You asked
Please provide the following information broken down into major cities and regions (Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales);
How many birth certificates were issues from 2016 to 2017 and 2017 to present (or the most up to date period for which the data is available) that did not list the name of the father on the document?
How many birth certificates were issues from 2016 to 2017 and 2017 to present (or the most up to date period for which the data is available) that did not list the name of the mother on the document?
How many birth certificates were issues from 2016 to 2017 and 2017 to present (or the most up to date period for which the data is available) that did not list the name of neither the father or the mother on the document? In those circumstances, how was parentage explained on the document?
We said
Thank you for your request.
We publish annual birth statistics based on birth registrations with 2016 being the latest data we have available. Data for 2017 births will be published in July 2018.
Live births that are registered without fathers’ information are recorded as sole registrations.
The number of births that were solely registered by the mother for the UK in 2016 is available in Births by usual residence of mother:
Please see the ‘sole registration’ column in Table 1.
We are unable to obtain the number of registrations that do not have a name of the mother recorded. This is because of the way we receive the data from the General Register Office (GRO).
We would classify births without information of the mother or father as abandoned babies. The General Register Office (GRO) maintain a register of abandoned children. The number of abandoned babies is recorded on this register each year from 2005 to 2016 is published in section 5.6 of our User Guide to Birth Statistics available at:
We do not hold any information on whether these babies survived.