PART ONE
WHO WE ARE
At the most basic level, the census is a once-a-decade snapshot of who we are: how we’re born, how we live and how we die. This section deals with all three of those, and in that order (it’s a fairly obvious order, after all). It looks at fertility rates and maternal ages, at family structures and living patterns, and at death rates and causes. All these are revealing in any number of ways, but behind the figures, no less present for being unseen and no less real for being unquantifiable, are the characteristics of the nation and those who live here.
Who are we? We like to see ourselves as amusing, decent, fair, polite and tolerant. We root for the underdog and like to take people down a peg or two when they’ve become too big for their boots. We like laws and rules, especially unwritten ones: at the battle of Trafalgar, for example, Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood refused to place snipers in the rigging because that wasn’t the way proper chaps won naval battles. We’re an island race, and it shows in our psyche. We regard our homes as our castles and consider ourselves self-contained and self-sufficient. We don’t go in for overt displays of patriotism – no saluting the flag, no pledges of allegiance – but give us a special occasion, such as a royal jubilee, and you could circle the earth with the amount of Union Jack bunting that comes out. Even in an age where deference has largely gone and globalisation is ever more prevalent, we continue to define ourselves by class and region. We apologise at the drop of a hat: for things we’ve done, for things we haven’t done, for things we might yet do and things we might yet not do, for being late, being early and being on time. We would rather shrivel up and die than make a scene. We like our upper lips to be stiff and our calm to be kept while carrying on. We like queuing and listening to a shipping forecast for areas we will never visit.
There are many things you could put into a ‘what it means to be British’ list, but surely one of the most British things of all is the horror of even thinking about making such a list. In that regard, perhaps, the census is rather un-British, comprising as it does of all sorts of lists; but then again maybe the only thing more British than the horror of making a list of what it means to be British is to find the entire nation numerated and tabulated by a plethora of lists.
BIRTH
‘THIS IS WHERE WE CAME IN …’
Live births in the UK were consistently above 1 million in the years up to the First World War. Thereafter there have been only four years with births above a million – 1920, 1921, 1947 and 1964. The first three were all rebounds from low wartime levels; the last was the tail end of the post-war ‘baby boom’ (a concept now repurposed as a mark of youthful derision with the dismissive ‘OK, Boomer’), which itself really began in 1947, thus neatly bookending the boom with two record years.
It should come as little surprise that the average age of parents is on the rise, not just for first children but for all live births. Figure 2 goes back to just before the Second World War for mothers and to 1964 for fathers (conveniently within the timeframe as laid out by Philip Larkin in a famous quotation on the start of sexual intercourse).
Fathers are consistently around three years older than mothers (another thing that may come as little surprise to anyone who’s seen how girls mature quicker than boys during adolescence, a process which often seems to stall for boys well into adulthood). The trend in the age of mothers was clearly downwards in the early part of this period, though with a blip relating to the later years of the Second World War (when, as in the First World War, there were fewer young men around and therefore less opportunity for marriage and procreation).
Figure 1: Total UK births
Source: Office for National Statistics
The mid-seventies saw the average age for both parents at its lowest (1973–5 represented the trough for mothers at 26.4 years, and 1974 for fathers at 29.4), which if nothing else proves that the various heinous crimes against fashion inflicted by clothes designers of the era had little effect on the libido of those obliged to wear such monstrosities of flared brown velour. Since then the trend has been pretty consistently upwards, reaching a high of 30.6 for mothers and 33.6 for fathers in 2018.
Figure 2: Average age of parents in England and Wales
Source: Office for National Statistics
For biological, financial and social reasons, the vast majority of births are to mothers between the ages of 20 and 40, but of course there is always a small proportion of those who fall outside those parameters. In 1938, the last year before the disruption caused by the Second World War, the over-40s accounted for more births than the under-20s, which may be a slight surprise given that some women married more or less straight out of school in those days and that fertility treatment was not yet available. A decade or so later, younger mothers were indeed accounting for a higher proportion of births than their older counterparts, a pattern which became more prevalent over the years. By 1972 mothers under 20 comprised 11 per cent of the total, and by 1982 those over 40 only 1 per cent, but since then the gap between the two has closed again. Indeed, in 2013 both groups accounted for exactly the same proportion of births, at 4.2 per cent.
If we divide the 20–40 age range into quartiles, the 25–29 and 30–34 cohorts together account for 60 per cent of births, with 20–24 and 35–39 coming in at 40 per cent combined. And within these two highest-performing quartiles (this is rapidly taking on the shape of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with the computer taking away two random wrong answers), the preponderance of each has waxed and waned as average birth ages for mothers have first decreased and then increased again. Team 25–29 held the advantage in the post-war years, but by the 1970s the two lines were converging, and now Team 30–34 are in the ascendancy.
The decline in fertility rates is not confined to the UK, of course. The vast majority of Western Europe is experiencing a similar phenomenon, with profound long-term social implications. Below an average ‘total fertility rate’ of about 2.1 children per woman, the population would eventually begin to shrink (provided mortality rates remain constant and net migration has no effect). This so-called ‘replacement rate’ is the level of fertility at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next. In developed countries, where child mortality is low, replacement level fertility requires an average of roughly 2.1 children per woman. In countries with high infant and child mortality rates, however, the average number of births may need to be much higher. This number is higher than 2 because even in developed countries not all children survive to adulthood and because, on average, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls (the figure is of course higher for countries with higher rates of infant mortality).
A study published in The Lancet followed world trends in fertility rates from 1950 to 2017. The global average at the start of the period in question was 4.7; by the end it was 2.4. But larger family sizes in the developing world (4.6 in sub-Saharan Africa, 2.7 in North Africa and the Middle East) mask the fact that, like the UK, many developed countries now have a birth rate of less than two.
The average completed family size for women who reached the age of 45 in 2018 (having been born in 1973) was 1.89 children per woman, unchanged from the previous cohort (women born in 1972) and jointly the lowest level since the series began (2.19 children in 1946). Further comparisons between the generations – that is, women born in 1946 and 1973 – are also instructive. The average age of mothers at childbirth (for all children, not merely the first) has gone from 24 to 31. In all, 82 per cent of the 1946 cohort were mothers by the age of 30, a figure that has now dropped to 53 per cent. Of the class of 1973, two-children families remain the most common family size (37 per cent), with 18 per cent having a single child and 19 per cent remaining childless. The proportion of one-time mothers has dropped only slightly over the years (14 per cent of women born in 1946 also had only one child), but that of childless women has more than doubled over the same period.
The latter has several possible causes. Fewer women are getting married than before; some women prefer to remain childless in order to focus on their careers; others postpone decisions on whether to have children until it’s biologically too late either way; and the more women who remain childless through choice or otherwise, the more acceptable and uncontroversial that lifestyle becomes. There is also considerable evidence that having children does not actually make people any happier, indeed quite the opposite: a 22-country study published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2016 found a considerable ‘parenting happiness gap’, with non-parents significantly happier than parents. (It’s not known whether the methodology included posing the questions at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night, when non-parents would be out clubbing and parents were trying to get a fractious infant back to sleep.)
Why are fertility rates falling? There is much media attention on factors such as declining sperm counts, but while average sperm count has indeed dropped (by more than 50 per cent in the West between 1970 and 2011, from 99 million sperm per millilitre of semen to 47 million, according to the 2017 Human Reproduction Update), it is still well within normal reproductive range (anything above 15 million). Aside from the obvious effects of medical advances on child mortality, thus obviating the perceived need for larger families to compensate for some children failing to make it to adulthood, the fall in fertility rates is therefore more social than physiological. Women have greater access to contraception than their ancestors, plus more varied and challenging education and career opportunities, which allow them to delay childbirth till later. In addition, the rising costs of living extend to child raising (the ONS 2018–19 Family Spending report found that households with two adults and two children spent on average £769 a week, compared with £660 for households with just two adults), and many couples would prefer not overly to compromise their lifestyle standards by having more children than they feel they could reasonably afford. And some couples regard not having children as morally the right thing to do, particularly in environmental terms.
While there are plenty of social and economic reasons for women to have children later in life, in purely biological terms it still makes sense not to delay childbearing: society moves much quicker than biology does. Younger women are more likely to become pregnant and less likely to suffer miscarriages. Natural fertility peaks in the early 20s, gradually declines from around 25 to 35, and then begins to decline much more rapidly after the age of 35.
Lower fertility rates, combined with increased life expectancy, eventually lead to an ageing population, with the attendant strains on individuals and society: later retirements, greater reliance on healthcare, lesser numbers of young people coming into the employment market, and so on. To a degree this can be mitigated by factors such as immigration and artificial intelligence, though neither of these are without issues.
Figure 3: Global fertility rate
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington
Just as birth rates are declining, so too are conception rates: for 11 consecutive years from 2008 to 2018, in fact. Conception rates, unlike birth rates, are by necessity subject to estimation. In 2018, there were an estimated 839,043 conceptions to women of all ages in England and Wales, a decrease of nearly 1 per cent on the previous year, though for a third year running, women aged 40 and over saw an increase in conception rates (and indeed were the only group to do so), with 16.3 conceptions per 1,000 women aged over 40. This is perhaps the most extreme indicator of the gradual age increase in mothers, a 30–30–30 pattern: in the 30 years since 1990, conception rates for women aged 30 and above have increased while rates for women aged under 30 have fallen.
TEENAGE PREGNANCIES
According to the metrics of tabloid scaremongering (metrics to which, needless to say, the ONS does not subscribe, being as they are unencumbered by statistical rigour or recognised methods of oversight), teenage pregnancies were some years ago right up there with uncontrolled immigration, forecasts of extreme weather, NHS tourism, benefit fraud and the EU. Certain media outlets would have had you believe that pretty much every teenage girl in the land was a feckless sex maniac getting herself knocked up by an equally feckless boy and condemning mother and child to a life on benefits.
This image became so prevalent that it skews public attitudes on the issue. For example, what percentage of girls aged under 16 do you think became pregnant in 2014? If you guessed 10, you were on the low side, and if 20, you were on the high side – but, crucially, those sides are of the average guess rather than the reality. The average guess is 15 per cent; the actual figure is 0.5 per cent. That is, of every 200 girls under 16, only one becomes pregnant; and the average person overestimates this by a factor of 30.
These figures haven’t always been so low, and that they’ve come down in the past couple of decades is no accident (unlike many of the very pregnancies in ques...
