At the start of this year I set out in this blog post that Scotland really needed to talk about babies and specifically our fertility rate.
I guess it's no surprise that a post entitled "We need to talk about babies" is just something politicians just don't want to talk about on any level.
So despite emphatic evidence that our demographics are going to hurt us in many many ways, inside or outside of the union, we just don't want to talk about it.
It reminded me of Rowan Atkinson's brilliant 1984 blood donation advert where he tried to literally get blood from a stone.
The post COVID trend
So let me see if I can make this as simple as possible.
For some time now I've been analysing the current birth and death rates in Scotland from 1974 until today. There was no question that COVID skewed both, but it's safe to say now that we seem to be through the short term effects on both births and deaths. This means we can see if COVID has had and impact on the long term trend.
It has, and it's not good news.
The easiest way to visualise and summarise the weekly data is to roll the data into 52 weekly annual periods. So add up all births from week 1 1974 to week 52, then sum up from week 2 1974 to week 1 1975, then week 3 1974 to week 2 1975 etc.
This gives us a rolling annual total of 52 weeks worth of data, and to make it a little easier I just divide it by 52 to give us a more digestible figure showing the average number of births over the last 12 months.
In 1974 that meant on average Scotland had 1307 babies, but this has now fallen to 856 as in December 2022.
I then do the same thing with deaths which gives us deaths of 1205 in 1974 and 1181 in December 2022.
By taking the deaths away from the births for each of these weekly points we can then see if the population of Scotland is naturally growing or decaying.
It should come as no surprise then that the population is decaying. However what is of real concern is the trend which started in 2011 has only been exaggerated by COVID.
You can see the COVID spike which increased deaths and deferred births, but as these figures have worked there way through the 52 week rolling average the clear trend is still there. Right now every week around 350 more Scottish residents are dying than those being born here.
So what?
It's easy to cast this off, afterall what's 350 a week in a population of 5 million! But it's missing the point. Like climate change this is something that can seem abstract and obscure but its long term effects are difficult to exaggerate.
Without a growing population Scotland will continue to age, we'll have less and less workers to pay tax and support a population in need of expensive health and social care. In some localities (the next piece of work I'm going to do) this will be increasingly apparent.
We can continue to just shrug our shoulders and hope that the next generation will pick this up, but there increasingly isn't a next generation! In 'my day' (the1990s) when I started working in financial services we used to speak of the demographic timebomb, but I think we need to update that metaphor for Scotland. It's more of a hand grenade and in Scotland we've just pulled out the pin.
