A schedule, not a shock
There were 585,396 babies born in England and Wales in 2025. That is 1. 6 per cent fewer than the year before.
Every figure is cited on screen. Company examples are fictional specimens.
Music: Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0
Transcript
- 0:00
There were 585,396 babies born in England and Wales in 2025. That is 1.6 per cent fewer than the year before.
- 0:15
The fertility rate fell too, from 1.41 to 1.39 children per woman. Well below the level that keeps a population steady on its own.
- 0:28
That sounds like a subject for demographers. It is not. A birth number is a customer number with a delay on it, and the delay is long enough to plan around.
- 0:41
A child born this year needs a nursery place in about two years. A primary school place in about five. A secondary place in about eleven. None of that is a forecast. The children already exist.
- 0:57
So a falling birth number is not a shock. It is a schedule. And what usually happens in a slowly shrinking market is not collapse, it is the smaller firms being bought by the bigger ones.
- 1:12
Count the firms, not the babies. Your market is the one in your own postcodes.
About this film
A schedule, not a shock runs 1:20, read by Imogen and appears on Leadistry's Blog page. The full narration is above in 6 sections, so you can read it instead of watching if that is quicker. Every figure shown on screen comes from the Companies House public record or a named published source, and the companies used as examples are fictional specimens rather than real customers.