It is a great pleasure to introduce my second annual report as Registrar General and Chief Executive of National Records of Scotland. This 159th edition of the Registrar General’s Annual Review continues the important core task of bringing together relevant and up-to-date information on Scotland’s people and places, and includes results from the 2011 Census.
One of the great advantages of an annual report that has been produced consistently for over 150 years, and of a census that has been taken regularly over a similar period of time, is that we can make comparisons over long timescales. Some of those comparisons are quite stark. For example, people in Scotland now live around a third longer than the population of a hundred years ago. In 1910-12, life expectancy for male and females was 50.1 and 53.2 respectively. People born today can, in general, expect to live to 76.8 for males and 80.9 for females. However, today’s figures mask significant local variation, usually in line with relative levels of deprivation.
This edition of the Annual Review also recognises the significance of 2014 as the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The report includes a chapter that examines the effect of the war on Scotland’s demographic makeup, using information taken from a series of reports about the civilian population by the Registrar General of Scotland from 1911 to 2013. For example, Scotland’s post-war bounce in births was so great that 1920 was, and still remains, a record year. Almost 137,000 children were registered that year, 31,000 (29.7 per cent) more than the average of those of the preceding five years. By comparison, 2013 saw a drop in the number of births, to 56,014, which is 3.5 per cent fewer than in 2012. This is the fifth fall after six consecutive annual increases in the number of births.
The continuation of a valuable long-running tradition does not preclude innovation and this report breaks new ground for us by including, for the first time, a dedicated infographics supplement. We have a responsibility to ensure that we gather and publish statistics that are robust and reliable, but we also need to ensure that they are understandable and accessible. Infographics can be one way of doing this, and increasing use of social media can also help. We have made some progress on both of these over the past year, but there is more to do on both.
In the past year National Records of Scotland (NRS) has published further data from Scotland’s Census. We have completed the publication of the high level data across the full range of census topics (such as Ethnicity, Identity, Language, Religion, Health, Transport and Education) demonstrating the richness and depth of the data collected in the census. We have now published eight of our much more detailed releases which combine the various topics providing further detail on Scotland in 2011. We have also recently hosted a national conference considering and exploring uses of census data, as part of our aim to promote and support the many varied uses of this data. More releases are planned during the rest of 2014, and all data and information can be found on the Scotland’s Census website
In 2013, Scotland’s population reached a further all-time high. We estimate that on 30 June 2013 it was 5,327,700 (based on rolled forward 2011 Census estimates), an increase of 0.3 per cent (14,100 people) on the previous year. As last year, this increase has been caused by more births than deaths, and by positive net migration (more people moved into Scotland than left Scotland).
In the year to mid-2013 migration accounted for the biggest part of Scotland’s population increase. More people came here than left, but the net migration of 10,000 is the lowest estimate since 2002-03. In 2013, 47,700 people came to Scotland from the rest of the UK and 28,200 came from overseas. In the same period, 39,800 people left Scotland for other parts of the UK and 26,100 went abroad. Most of the people moving to and from Scotland were in the 16 to 34 age group.
More generally, however, the population continues to age, so that the proportion of people aged 65 and over is now more than the proportion of those under 16 (18 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively). The number of households continues to increase, albeit more slowly than a decade ago, and our latest projections suggest that Scotland’s population will go on rising, to 5.78 million by 2037, and will continue to age significantly, with the number of people aged 65 or over rising by 59 per cent in the same period. We also expect the number of households to rise from 2.40 million in 2013, to 2.78 million by 2037.
Scotland continues to benefit from a registration system which has been used continuously since 1855. Today a network of around 700 local authority registrars across the country records births, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths, and provides around 140,000 records each year to the central databases in Edinburgh. These accurate records are one of the main sources for many of our calculations in this report.
From them, we not only know that in 2013 there was a drop in the number of births, as mentioned above, but also that the number of deaths in 2013 fell slightly by 0.4 per cent to 54,700. The registration and death certification systems tell us that the four main causes of death were cancer (29 per cent of deaths), coronary heart disease (13 per cent of deaths), diseases of the respiratory system (13 per cent of deaths) and strokes (8 per cent of deaths). The total number of deaths from the so-called ’three big killers’ (cancer, coronary heart disease and stroke) has reduced from 65 per cent of all deaths during 1980-82 to 50 per cent in 2013.
There were 27,547 marriages registered in Scotland last year. Tourist marriages, where neither bride nor groom lived in Scotland, remain popular, accounting for nearly a quarter of these (23 per cent). The number of civil partnerships last year fell by 44 registrations to 530, which represents a fall of 7.7 per cent on 2012. The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014 received Royal Assent on 12 March 2014, and NRS will, in due course, include figures for same-sex marriages in its relevant quarterly and annual publications.
The last one hundred years have seen substantial shifts in Scotland’s demographic make-up, as the data from the 2011 Census highlights. But it is clear that there is the potential for some further significant changes in the future structure of Scotland’s population, particularly in terms of its age profile and living arrangements. The richness and depth of the information, trends and statistics in this report will be of most value as they are used by policy makers and service providers to provide insight into current requirements and to plan for future needs.
Tim Ellis
Registrar General,
National Records of Scotland