01-07-2025
Four in ten babies born to foreign parents
Four in 10 new babies had at least one foreign-born parent last year, official figures show.
A total of 40.4 per cent of live births in Britain in 2024 were to families with at least one parent not from the UK - up from 35.1 per cent in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Foreign-born parents were responsible for more than half of births in 17 per cent of English local authority areas, up from 13 per cent in 2016, according to the data from the Office for National Statistics.
In five local authority areas, foreign-born parents were involved in 80 per cent of births or more.
It follows a surge in net migration when the Tories loosened the rules after Brexit. The number of people moving to Britain hit a record high of 906,000 in the year ending June 2023.
Nuni Jorgensen, a researcher at Oxford University's Migration Observatory, said: 'The rise in births to migrant parents is thus largely due to more people moving to the UK. Since most new arrivals are young adults, more births to migrants are expected.
'Areas with a high share of births to foreign-born people tend to have larger migrant populations.'
The five areas with the highest rates of foreign-born parents are all in London or its suburbs, topped by City of London (84.4 per cent); Brent (83.9 per cent); Newham (82.4 per cent); Harrow (82.2 per cent); Ealing (81.4 per cent); and Westminster (80 per cent).
Ms Jorgensen said the increasing number of births to foreign parents reflected the younger age of migrants.
According to the 2023 annual population survey, 25 per cent of women aged 25 to 34 in the UK were foreign-born. The latest ONS figures reveal that 33 per cent of births were to a foreign-born mother.
Ms Jorgensen said: 'Most migrants are in their 20s and 30s—the typical age for having children. Migrant women also tend to have slightly more children, on average, but the gap is relatively small.'
In London, there were only two boroughs in which the majority of births did not involve a foreign-born parent: Bexley (48.6 per cent); and Bromley (44.6 per cent). This was down from five boroughs in 2016.
A total of 4.4 per cent of all live births were to Indian mothers, more than double the rate a decade ago. This was followed by Pakistan (3.6 per cent), Nigeria (2.5 per cent) and Romania (2 per cent).
Academics have forecast that white British people will become a minority in the UK population within the next 40 years.
An analysis of migration, birth and death rates up to the end of the 21st century predicts that white British people will decline from their current position as 73 per cent of the population to 57 per cent by 2050 before slipping into a minority by 2063.
The research, by Prof Matt Goodwin of Buckingham University, suggests that by the end of the century, the white British share of the population – defined as people who do not have an immigrant parent – could have fallen to around a third (33.7 per cent).
He said: 'What these figures show is the ongoing effect of mass uncontrolled immigration and rapid demographic change, a policy that nobody in this country asked for or voted for.
'The fact that more than one in three babies in England and Wales are now born to one or both parents who were born outside the UK should ring very loud alarm bells in Westminster.
'It raises profound questions about our identity, culture, way of life, and how we are going to hold our nation-state together over the longer term'.
