Women in the most deprived areas have 66% more births. Poverty drives fertility, not just ethnicity.

The standard line: ethnic minorities have more children. The data is more complicated.

ONS Linked Births 2024. 567,412 births broken down by Index of Multiple Deprivation decile.

Most deprived quintile (Deciles 1-2): 144,522 births. 25.5% of the total.

Least deprived quintile (Deciles 9-10): 87,216 births. 15.4%.

Ratio: 1.66x. Women in the poorest areas have two-thirds more births than women in the wealthiest. Every step down the deprivation ladder adds births. Decile 1: 75,561. Decile 10: 41,207.

Pakistani TFR: 2.52. White British TFR: 1.31. That gap is real. But Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations are overwhelmingly concentrated in the most deprived areas. Burnley, Blackburn, Bradford. The places with the highest ethnic minority growth are the same places with the highest deprivation.

The 1.66x deprivation gradient means a chunk of the ethnic fertility gap is driven by where people live, not who they are. Poverty reduction in deprived areas could narrow the gap more than cultural assimilation ever will.

The ethnic differentials are real. The projections stand. But anyone who attributes the entire fertility gap to ethnicity is not reading the data.

Peak fertility age: 30-34 (98.0 per 1000 women). Under-20 fertility: 8.1 per 1000, concentrated in deprived areas. National TFR: 1.50.

ONS Table 8 provides ethnicity, IMD, and age as separate summaries, not a full cross-tabulation. We cannot directly compute Pakistani fertility by deprivation decile from published data. That would need an ONS ad-hoc request. The aggregate gradient is clear.

Source: ONS Linked Births 2024, Table 8. Census 2021 custom dataset for denominators.