British couples having less sex since the birth of the internet, says statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter

The number of times the average heterosexual couple in the UK makes love has fallen from five times a month in 1990 to three times a month now

Being connected to the world all the time by mobile devices could mean that people have less time for each other (Getty Images)

People are having significantly less sex and the birth of the internet may be the reason, a leading statistician has suggested.

Professor David Spiegelhalter, of Cambridge University, found that the number of times the average heterosexual couple in the UK makes love has fallen from four times a month in 2000 to three times a month now. The figure in 1990 was five times a month.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour, he said it was hard to identify the reasons behind the decline but suggested that being connected to the world all the time by mobile devices meant that people perhaps had less time for each other.

“We used to have a very big separation between our public lives and our private lives,” he said.

“Now they are so mixed up and integrated. People are checking their emails all the time. You do not have this same sort of quiet empty time that there used to be.”

The figures, contained in Professor Spiegelhalter’s new book Sex by Numbers, also reveal that men claim to have had an average of 14 sexual partners, while women say they have had seven.

“When people start getting to 10 or 15, they always start getting a bit vague frankly,” he said.

“There is a suggestion that men make a vague stab upwards and women might make a vague stab downwards.

“Women may, when thinking about their history, not want to count some relationships, they would rather just forget.”