, 67.4% of births last year were to couples in which at least one was born overseas.
The figures reflect the record number of migrants who have come to the UK in recent years to study or fill holes in the workforce. That’s pushed immigration to the forefront of political discourse in Britain, contributing to the record defeat suffered by the Conservatives in a general election in July, after successive Tory administrations failed to even come close to meeting their promises to rein in the numbers of those entering the country.
But they also highlight the UK’s falling birth rate, especially among adults who were born in the country. The total number of births to two non-UK-born parents, at 146,259, was only marginally higher in 2023 than in 2016 — but the proportion is now larger due to the overall decline in the number of people having children.
Figures from the ONS last month showed there were only 591,072 live births in England and Wales last year, the lowest number since 1977. Yet the population is much larger than it was then, meaning the fertility rate — or how many children are being born per woman — fell to its lowest since records began in 1938.
Rob McNeil, deputy director of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, said it was unsurprising to see the proportion of births to non-UK-born parents rising, given the influx of migrants the UK has seen in recent years. Many of those people have come from countries where economic divides are more stark, such as India and Nigeria, and are often motivated by the possibility of providing a better education and life prospects for their children.
The ONS said India remained the most common home country for non-UK-born parents in 2023, with Pakistan in second place.
Net levels of legal migration to the UK fell to 685,000 last year from 764,000 a year earlier — but was still the second highest level on record. That comes on top of tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have crossed the English Channel in small boats, entering the country illegally in recent years.
The pace of demographic change has created flash points in Britain. Tensions around migration reached a tipping point over the summer when it was rumored that a fatal attack on three young girls had been committed by an asylum seeker. While it later turned out that the suspect had been born in the UK, the false claims sparked attacks on hotels housing migrants and centers providing support.
The Tories, who ceded power to Labour at this year’s election, had taken steps to bring down the number of migrants to the UK after presiding over the boom in net arrivals. They banned most students from bringing dependents to the UK at the start of this year, as well as preventing care workers coming to the UK from bringing their partners or children.
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