Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Population growth




Since my skills for handling any kind of image or graph on a computer are rudimentary I lifted the chart from the Times reports of the UK population estimates for 2008. A much better copy can be found in the original ONS report.



It shows one half of the population age pyramid, rotated so that the peaks & troughs in the numbers of babies born over the last 60 years show up – mortality will not have reaped much of a toll on those numbers so far, & the net effects of migration into & out of the country will not have greatly affected the overall shape of the age structure.

It shows how the 1946-48 baby boom (those aged 60 to 62 in 2008) was really just a spike, compared to the great boom of the sixties & the smaller one of the 1980s.

Equally it shows clearly the trough in the 1970s, when (very) broadly speaking, the ability/desire of women to have smaller families coincided with a wish to start them later & was facilitated by the Pill & the availability of contraception on the NHS.

The last decade of the last Conservative government was accompanied by a long decline in the number of births, and we have seen a steady upward curve again since the millennium.

Roma Chappell, deputy director of demography at the Office for National Statistics, said that “It’s actually quite exciting because it’s the highest fertility rate we have seen in the UK for some time. You have to go all the way back to 1973 to find a time when the fertility rate went higher.”

Curiously that was the year of the publication of the Ross Population Panel Report, which was commissioned to look into the effects on the UK of the high population growth rates of the 1960s – nobody really believed that the recent fall in fertility could be sustained



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