Prime Minister Keir Starmer needs to remember local circumstances matter when it comes to government spending (Image: PA)
We’re all getting older. As people, places and as a country, too. But while most of us understand we live in an ageing society, the story gets more complicated when we look at age across the different parts of the country.
Some places are older than others, some areas are ageing faster than others, and some parts of Britain are actually getting younger. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the country has been increasingly divided by age. People living in rural and coastal areas were already older, on average, two decades ago, compared to those living in cities. But since then, they’ve aged faster than the rest of the country.
As a result, the typical resident of North Norfolk, Britain’s oldest district, is 55 – almost twice that of Britain’s youngest borough, Tower Hamlets in East London, where the typical local has only recently turned 30.
This ‘demographic divide’ is not just an interesting regional quirk. With age becoming a significant predictor of who someone votes for, it means there is a growing age divide between Conservative and seats.
It is not healthy for our democracy if older people are concentrated in ‘safe’ seats, while young people live in ‘safe’ Labour constituencies.
It runs the risk of politicians focusing solely on the needs of a single age cohort at the expense of others. These unequal ageing patterns also really matter when it comes to funding and delivering local services.
So, why is this happening? Since we all individually age at the same rate, it can’t just be put down to all of us getting older. Instead, we need to look at birth rates and migration patterns.
As you might expect, more births make an area younger, and the oldest parts of the country tend to have the lowest birth rates. Younger women (aged 25-40) who might want to start a family make up almost double the proportion of the population in young major cities like Manchester and Newcastle than they do in older areas like North Norfolk or Rother on the Sussex coast. These places are unlikely to see a baby boom any time soon.
A similar urban-rural divide emerges when we look at migration patterns.
Major cities are the top choice for moving to the UK. And since we’ve seen a big wave of young people coming to work and study in cities outside London. Between 2002 and 2018, other major cities welcomed about 6,000 young international migrants (aged 25-30) a year. But this has more than doubled to 15,000 young migrants a year since 2019.
Young Britons are also drawn to the bright lights of our big cities: at age 19, many relocate to cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and Cardiff for university, pushing down their median age. In their twenties, many of these graduates move to London, while in their 30s more of them leave the capital than come to it, with some moving back to more rural areas.
These trends are so stark that many major cities like Bristol, Newcastle, Cardiff and Nottingham are getting younger. Today the typical resident in Salford, Greater Manchester, is three years younger than the typical resident would have been at the turn of the century.
There is one big exception to the anti-ageing process that is taking place in British cities – and that’s London. A baby bust and – after which young migrants have tended to concentrate in other major cities – mean that the capital is aging as rapidly as a small village. This is why many inner London boroughs are now having to close schools – much to the concern of local parents.
In areas where the typical age is rapidly increasing, or even decreasing, there’s a risk that will struggle to keep up with changing demand.
In the relatively ‘old’ area of Gloucestershire, for example, seven-in-ten of those aged 65 and older don’t receive the support they require, while in Knowsley in Merseyside it is six-in-ten.
Even in areas where local authorities are meeting demand for social care, there’s evidence the amount of support given is being rationed. The youngest local authorities in England tend to spend more per person aged over 65 than the oldest. This suggests that local authorities with older populations are having to spread funding out more thinly.
These ageing patterns are unlikely to change any time soon, so they need to be better understood by local, regional and national governments alike.
As ministers prepare to allocate for the rest of the parliament in the upcoming Spending Review, they need to remember that local circumstances really matter.