The places in Lincolnshire which registered more deaths than births in 2023

The parts of England and Wales where people are dying faster than the next generation is being born have been revealed in a new map. Last year, deaths outnumbered births in the UK for the first time in nearly 50 years, excluding the pandemic.

This was the case for every district in Lincolnshire. East Lindsey had by far the biggest death to birth ratio, with 2,298 deaths and just 930 live births. Lincoln had the lowest, with 999 deaths and 903 live births.

But that wasn’t true across the whole of the UK. While Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all saw more deaths than births in 2023, the opposite was true in England as a whole. Last year, 563,275 live births were registered in England, while 544,054 people died, a difference of 19,221.

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That natural population growth - which doesn’t include internal or external migration - was almost entirely driven by London, where more than twice as many people were born than died, with 104,167 births compared to 51,949 deaths. There were also 1,614 more births than deaths in the West Midlands and 985 in the East of England.

You can see if there were more births or deaths where you live using our interactive map

But in every other region of England, deaths outstripped births. The biggest impact on the native-born population was seen in the South West, where 15,412 more people died than were born.

In Wales, there were 8,692 more deaths (36,054) than births (27,362), a bigger gap than in any English region, with the exception of the South West. Of local authority areas in England and Wales, Dorset saw the biggest decline in the native-born population.

In 2023 there were 2,410 births and 5,177 deaths in Dorset, a difference of 2,767. North Yorkshire was next, with 2,543 more deaths than births, and then Somerset (2,275).

Birmingham saw the biggest rise in the native-born population, with nearly three times as many births (14,236) as deaths (4,810), swelling the city’s resident numbers by 9,426. In Wales, only two areas saw more births than deaths, Cardiff (a difference of 500) and Newport (237).