Baby Bust

As the national debate around falling birth rates gathers pace, there is an opportunity to pursue supportive pro-natal policies with a focus on social justice. Currently, too few babies are being born to maintain the future of our economic model. Without intervention the UK faces poverty, inflation, and sector shortages.

Perhaps even more significantly, the UK’s ‘Baby Bust’ represents a huge societal failure. Nine out of ten young women hope to have children. Yet, under current fertility conditions, the total childlessness rate in the UK is predicted to be as high as 30 per cent. ‘Unplanned childlessness’ is a major cause of grief and sadness for many.

Yet falling birth rates are not only a problem in Britain. Fertility has been falling across the world for more than fifty years, and a recent study in the Lancet predicted that, by the end of this century, just six countries in the world would have above-replacement birth rates. British politicians have been surprisingly quiet about this issue, but other governments have taken note. In 1976, just nine per cent of countries had introduced explicitly pro-natal policies; by 2019, this had increased three-fold to almost 30 per cent in 2019.

At some point, the United Kingdom will be forced to reckon with the consequences of sustained sub-replacement birth rates and a range of policies will need to be enacted to ameliorate its impacts. This paper sets out some of the causes and impacts of low fertility rates and explores the principles that should underpin pro-natal policies. It is not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive; ultimately a variety of interventions will need to be tried, and some will be more successful than others.

Strong families are the foundation of strong societies. Fewer children mean fewer families and a weakening safety net, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable. Decades of below-replacement birth rates are undermining relational stability, community connectedness, and economic security in our nation.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows:

The current problem

In 2024, the UK’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR; the mean number of children per woman) fell to 1.41, a record low. But Britain’s TFR has been below replacement (2.1) since 1970. Combined with the effects of rising life expectancy, we can see the impact of falling fertility in the Old Age Dependency Ratio (OADR; the ratio of working aged people to pensioners in a population). In 1970 there were four working age people for every pensioner. By 2025, the ratio is 3.5:1. Worse still, in the coming generations this is set to plummet to 2:1. It is one thing for the costs of a retired person’s pension, care and health services to be split between four working age people; it is quite another for the burden to be shared by just two.

Declining birth rates have not been caused by mothers having fewer children. In fact, the average family size has remained remarkably similar since the 1970s (the number of children per mother has actually increased slightly in the US). Rather, what has changed is the number of women who never have children at all. In 1970, the female childlessness rate reached as little as five per cent but this is estimated to have risen to around 30 per cent for the current cohort of young women as of 2022.

According to the demographer Stephen J Shaw, the best predictor of a country’s TFR is now the average age of a first-time mother. In the UK, this has been increasing. In the early 1970s, the average age at which a woman had her first child was 23 compared to nearly 29 in 2020. This higher age reflects the greater number of women delaying childbearing until long after peak fertility and the greater the number who will find they have fewer children than they want. The key therefore to reducing childlessness – and raising the TFR – is to lower the average age of first birth.

The rate and average age of first marriage are the strongest indicators of the average age of first birth, and, since 1970, the average age of marriage has increased by around ten years from 22 to 31. This is a trend shared across almost the whole world. It would seem, therefore, that focusing on reducing the average age of marriage is a good place to start.

International comparisons and examples

Since collapsing fertility is a global problem, there is now a growing body of pro-natal policies available for international study. In this review, we have paid particular attention to the policies of France and Hungary since both countries have spent significant sums on pro-natal interventions over an extended period of time. Examples of pro-natal policies range from baby bonus schemes, childcare support or ‘family quotients’ to family loans and income tax relief, to housing being conditional on marriage or children, or even city-wide dating events.

Common misconceptions

There are many common misconceptions surrounding the consequences of falling fertility rates. Indeed, many people fail to understand why collapsing birth rates are a problem at all. This is also the case for many of the proposed ‘pro-natal’ solutions; some ideas that sound sensible – such as rolling out ‘free childcare’ – have not worked in practice. This section offers a discussion of some of these ideas and takes account of the international evidence. We have included sections on the impacts of IVF, abortion rates, immigration, childcare costs, housing, and attitudes to the environment.

What can be done?

• Marriage should be prioritised
• Adulthood should begin earlier, especially for men
• Motherhood should be properly valued
• ‘Baby Boomer’ politics must be addressed
• Incentives and benefits should be conditional