Britain has entered a birth rate crisis

Few will notice, yet this year England and Wales are almost certainly going to cross a remarkable threshold: the number of deaths will exceed the number of births. In the year to mid 2023 – figures for which have been published today by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) – there were 598,400 births and 598,000 deaths. Given the long-term downward trends in births, and the lag in the figures being published, we have almost certainly arrived at the point of negative natural population growth – a condition which has not properly afflicted Britain since the Industrial Revolution. Across the whole of the UK, deaths did narrowly outnumber births in the pandemic year of 2020, but other than that the only period over the past century in which that happened was between 1976 and 1978, after the end of the post-war baby boom. The world wars themselves did not reverse the natural growth of the population.