The EconomistSeptember 7th 2019 Britain 292 “there’s nothing for the kids”. Her disabled
daughter is due to start at school this week,
but she is still waiting for a place on the bus
to be confirmed. “If we have to take taxis,
it’s £30 [$37] a day.” Only 27% of voters
turned out in the last local election. In the
Brexit referendum, two-thirds voted Leave.
The data do not capture everything. In
Bartley Green, volunteers have enabled the
library to expand from opening one day a
week to two days. They run coffee morn-
ings and sewing classes and use social me-
dia to encourage the isolated to join in. In
the Henley ward of Coventry, another left-
behind place, locals were so riled by the
negative publicity of their billing on the
multiple-deprivation index that they made
a calendar with pictures of their communi-
ty groups, like armchair exercise classes for
the elderly. Such places might lack many
amenities that other Britons take for grant-
ed, but they are not short of pride. 7“T
he oh, oh, Ohhh-lympics!” ran one
tabloid headline. “As record 150,000
condoms are handed out to a host of super-
attractive athletes, could London 2012 be
the raunchiest games ever?” Official statis-
tics regarding the sex lives of toned ath-
letes are hard to find. But away from the
Olympic village, another reproductive re-
cord was indeed broken that year. Accord-
ing to the Office for National Statistics
(ons), mothers in England and Wales gave
birth to 729,674 children, the most in over
four decades. They have struggled to keep
up since (see chart).
The boom followed a bust. Births began
to slump during the 1990s, reaching a low
of 594,634 in 2001. The subsequent growth
reflected a number of factors (none actual-
ly related to the hosting of sports events).
There was an echo of earlier baby booms,
which increased the number of women of
child-bearing age. This coincided with a
rise in fertility rates, partly because of morebirths among older women, who had earli-
er postponed them. The average maternal
age at birth is now 31, up from 28 two de-
cades ago.
And then there was an increase in im-
migration. A paper by the onsestimates
that foreign-born mothers accounted for
two-thirds of the rise in births between
2001 and 2007. In 2000, 16% of children
born in England and Wales had mothers
who had been born abroad; by 2012, 26%
did. An influx of youngish eastern Euro-
pean migrants after the expansion of the
European Union in 2004 contributed to the
boom. In 2010 Polish mothers overtook
Pakistanis to become the largest group of
foreign mums. Polish and Romanian
mothers now account for more than 5% of
births in Britain.
Changes in population always cause
“stomach aches” for the welfare state,
notes David Coleman of the University of
Oxford. Predicting exactly when birth rateswill pick up or slow down is difficult, be-
cause it depends on a range of factors from
house prices to cultural expectations. But
governments, both local and national, are
forced to guess, since it takes years to build,
say, a school. Another dilemma, notes Piers
Elias, a consultant who advises councils on
demography, is that local authorities must
decide whether to prepare for the peak pop-
ulation, which is more expensive and may
later result in empty buildings, or the aver-
age, which will lead to a squeeze during the
busiest years.
Maternity services were the first to be
put under pressure—initially by the rise in
the number of births, then by the increas-
ing age of mothers, which results in more
complications. The average class size in
primary schools has since risen to 27.1, up
from 26.4 in 2010. And a bumper crop of 11-
year-olds is now heading into secondary
schools, which tend to struggle with higher
numbers more than primary schools be-
cause of the difficulty of attracting special-
ist teachers, particularly in subjects like
maths and physics, says Jon Andrews of the
Education Policy Institute (epi), a think-
tank. In a spending statement on Septem-
ber 4th the government confirmed that it
would give schools another £4.6bn
($5.6bn) by 2022-23, a 10% increase. Ac-
cording to the epi’s estimates, nearly £1bn
of that will be sucked up by the extra pupils.
Being part of a boom generation is
something of a curse. Resources are spread
more thinly and competition for them is
more intense. This year secondary schools
are likelier to be oversubscribed than in
past years, because of the abundance of 11-
year-olds. In contrast, universities are cur-
rently going to desperate lengths to attract
students, owing to a shortage of 18-year-
olds. By the time the Olympic generation
come to apply, in a decade or so, it will
probably be harder to get in. And things
will not get any easier after that. When they
head into the workplace they will face a
truly Olympian task: supporting the even
bigger generation of boomers who will be
enjoying retirement. 7A baby boom grows up, causing difficulties for stretched public servicesDemographyAn Olympic generation
Baby bumpsSource: ONSEngland and Wales, total births, m00.20.40.60.81.01945 60 70 80 90 2000 10 18Post-war
boom
1980s
boomOlympic
boom1960s
boom