“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” So does God command man in the very first chapter of Genesis. For centuries, we followed this commandment pretty well. From at least the Elizabethan period up until the mid-nineteenth century, English women generally had around five children over the course of their lifetime. Outside of England, birth rates were often even higher.
Yet, in the last six decades, birth rates globally have steadily declined. Countries that once fought to control their population — such as China — are now scrambling to reverse the trend. Our falling birth rate is now one of the greatest global challenges of the twenty-first century.
The quest to improve the declining birth rate is sometimes seen as a religious, right-wing endeavour. Yet the left should care about this problem — and increasingly does. A major reason for the declining birth rate is the sheer expense of raising a child until 18. In the UK, it is, on average, well over a quarter of a million pounds. Family life — not just marriage but also having children — is becoming the preserve of the affluent. This is compounded by the fact that, nowadays, both parents are likely to be working, necessitating steep financial sacrifices either through less work or more childcare. Child poverty in the UK is now on the increase and, reversing a trend from decades ago, high income is increasingly correlated with high fertility. A decade ago, public debate around intergenerational inequality centred around young people’s lack of access to homes and income progression: now it is also about lack of access to family life.
The left should also care about a low birth rate because, without babies who can grow up to work, pay tax and support their parents, the state will run out of money. The number of dependants that every working-age person in the UK will have to support is set to increase by half by the 2070s if current demographic trends continue, effectively requiring 50 per cent more money just to keep the provision of public services at the current level — and this is assuming a continued high level of immigration, without which the numbers look even bleaker.
The right, too, has good reasons to be concerned besides religious argument. The inevitable decline in family life that would come about from low birth rates risks a more individualistic culture, one that is antithetical to the conservative vision for the good life. Gone is one of Edmund Burke’s “little platoon[s],” the “first link in the chain by which we move toward a love to our country and to mankind.” A life not centred around serving others will instead likely become a pursuit of material comforts, proving right the subscribers of dialectical materialism. It will also erode the right’s electorate — family life makes one more conservative, something Tories ought to be interested in at a time when the Conservative voter base is nearing death from old age. Indeed, while for the left a low birth rate means underfunded public services, for the right it means pressure to increase taxes far beyond current levels and an even greater reliance on immigration and public borrowing.
This fertility problem, though, is not one we entered entirely willingly. Around two-thirds of 25-to-34-year-olds in the UK are planning to start a family, and the average number of children that women in the UK want to have throughout their life is 2.35, far below the UK’s actual current – and declining – birth rate of 1.44 births per woman. This suggests people generally still want children. The problem is not one of a cultural abandonment of the family, but of an inability to fulfil already existing aspirations.
What would help? A more holistic approach to the underlying problems.
Childcare and housing, two main components of the cost of parenthood, are uniquely expensive in the UK. British childcare is the third most expensive in the OECD, while our homes are the most expensive in the entire English-speaking world as well as some of the smallest in Europe – half the size of Danish homes and rarely big enough to support a large family.
On the former, since the mid-1990s, childcare subsidies expanded considerably. The Early Years Free Entitlement, giving infants 30 hours of free childcare a week, now starts from nine months. The poorest families can now also claim 85 per cent of childcare costs through Universal Credit, up to a maximum. Yet, parents still face punishing prices. In a market increasingly dominated by private childcare providers, we ought to first get stricter on the conditions of what public money is spent on.
Second, childcare stresses are most acute early on in a child’s life. Front-loading Child Benefit rather than spreading it out over as many as twenty years could ease this.
Third, we need to better support parents who take time off work to care for their children. Low-income mothers, most of whom work for small companies that only offer Statutory Maternity Pay, often return to work sooner than they would like due to paltry compensation; 90 per cent of pay for the first six weeks and £184 a week thereafter, all paid for by the state.
The base rate of maternity pay should therefore rise. To pay for this, a cap on Statutory Maternity Pay should be introduced and some of the money consequently saved recycled into a higher rate. The 90% of pay in the first six weeks’ maternity pay is currently uncapped and needlessly subsidises large, high-paying employers who can offer generous occupational pay schemes regardless.
Fourth, it is young parents who tend to be the most under-resourced. Extending Transferable Tax Allowance could help. The Allowance — which currently enables a basic-rate taxpayer to transfer their personal tax allowance to their partner — ought to be a mechanism working grandparents who withdraw from work to care for their grandchildren should be eligible for, allowing them to provide both practical and financial support to their adult children.
Fifth, having children puts acute pressure not just on finances, but also time. It can become lonely and isolating. Time use surveys show parents in Britain today spend more time with their under-fives than ever before, despite working more: it is community time which has suffered. As David Brooks writes, the nuclear family is to blame; we should be lamenting the loss of the extended family, with helpful grandparents, aunts and uncles living nearby.
Alas, we cannot reverse this now. That is why community services and strong relationships with fellow parents are needed. The Conservative were wrong to cut Sure Start Children’s Centres in the 2010s; we now know these centres were beneficial for both parent and child outcomes. Today renamed “Family Hubs”, we need a return to the comprehensive coverage they enjoyed in the 2000s.
Sixth, it would also help to improve women’s experience during and after pregnancy. A third of women who give birth suffer some form of birth-related trauma; this is well-documented in former MP Theo Clarke’s report from last year, which lists some reprehensible examples of how mothers are treated in UK hospitals. In one case, a would-be mother says she was “lying on the ground in pain wanting to die” during her 36-hour labour, which involved the midwife “throwing the paracetamol in the sink.” Here, we could take lessons from the Dutch maternity nursing system, where parents are provided daily support in the home for a week — something David Cameron had hoped to replicate back in 2008.
Finally, we need to give more time and space to parents with young children. This should include sick leave for parents, family-friendly flexible working, dedicated spaces on public transport for young families and new homes with access to playgrounds and green spaces within walking distance. Indeed, access to family-friendly spaces, and lack thereof, often impacts the birth rate even more so than financial incentives.
With any single of these policies, the birth rate may still flounder. Many countries with lovely walkable neighbourhoods — such as Poland — or cheap childcare — such as Sweden — or extensive state expenditure on pro-family measures — such as Hungary — still fail to even get close to a replacement birth rate of 2.1 children per woman. But there is hope in a holistic approach. There are examples — some places in Japan and Italy, as well as the entire country of Czechia — of consistent and universal pro-family policy successfully improving birth rates.
Even if the task at hand is a difficult one — and, in this case, it is — we should not give up when so much is at stake. Making Britain much more family-friendly should be one of the main missions of this government. Momentum is building, across both the right and the left, for a United Kingdom where family life is easier and happier. The prize for success — greater prosperity and fairness. The cost of failure — collapsing under the weight of our own ageing society.
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