The Commission reported in March 1949. It found that the main cause, and very probably the only cause, of the fall in family size was the spread of deliberate family limitation. In the course of the nineteenth century powerful economic, social and cultural forces combined to tell against the continued acceptance of an uncontrolled birth rate. Changes in economic organization were reducing the importance of the family as a productive unit, while the Factory and Education Acts were extending the period during which children were an unrelieved expense to their parents, the result was that, in all classes of society except the wealthiest, married couples with young children to support were at an economic disadvantage compared with childless couples: and parents with a family of several young children were at a disadvantage as compared with those with only one or two.
The Commission's recommendations aimed at reducing the economic disadvantages ot parenthood. It proposed increased family allowances; reform of income tax to reduce the disadvantages of parenthood for the well-to-do; the building of more houses with more than three bedrooms; the further development of family health and welfare services, and research and education in population questions.
The populations of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland[1] and of each of the principal regions of England were hi every case greater in 1951 than in 1931, whereas in the period 1921-31 the populations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland had declined.
The greatest increases were in the eastern, southern, midland and south-western districts of England, and in Northern Ireland. The smallest increase was in Wales. The population of the United Kingdom taken as a whole is predominantly urban and suburban. During the nineteenth century, when the labour demands of newly developing industry drew great numbers from the countryside to the towns, the urban element continuously and rapidly outgrew the rural element. At the end of the nineteenth century 75 per cent of the British population was living within the boundaries of urban administrative areas and the large conurbation was already the dominant type of British community. By 1911 the economic and social limits of these conurbations extended far beyond the administrative boundaries of the cities which formed their core, owing to the building of outer suburbs which linked up neighbouring towns. Since 1921 nearly 40 per cent of the population has lived in the seven great conurbations whose centres are the cities of London, Glasgow, Birmingham and Wolverhampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Bradford, and Newcastle upon Tyne.
During the twentieth century the general character of urbanization changed, the later increases in urban areas being relatively much smaller and much more due to the natural growth of the towns than to the withdrawal of rural population. Moreover, two new and decided trends became apparent: first, the outer rings of conurbations and the suburbs of large cities began to increase in population much more rapidly than the large cities themselves; secondly, there was a considerable migration, particularly of young adults, to the expanding new light industries and suburban residential areas springing up in and around London and Birmingham. This movement was intensified by the heavy unemployment of the inter-war years which affected with particular severity the textile and heavy engineering industries of Scotland, Northern England and South Wales.
The combined effect of these two trends was that the outer rings of the London and Birmingham conurbations increased most in population while the remoter country areas and some industrial towns of Scotland, Wales and Northern England declined. In urban areas in England and Wales, the medium-sized towns of between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants increased most rapidly, while the populations of very large or very small towns tended to decline.
- ↑ For population figures see map on p. 7.
