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Crayford Urban District Council
To the Chairman and Members of the Urban District Council.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present my Annual Report for
the year 1951.
The vital statistics of the Urban District are, broadly,
satisfactory and present a number of interesting feaures. The
birth rate during 1951 was 13.9 per thousand of the home
population compared with 15.6 per thousand in 1950, 17.9
in 1949, 18.4 in 1948, 22.0 in 1947, 22.0 in 1946, 18.8 in 1945
and 23.1 in 1944. It will be seen that the increase in the birth
rate towards the end of the war has not been maintained and
the birth rate in fact shows a continued rate of decline which,
in general, follows the trend in the birth rate for the country
as a whole, although the birth rate for Crayford is appreciably
lower than the national rate (15.5). There is a number of
posible explanations. Firstly, the housing position is a major
deterrent to young married people to start a family. Added
to this is the high cost of living, including the high cost of setting
up a home. The birth rate for the District corrected by
the use of the Registrar General's comparability factor (0.93)
was 12.9.
Bearing in mind the low death rate which we enjoy
nowadays and the fact that the level of the population is being
maintained only by the fertility of the past, two things are
obvious; firstly that the number of old people must increase
and secondly, (seeing that we are all mortal) the death rate
must be expected to rise and the population stabilised at a
lower level based on present day fertility factors.
The death rate for the District during 1951, was 9.56
compared with 7.89 for 1950, or, after correction by means of
the comparability factors for deaths (1.21) 11.6 compared with
an uncorrected death rate for the country as a whole of 12.5.
The infant mortality rate for 1951, at 20.7 per thousand
live births, was considerably lower than the rate for 1950,
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