One million a year
What will the rising death rate mean for society and culture?
It’s been one of those periods where good news is lacking, so here’s some: deaths are relatively stable. In fact, in the last couple of years, they’ve been declining from the Covid peak.
You might think that’s a low bar for good news, and fair enough. But the data speaks for itself. Since the end of the second world war there have been only seven occasions when the number of deaths registered in England and Wales was less than 500,000. They’ve tended to come in clusters: three of them were in the period immediately after the war (1946, 1948 and 1952) and the others were four consecutive years between 2009 and 2012 (the real good old days). In this time there has only been one year in which the number of deaths has exceeded 600,000. That was 2020. Since then, a steady drop.
Since 1946, on average the number of deaths each year has been just under 550,000. Although the yearly figures oscillate around that average, they never stray too far.
The data for the UK as a whole (adding Scotland and Northern Ireland into the mix) tells a similar story. The average number of deaths for this period is 620,000 and the yearly number is typically within a gnat’s crotchet of this average.
However, this is going to change. From the end of this decade, the number of deaths is going to start rising, substantially. According the ONS’s population projections, the number of deaths in the UK will cross 700,000 for the first time in 2031. Within 15 years, it’ll cross 800,000. By the end of the century, almost a million people a year will die in the UK.
Compared to the average that we’re used to, this is quite the departure.
What does this mean?
Neither I nor the ONS (presumably) have access to any classified information about novel diseases or impending asteroid collisions: life isn’t going to start getting more dangerous. In fact, across the whole of this period deaths as a proportion of the population don’t change much at all (currently, about 1% of the population die each year; by 2122 it’ll be 1.2%). But the sheer volume of deaths will take some getting used to.
We can often be squeamish or sensitive to discussions around death and dying – but this is a demographic and infrastructure challenge we have to deal with.
Mortuaries, funeral directors, care homes, registrars, palliative care, crematoria, burial sites. In many areas these are struggling with the slight elevation in deaths that we’ve seen since 2020. The steepest part of the trend is happening in the next decade or so: this requires attention now.
The rising number of deaths is likely to mean more scope for change and innovation in how we mark them. Funerals have already seen remarkable and continuing change in the last decade, since the emergence of direct cremation as an alternative to funerals with more traditional shape and set up. This will continue: from living funerals to hybrid direct cremations to campaigns for more – and greener – options beyond burial and cremation. Grumblings about the cost of dying – a major focus for the Competition and Markets Authority in the last decade – aren’t going to go away. Accelerated by an ageing population, our attention will focus on the quality of the services that support end-of-life, from health and social care to funerals and memorials.
I don’t think it’s unfeasible to hypothesise that such an increase in the number of deaths and funerals will see a strengthening of tradition and even of religion in funeral ceremonies. Even if the proportion of religious funerals doesn’t increase, the number may well.
Back to squeamishness and sensitivity: are we really ready, socially and culturally, for a society with such a high number of deaths? The change is particularly stark when plotted against births for the same period.
We’ve written about the UK’s slide into a quasi-Children of Men demographic scenario before, but back then with our gaze trained on the impacts of low fertility. What does high deaths mean for our culture and our consciousness?
Children of men
Here’s a thing that has almost always been true: there are more births than deaths each year in the UK. Often massively more.
By the end of the century, the number of deaths will outnumber the number of births by a factor of nearly two to one. Families will have more people leave them than join them. We’ll go to more funerals than christenings or naming ceremonies, we’ll buy more with sympathy cards than congratulations cards, florists will sell more lilies than carnations. The size of demand on the NHS will be completed lopsided. There have only been a couple of years, ever, when deaths outnumbered births in the UK (1976 and 2020) both isolated and slightly freak events. But this is our new normal; more deaths than births, forever.
A final thought is that, once again, the most consequential forces of change are the slow moving ones. Demographic change is very rarely dramatic, and this one won’t be either. But by the middle of the century, the still-rising number of deaths will have changed society.
More than this
Trajectory monitor trends in demographics, social values, environmental behaviours, politics, economics, society, tech and much more. We work with clients on bespoke projects and publish reports, analysis and data on our Now & Next subscription service.
Membership of Now & Next gets you:
✅ All Optimism Index outputs - your monthly update on how consumer attitudes, spending and behaviours are changing
✅ Our continually updated Horizon Scan, allowing you to contextualise and prepare for the next 12 months and the years beyond
✅ The whole Trajectory archive of trends content, insight and foresight, including our trends briefing archive on demand, all our deep-dive reports and articles, and the Trajectory Macro Trends.
There are membership options for every budget, starting at £500p.a. You can find out more here.