MANCHESTER, England (CN) – Britain is expected to record more deaths than births every year starting in 2026, ending natural population growth for the first time in modern history and deepening pressure on politicians who promise to curb immigration while preserving the workforce.
Office for National Statistics projections published on April 28 show that the UK population will continue to grow, reaching 71 million by 2034, but at a slower pace driven increasingly by migration as the birth rate falls and the population ages.
Between mid-2024 and mid-2034, the statistics agency predicts 6.4 million births and 6.9 million deaths, leaving deaths outnumbering births by almost half a million people.
Over the same period, 7.3 million people are expected to immigrate to Britain long-term while 5.1 million people emigrate, adding around 2.2 million people to the population.
It marks a demographic turning point for Britain and raises questions about how governments will pay for pensions and healthcare as the population ages and fewer working-age adults support more pensioners.
“The impact is on both growth and public finances: slower or negative labor force growth reduces output while also reducing tax revenues at the same time as an aging population increases spending on pensions and health,” said economist Jonathan Portes. “The majority of health spending is now on the elderly.”
The ONS pointed out his figures are projectionsnot forecasts, and said actual numbers could change depending on the level of births, deaths and future migration.
Britain is aging as the birthrate falls
However, the direction of travel is in declining fertility, leading to fewer children in the next decade as retirees become the fastest growing age group.
By 2034, retirees are expected to make up about a fifth of the population.
The number of children is projected to fall by 1.6 million, while the working-age population grows by 1.5 million, slower than the projected increase of 1.8 million retirees.
In December 2025, the unelected upper house of the UK Parliament, the House of Lords, warned younger generations would bear the cost of successive governments’ failure to adapt to an aging society.
The committee found that measures such as raising the state pension age or increasing immigration will not solve demographic pressures on their own.
A shrinking workforce without immigration
Portes said Britain would need several approaches at the same time, including policies to boost productivity, delay the retirement age, increase labor force participation and immigration.
“None is likely to be sufficient on its own,” he said. “Immigration cannot compensate for population aging, but it can smooth the demographic transition.”
He added that without immigration, Britain’s workforce “would have shrunk rapidly in recent years”.
This presents a political challenge for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor government, which has pledged to reduce immigration, echoing promises made by the previous Conservative government and pressure from UK Reform, the right-wing anti-immigration party led by Nigel Farage.
under work net migration to the UKthe difference between people arriving and leaving the country fell 69% in the year ending June 2025, from 649,000 to 204,000.
Net migration peaked at nearly 1 million in 2023.
Despite the sharp reduction, he failed to prevent The reform wins thousands of seats in the local council over the past two years, riding a wave of anti-immigration sentiment among certain segments of the electorate.
The ONS expects net migration to add 2.2 million people to Britain’s population between 2024 and 2034, far less than previously predicted.
A Home Office spokesman said the government wanted to further reduce migration.
“While these projections do not directly take recent policy changes into account, we need to go further to reduce migration levels,” the spokesman said. “That’s why we’re introducing sweeping reforms to our immigration system, ending the over-reliance on cheap labour, while attracting the brightest and best to the UK.”
The survey by the ONS suggests immigration is not the main concern of the public.
In April, 90% of respondents said the cost of living was the most common issue facing Britain, followed by the National Health Service at 80% and the economy at 74%.
Only people over 70 ranked immigration in their top three concerns.
Migration relieves the pressure, but it is not a cure
While immigration may be part of the solution, migration experts caution against treating immigration as a cure for an aging population.
“Although ONS population projections suggest that the UK population would fall without international migration, this does not mean that migration is the answer to the challenges created by an aging population,” said Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
“The main challenge is fiscal: as the population ages, spending on pensions and health care increases, while the share of working-age taxpayers falls,” Brindle said.
Research suggests that the long-term effect of migration on public finances is relatively small, he added.
As older workers retire, Britain can fill labor shortages through training, automation and later retirement as well as migration, Brindle said.
Public divided on population slowdown
The public has mixed feelings about what demographic change means.
Ann, from Salford, said she was not surprised by the fall in births, posting on social media that “so many things stop young people from having families”.
Ellie blamed the cost of living crisis for the figures, saying, “people can’t afford to live, let alone have children.”
Alan from Manchester believes slower population growth could ease pressure on housing and public services. “A population decline would not be a bad thing in my opinion,” he said.
The demographic shift leaves Britain facing a question that politicians from most parties have struggled to answer: how to support an aging population and shrinking birthrates while promising voters lower immigration.
ONS forecasts suggest the country’s population will peak in the 2050s before beginning a long decline.
Courthouse News reporter James Francis Whitehead is in England.
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