WEBVTT

NOTE A schedule, not a shock
NOTE Narrated by Imogen. Generated from public/films/voice-takes.json
NOTE by scripts/build-film-captions.mjs. Edit the narration, not this file.

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There were 585,396 babies born in England and Wales in 2025.

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That is 1.6 per cent fewer than the year before.

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The fertility rate fell too, from 1.41 to 1.39 children per woman.

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Well below the level that keeps a population steady on its own.

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That sounds like a subject for demographers. It is not.

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A birth number is a customer number with a delay on it, and the delay is long enough

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to plan around.

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A child born this year needs a nursery place in about two years.

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A primary school place in about five. A secondary place in about eleven.

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None of that is a forecast. The children already exist.

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So a falling birth number is not a shock. It is a schedule.

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And what usually happens in a slowly shrinking market is not collapse, it is the

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smaller firms being bought by the bigger ones.

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Count the firms, not the babies. Your market is the one in your own postcodes.