1.1 The Office for National Statistics (ONS), on behalf of the Registrars General, prepares the population projections for the United Kingdom and its constituent countries. Responsibility for the production of these projections passed from the Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) on 31 January 2006. Detailed results of these (2006-based) projections will nevertheless be published on GAD’s website (www.gad.gov.uk). This paper presents the main results of the latest, 2006-based, projection for Scotland and outlines the fertility, mortality and migration assumptions used in its preparation.
1.2 The results in this paper concentrate on the period up to 2031, although they occasionally refer to up to 75 years ahead and ONS make available projections up to 2106. However, projections this far ahead become increasingly more uncertain the further ahead they go.
1.3 As well as producing the main "principal" projection ONS also produce "variant" projections using alternative plausible assumptions. At the time this paper was written (23 October 2007) ONS had published seven variant projections on the ONS and GAD websites. Additional variants will follow in November 2007. More information on the variant projections is given in Section 7.