The places in Wales where more people are dying than being born

The parts Wales where people are dying faster than the next generation is being born are laid bare in a new map. Last year deaths outnumbered births in the UK for the first time in nearly 50 years, excluding during the pandemic.

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. Last year, 563,275 live births were registered in England, while 544,054 people died, a difference of 19,221.

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. But in every other region of England, deaths outstripped births.

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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. Only two areas saw more births than deaths, Cardiff (a difference of 500) and Newport (237). Carmarthenshire saw the biggest change in population with 849 more deaths than births in the county.

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

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2023, there were more than 14,000 fewer births in England and Wales than the previous year. Last year's figure of 591,072 was the lowest number since 1977 and the first time the number of live births has dropped below 600,000 since 2002.

The fertility rate - the average number of children a mother could expect to have during her lifetime - also fell to 1.44, its lowest since records began in 1938. The number of deaths, however, increased by more than 4,000, rising to 581,363.

Dr Gillian Lockwood, consultant at Fertility Family, believes the decline in fertility and birth rates “can be explained by a perfect storm of demographic and economic factors happening together”.

She said: “As young people are encouraged to stay in education longer, may end up struggling to achieve jobs which will allow them to get onto the property ladder, and pay back their university loan, becoming a parent may be pushed back down their list of priorities.

“Up to a third of young people are back living with their parents during their twenties and early thirties because renting is too expensive to allow them to save for a property too. Women also continue to overestimate their ‘reproductive life-span’ and many plan to start a family in their late thirties - little realising that they may only be able to fit in one baby if at all, before getting successfully pregnant becomes difficult.

“If it takes two incomes to pay one mortgage, it is understandable that the financial cost of having a child can be viewed as too high except for the lucky few who have jobs that offer excellent maternity and paternity pay. Even if the mother can return to work, the cost of childcare is prohibitively high for one child, let alone two.” Join our WhatsApp news community here for the latest breaking news. You will receive updates from us daily.