Over a quarter of British babies born to foreign mothers in 2011
THE NUMBER of babies being born in the UK climbed to nearly three quarters of a million in a recent year, official statistics revealed yesterday.
The figures, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), also showed that 26 per cent of births were to women born outside the UK.
Using data from 2011, the latest census year, the ONS said that there were 724,000 live births, of which 185,000 were to non-UK-born women.
Of that total, 41,697 babies were born to mothers originally from Pakistan, India, or Bangladesh.
Over 5,000 more were born to women who themselves were born in Germany. The ONS said that some of these mothers were probably the daughters of UK-born parents who worked for the armed forces in Germany. The UK maintained a military presence in Germany for several decades after the Second World War.
Yet Poland tops the league of foreign countries from which new mothers originated. Over 20,000 live births in 2011 were to women themselves born in Poland.
Also featuring strongly were women born in Nigeria and Somalia. Civil war resulted in many Somalians migrating to the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, the ONS says, with women from the east African state having a so-called total fertility rate of 4.19.
The rate is an estimate of how many children a woman might have at current rates of childbearing.