Monday, May 22, 2006

More Demographics

"Birth rate increase may reflect Blair policies, says expert"

Thus the Guardian.

The birth rate has climbed to its highest point in 13 years to an average of 1.8 children for every woman in England and Wales, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday.
The climb from an all-time low of 1.63 children per woman in 2001 is still significantly below the level needed for replacement - which is more than two. But there was speculation yesterday that the childcare reforms of the Blair government might be having an impact.


Huzzah for Sure Start !

"We looked at the reasons for this slight, hopeful rise," said Julia Margo, author of a report called Population Politics published in February by the Institute for Public Policy Research. "It seems to map on to 2001 when Labour started pushing on family friendly policies and childcare. There is a better deal now from government than ever before."

Hooray ! We won't all have to work till we're 156 ! The family lives !

Yes, but whose family ?

But, she added, there were other possible reasons that do not hold out promise for the rise across all groups which is needed for a sustained increase in births. "We don't have access to the background data, which would tell us whether there are socio-economic differences, whether professional women will still be having less children." It could be that the rise is restricted to poorer women and those from migrant groups, who traditionally have had larger families.

The figures are here.

The figures by health authority (.xls) and local authority are interesting. The lowest birth-rate ? The hideously white north-east (which you may recall has the highest bastardy rate in England). The highest ? West Midlands and North London.

A quick Excel sort gives us the following top ten local authorities, ignoring Rutland, where a woman having quads seems to have distorted the figures.

Newham
Blackburn with Darwen
Bradford
Barking and Dagenham
Luton
Oldham
Peterborough
Pendle
Slough
Boston

Yes, that last one's right - Boston, Lincs.

The bottom 20 or so are interesting, too. Three categories.

a) wealthy white urban areas - there aren't enough yuppies moving back into town. Chester, Cheltenham, Warwick, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham.
b) poor white city centres - Sunderland, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle under Lyme. Same phenomenon ? Natives avoiding the cities ?
c) certain London boroughs - Islington, Camden, Ken & Chelsea, Westminster. By the time you can afford to live there your breeding days are over.

6 comments:

Serf said...

Blair's government has indeed increased birth rates.

Immigrants have more children.

Anonymous said...

Many, many, many more. All on the NHS.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, its a shame they didn't give figures according to ethnicity, because immigration is disguising the very low birth-rate of the English.

I suspect the 'white' English birth-rate is similar to that of Scotland, which was at that lowest ever birth rate in 2002 and has only risen slightly since then.
At 1.4 per woman.

England and Wales births were at 640,000-ish in 2004 but the number of abortions were 180,000-ish. Thats 28% of babies in England and Wales were killed before birth.
It would be interesting to know the ethnicity of them as well, I assume most are white English and Welsh.

So if you considered the lower births of white English and the higher than average abortions, the true figures for percentage of abortions (murders) is probably a lot higher.

Anonymous said...

you dont need the birth rates split by ethnicity, just look at the populations of infant schools, the Ofsted reports always split down by ethnic background when dealing with exclusions etc.

AntiCitizenOne said...

A falling population would not be harmful without the damage a welfare state causes by enslaving children.

Anonymous said...

I don't know about other places but inner city Leeds has a high proportion of students. Not the most fecund of groups