The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes data on the number of live births by the mother's country of birth in England and Wales each year. Every time a birth is registered in England and Wales both parents are required to state their places of birth on their child's birth certificate, and this information is then collated to produce these statistics.
In order to make it easier to look at what these data tell us about births in London, and how these have been changing over time, the GLA Demography team has extracted the data which relate to London from the main ONS dataset since 2001 and presented it here in an easily accessible format.
For more information about how the ONS produces these statistics, please visit their website: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths
For more information about how we extracted these data and created this report, please this project's Github repository: https://github.com/Greater-London-Authority/births_by_mothers_country_of_birth
Since 2001, the number of live births being recorded in London has changed from 104,162 to 104,246 births per year. The proportion of births which were to mothers who had been born outside the UK has changed from 43% in 2001 to 59% in the most recent year (2023).
In 2023, the region of origin which supplied the largest number of births to non-UK-born mothers in London was Asia with 24,004, followed by the Africa which provided 10,596. The region of origin which has seen the largest change since 2001 is the Asia, which went from 13,489 live births per year in 2001 to 24,004 in 2023.
