Brits face serious consequences if our birth rate continues to decline – here’s what we need to do to reverse the trend
BRITAIN’S birth rate is in deep decline, and unless we take action to reverse this trend our nation faces serious consequences.
A new report reveals that birth numbers in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest recorded rates ever, and dropped dramatically over the past ten years.
You might ask, why does this matter?
Well, these figures mean that in just two generations from now, there could be 40 per cent fewer births than there are today.
It will mean that for every pensioner, there will be just three working-age people — compared with four now — and that will see our taxes rocket.
We will have difficulty funding pensions, education and the NHS.
Business, the Armed Forces and public services will struggle with a dwindling pool of working-age people to employ.
Remove the barriers
To sustain our economy and our society, we need to make sure that those who want to have children can do so.
Of course there are women who don’t want — or are unable — to have children, and that is to be expected and respected
But at the moment, the study shows most women say they want two or more children, but in reality they have fewer — and some experts predict that around 30 per cent of females today will never be mums.
So why is this? We have to look at the social, economic and political factors that act as national contraceptives and use government policies to help remove the barriers.
There’s a suggestion that women would have more babies if the Government provided free childcare from birth. We certainly need a good childcare sector, but after a recent visit to Finland I don’t believe this is what is stopping people from having children.
Finland is a country where babies from ten months old are entitled to almost free, very high-quality, full-time day care, wages are higher and maternity leave is more generous, and yet the state has one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Of course lots of mothers want to return to work after having children — and most do. But polling shows that most mothers would prefer to work less when their children are very young and so a better offer for women would be choice — the choice to return to work at a time of your choosing, to get the balance right for your own family and not to be forced to put children in formal childcare because you cannot afford not to.
As a Government, we need to help women by offering them more support to spend time with their children if that is their preference, as well as greatly shifting our attitude towards motherhood, which is too often painted as “drudgery” rather than the challenging — but deeply fulfilling — role that it can be.
The heart of the problem lies in the fact that raising children is no longer valued enough by society. We see it as a private endeavour that should not require support from the state. But if we need people to have children, then this attitude will have to change.
Until the 1990s, our tax system recognised families by allowing couples to share tax allowances and offering additional tax allowances for each child.
Now we have an individual taxation system that doesn’t recognise the importance of bringing up children, leaving families in Britain paying far more tax than in comparable countries.
This “family penalty”, combined with high housing costs, student debt and a tendency to live further away from extended family, means that when young couples do the sums they often feel they can’t afford to start a family.
Families are penalised
Some believe that we can solve our birth rate crisis with immigration, but this is just not the case.
Immigrants get old too, and, after a few generations tend not to have any more babies than the indigenous population.
We just end up needing to import more and more migrant workers to pay for an ageing population.
The only answer to the threat of falling birthrates is to improve the economic, social and cultural conditions that affect couples’ decisions to start a family.
Before I was an MP, I was a biology teacher and I used to teach children about the optimum conditions for photosynthesis in plants.
But just like for photosynthesis, or any other biological process, we need to find the optimum social, economic and cultural conditions that make it easier for people to become parents if they want to.