Britain's baby deserts

Not enough children in the countryside, or not enough sex in the city? Maybe both.

Some day, I think, there will be people enough

In Froxfield to pick all the blackberries

Out of the hedges of Green Lane…

- Edward Thomas

*

(This piece is one in a series on parenting and the birth gap challenge.)

*

From time to time there are stories in the papers about schemes to encourage people to move to beautiful-but-depopulated places in Italy. There are offers of hefty subsidies, or even houses for sale for just one euro.

These are often stunning hilltop villages, sadly now populated only by old ladies in black dresses, because all the young folk have moved away, and there are no kids. This seems amazing to people living in cramped conditions in rainy Britain.

It might not seem like it when viewed from our cities, but there are places in Britain with a similar vibe.

The ONS have published data on the number of births right down to the level of the neighbourhood¹. The data lets us look at things in a very granular way.

For example, if we look at the number of babies being born compared to population density, we see that there are far fewer births in the most rural areas, and far more in the most urban areas. There are twice as many births in the densest tenth of neighbourhoods than in the least dense.

But of course you will have clocked the main reason for this - Britain’s countryside has a much older population that its cities do.

92% of all babies (in 2022) were had by mothers aged 20-39. And twice as big a share of the population is aged 20-39 in the densest tenth of neighbourhoods compared to the most rural.

So if instead of absolute numbers, we look instead at the number of babies per young person, we can see that there are actually fewer babies per young person in denser areas: there are about a quarter more babies per head in the least dense quarter of neighbourhoods than in the densest 10%:

So we actually have two types of “baby deserts” in the UK: baby deserts in the countryside in absolute terms, but fertility deserts in the cities compared to the number of young people.

Here they are side by side.

In the map below there are red rings around the main urban areas in England.

As you can see, outside them many rural villages and neighbourhoods have fewer than half a dozen births a year for every thousand residents (shown in green). This is a South Korean level of babies per head. There are 5,000 neighbourhoods below this rate - 5,000 baby deserts if you will.

On the other hand we can see lots of inner urban neighbourhoods in central London (shown in a pull-out) have fewer than 30 babies per year per 1000 people aged 20-39 (shown in red).

The urban baby deserts are perhaps more surprising: in general Britain’s cities have more migrants, and in general migrants have higher fertility rates.

In this piece I am not going to attempt some fancy regression analysis about all the factors that drive fertility, or claim that density is causing lower fertility.

Then again, there is some global evidence linking density and lower fertility. One view is below - from Daniel Hess for the Institute of Family Studies - though demographers debate these effects.

The urban fertility issue may be understated in my data here because Census 2021 was affected by the pandemic, and people moving out of cities: so the ratio of young people to babies may be even higher than comparisons to the census data suggests.

My purpose here is not to prove that density is bad for fertility, but to look at what these different baby deserts are doing to our country.

Flocking together, or coming apart?

The country is already pretty polarised between young cities and old shires. In Southwark one in twelve people are pensioners, while in North Norfolk one in three are.

And the gaps are widening. Places that were old in 2011 got older faster in the decade after. The trendline below is steeper than a 45 degree line because already-young places held steady or, like Barking, got even younger. Meanwhile already-old places like North Norfolk got even older.

One of the main reasons for this is internal migration - people who already live in the UK are moving out of our cities and into the shires, even as city populations grow because of international migration. It’s a bit like a fountain that is constantly overflowing, but topped up from below.

Between 2012 and 2023 1.25 million more people left London for other parts of the country than moved in (it was 123k a year on average since 2016).

Over the same period 2012 to 2023 there were 136,000 more people who left Birmingham than people who moved in, and it was similar for other cities: like Leicester, (-60k) Bradford, (-41k) Luton, (-47k) and Manchester (-46k).

People moved to the shires and coast. The net gain for places like East Devon and South Norfolk was equivalent to a fifth of their population, while Newham lost the equivalent of a third of its population.

There are all sort of implications from this polarisation by age-and-migration: not least about the ability of people in different parts of the country to really understand each other.

The massive variations in the numbers of babies being born in different places are part of the story too, along with internal and international migration.

Conclusion

Britain has a birth gap - a gap between the number of kids people say they want, and the smaller number they actually have.

This is causing many problems: from personal sadness, to major social and economic challenges.

And the baby gap is playing out in different ways in different places. Many of our most beautiful rural areas are sadder places because they lack small people.

Vast numbers of village schools have shut - 1980 there were 11,464 small primary schools in England with 200 or fewer pupils. In 2018 there were just 5,406, and rural schools have been twice as likely as urban to close. Many rural pubs have gone the same way, and when you lose both a village feels much less like a real village.

Meanwhile in other parts of the country young people are trapped living with parents or crammed into tiny flats where they may feel they can’t have kids.

It feels like there could be some kind of mutually beneficial exchange here?

Regular readers will have heard me banging on about levelling up before, and why we need to help spur private sector growth in the bits of the country that are left behind - particularly shire and coastal areas. We will never solve our economic problems or housing problems if we rely on all cramming into one corner of our country - and perhaps we will make our demographic problems worse too. Moving to the big city shouldn’t be the only way to get an interesting job.

Out in the shires the economy is smaller, and a single project can completely change the availability of good jobs. Be it a nuclear power station or a big factory, they can change the economic fortunes of a whole county.

I have seen both ends of this urban-rural equation. I’ve been an adult in a tiny London flat wondering if I will ever have kids. And I’ve been a child on the edge of Huddersfield, catching frogs, wading in bogs, and sledging on big hills. I remember the cows leaning over the back fence to munch my father’s roses, and my best-ever job, shovelling cowmuck on a hilltop farm near Elland. And big bonfires in the back field. And rope swings over rivers.

I want more children to have these chances, which means we need to open up more chances for adults in these places.

Appendix

Here’s a closeup of Greater London

1. (“Lower Layer Super Output Areas” in the jargon, with an average population of about 1,600 each)