FOI Ref: FOI/2022/3470
You asked
Please supply the following information:
Live births in the UK, starting from January 2010 until the most recent available month, cut by:
- Previous number of children (birth order),
AND
- Week or month,
AND
- Marital status
Please supply multiple tables of live births by week/month, one for each marital status (or 1 larger nested table).
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We are responsible for the production of birth data for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the birth certificate at the point of birth registration. National Records Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.
However, we do publish annual headline data for the United Kingdom as part of our Vital Statistics in the UK publication, but are unable to provide any further disaggregation of this data for Scotland and Northern Ireland, as we do not hold this information.
Births in England and Wales
We do not hold the complete analysis you have requested, but we do hold the following analysis. Our annual births characteristics datasets contains live births by date which you can use to plot the months to give you the monthly totals. Multiple births data is also available within this data set. Table 5 shows Live births by number of previous live born children by age of mother.
Births by marital status are available in our Births by parents' characteristics
We also have the following publications and data sets which may be of interest to you:
- All publications related to live births - Office for National Statistics
- All data related to live births - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)
Should you wish to request any further analysis outside of the information available above, this would need to be created as bespoke analysis. Therefore, we would advise consulting with the Health Data customer service desk, who will be able to discuss your request further. Such services would be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure controls, resources and agreement of costs. If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Please note, there may be a charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy.