Presents statistics on birth registrations in England and Wales by birth characteristics. This package contains summary statistics on stillbirths including figures by age of parents and quarter of occurrence. Tables also provide birthweight data for live and stillbirths by mother's area of usual residence and maternities, live births, and stillbirths in hospitals by area of occurrence.
There were 698,512 live births in England and Wales in 2013, a decrease of 4.3% from 729,674 in 2012.
The numbers of stillbirths fell to 3,284 in 2013 from 3,558 in 2012 (a fall of 7.7%).
In 2013 the stillbirth rate fell to 4.7 per thousand total births, from 4.9 in 2012. This is the lowest stillbirth rate since 1992 when it was 4.3.
In England and Wales 7.0% (49,050) of live births were low birthweight (under 2.5kg) in 2013. The percentage of low birthweight babies has remained unchanged since 2011.
