British mothers are now outnumbered by foreign-born mums at nearly one in seven maternity units, analysis shows.
At Northwick Park Hospital, in the London’s Harrow borough, a staggering 84.2 per cent of live births in 2023 were to non-UK mothers.
Behind Northwick Park was Newham’s University Hospital (77.1 per cent) Hillingdon Hospital (72.1 per cent) and North Middlesex Hospital (71.2 per cent).
Nearly one-third of all births in England and Wales are now to mothers born abroad, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) says.
In 2003, before immigration spiralled to all-time highs, that figure stood just shy of a fifth.
India is the most common country of origin for non-UK born mothers, just ahead of Pakistan, Romania, Nigeria and Poland.
When the ONS figures are broken down by hospital, 27 different sites register rates exceeding 50 per cent.
This includes St Mary’s, an NHS hospital in Manchester which delivers more babies than anywhere else in the country.
Nine of the ten hospitals with the highest non-UK mother births are in London.
Birmingham’s City Hospital (64.5 per cent) in Winson Green ranks eighth.
The other end of the spectrum is localised, too, with three of the five lowest rates in Wales.
Royal Glamorgan in Llantrisant (5.7 per cent) ranked last, according to MailOnline’s breakdown of all 269 facilities.
Exact figures weren’t supplied for dozens of sites with too few births to analyse.
An ONS spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘Almost a third of babies born in 2023 in England and Wales were to non-UK born women, a slight increase on the percentage in 2022.
‘This is a continuation of the long-term trend of the percentage of live births to non-UK-born mothers generally increasing.
‘While our birth data show us the parents’ country of birth, it doesn’t give us a picture of the family’s ethnicity or migration history, and it’s worth noting that not all women born outside the UK will be recent immigrants.’
India remained the most common country of birth for non-UK-born mothers (3.6 per cent of all live births) and fathers (3.9 per cent) in England and Wales last year.
Pakistan was second again.
Ghana entered the top 10 most common countries for non-UK born mothers for the first time in 2023, in ninth place with 0.6 per cent of live births.
But Germany fell out of the top 10, having been there since ONS records began for this measure in 2003.
Albania ranked at number seven, up from eighth in 2022, having entered the top 10 for the first time in 2021.
Afghanistan was at number eight, falling from seventh place in 2022.
Professor Sarah Harper, an expert on populations and migration at the University of Oxford, told MailOnline: ‘Non-UK born mothers have always tended to have a higher total fertility rate than UK-born mothers.
‘This is particularly the case with South Asian-born mothers and since Brexit the UK has taken more immigrants from South Asia and fewer from EU countries.’
There were just 591,072 live births in England and Wales in 2023, the lowest number since 1977 (569,259).
This number also represented a decrease of 14,407 compared to the year prior.
Professor Harper said this trend falls down to economic factors such as affordability but also a change in attitude to people wanting to have fewer, if any children.
The total fertility rate (TFR) in England and Wales dropped to 1.44 children per woman, its lowest value since records began in 1938.
Freefalling birth rates have triggered doomsday warnings about population collapse, which demographers believe will devastate Western economies.
If the downward spiral continues it may leave countries with too few younger people to work, pay tax and look after the elderly.
