Scotland is the South Korea of the UK
Farewell to the Highlands
Most people don’t think of Scotland as a very low fertility nation, but it is.
We learnt last month that England and Wales’ birth rate has slipped to 1.44. But Scotland is already at 1.28, not far off famously low fertility Japan’s 1.2.
A depopulating country
“Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, the birth place of Valour, the country of Worth.” – My Heart’s In the Highlands, Robert Burns
Scotland’s population is predicted to peak in 2033. Scotland will then go into population decline, even as the population of the UK as a whole is expected to continue to grow.
Currently, this is most acutely being felt in Scotland’s rural Highlands and Islands regions. These are already depopulating and seeing rapid declines in the number of working age people. Symptoms include staffing shortages in the tourism industry and schools that are emptying of pupils. Even four years ago in 2020, around a quarter of schools in southwest Scotland were at less than 50% capacity, with some taking only 13% of the pupils they could.
Why is fertility lower in Scotland?
That Scotland lags behind England and Wales in terms of fertility is no fresh development – it’s been this way since the 1970s.
Figure 1. Total Fertility Rate 2000-2022
Why has the UK-wide decline in birth rates unfolded faster and to a greater extent in Scotland? Immigration and a preference for smaller families among Scots are some of the answer.
Immigration
Scotland has fewer immigrants than England and Wales. People born outside the UK make up 10% of Scotland’s population, in comparison to 16.8% of the population of England and Wales.
But not only do fewer foreign-born people live in Scotland than in England and Wales, the countries of origin of those people are different. Of the 397,000 non-British nationals living in Scotland in 2021, 58% were EU nationals. Of the 10 million non-UK born people living in England and Wales in 2021, 36.4% were born in the EU.
In 2020, the five most common non-UK countries of birth for people living in Scotland were:
Poland (est. 80,000 people)
Germany (est. 27,000 people)
Pakistan (est. 26,000 people)
India (est. 24,000 people)
Ireland (est. 22,000 people)
But in England and Wales, according to the 2021 Census, the five most common non-UK countries of birth were:
India (920,300 people)
Poland (743,000 people)
Pakistan (623,500 people)
Romania (538,800 people)
Ireland (324,600 people)
We can see that a greater proportion of Scotland’s immigration comes from countries with lower fertility rates. The Total Fertility Rate of Poland is 1.3, but in Pakistan it is 3.6. And in general Scotland receives a greater share of its immigration from EU countries, which are likely to be lower fertility than the non-EU countries of origin that make up more immigration to England and Wales.
This may in part explain why foreign-born women in Scotland actually have significantly fewer children than UK-born women in Scotland, as Figure 2 below shows, when the opposite is the case in England and Wales.
Figure 2. Total Fertility Rates of UK-born and foreign born women in 2021
Scotland’s different immigration mix likely contributes to its lower birth rate. Yet the table above also shows us that even among UK-born women, Scottish women have fewer children than women in England and Wales. Immigration cannot fully explain why Scotland is the UK’s low fertility ‘South Korea’.
Smaller families
A paper published this month finds fascinating differences in family habits and the pattern of birth rate decline between the four nations of the UK. In seeking to understand what’s going on in Scotland, the headline news is that while Scottish women are not more likely than women in England and Wales to be childless, they are more likely to have a smaller family.
As can be seen in Figure 3 below, Scotland has seen a decrease in family size across all women born between 1956 and 1978 (these age cohorts were looked at because it can be assumed that these women have completed their families and will not have more children).
Figure 3. Distribution of completed family size by age 40, by birth cohort, 95% confidence interval
Scotland has also seen an increase in one-child families across all educational groups, as shown in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4. Proportion of 1-child families age 40, by birth cohort and educational attainment, 95% confidence interval
Do Scots simply want fewer children than those in other parts of the UK? There is some evidence of that, as uncovered by Berrington et al. (2023).
Between 1991 and 2009, 77% of Scottish mothers with two or more children said they did not intend to have any more children, in comparison with 75% of those in Wales and 71% in England. But Scottish mothers with one child are not less likely than those living in England to report that will or probably will have another a child, though they are more likely than English women to say they ‘don’t know’.
Berrington et al. found that the decreased likelihood of Scottish mothers with two or more children intending to have another child persisted even controlling for ethnicity, age, education, economic activity, and country of birth. They also found that these differences in fertility intentions increased in the period of 1991-2009, versus 1979-1990, theorising that growing up around smaller families has prompted more Scots to want smaller families themselves.
But Berrington et al. also note that the difference in fertility intentions between Scottish and English and Welsh women are still small, and so cannot fully explain why Scottish women have fewer children. That indicates that there are barriers to parenthood in Scotland that are acting to bring down the birth rate, and which could be alleviated.
What is Scotland doing about this?
“…there is a role for government in addressing the barriers that may prevent individuals and couples from starting a family.” – Scottish Population Strategy 2021
Pleasingly, the answer is not nothing. Scotland published its first national Population Strategy in 2021, explicitly acknowledging the challenge of falling birth rates and naming helping Scottish people start and expand their families as a goal. It would be excellent – though overdue – to see the UK Government take a similar step.
But though the Scottish Population Strategy says it aims to improve birth rates by making Scotland more ‘family friendly’, much of it consists of child and young-people related policies that though positive, are not explicitly targeted at helping more Scots have the children they want. An example is the restating of the commitment to do better by care leavers.
Perhaps the two policies in the Strategy that are most clearly targeted at supporting Scottish people to have the children they want are the Scottish Baby Box (a scheme that sends parents of newborns free essentials and which was not a new policy but introduced in 2017) and the Scottish Child Payment, an extra child benefit payment for low-income families that is primarily intended to alleviate child poverty.
In February 2024, the Scotland published a follow-on to its Population Strategy, a Depopulation Action Plan. This is focused on helping the rapidly depopulating areas of Scotland cope with the draining of their communities and to try to encourage young people to stay. This includes giving one affected council a mere £30,000 grant to research the “causes of local population decline” and “inform the development of future policy interventions”.
Taken together, neither the Population Strategy nor the Depopulation Action Plan can be called a serious effort to arrest Scotland’s population decline, now due to begin in under a decade.
Conclusion
Scotland is becoming an older, emptier place. In part, that’s because of the type and level of immigration it receives, and because of a smaller family habit among Scots. But there is still evidence that Scots have fewer children than they want to have, meaning there is much for the Scottish Government to do.
Very positively, the Scottish Government – an explicitly progressive, left-of-centre administration – does acknowledge that declining birth rates are a problem and a place for government action. Yet the actual policy response so far is certainly insufficient for a country that will start declining in population in under a decade, if not before.
Scotland is a country of extreme natural beauty that has made tremendous contributions to the cultural, economic, scientific and political life of the UK and beyond, through figures like Adam Smith, Andy Murray, Tony Blair, Robert Burns and Gordon Brown. It is a tragic thing to see it on the brink of such decline, with its ability to continue making astonishing contributions to the world diminishing as its population dwindles.
Phoebe