Edward Davies: Solving the birth rate crisis is a moral and fiscal imperative

Edward Davies is Research Director at the Centre for Social Justice.

Motherhood was much in the news this week.

It kicked off with a flurry of last-minute chocolate and daffodil purchasing by the nation’s offspring on Sunday morning. And hot on the heels of Mothering Sunday came Jessie’s Buckley’s Oscar acceptance speech in which she dedicated the honour “to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”.

We at the CSJ also launched a report that found that 600,000 women would miss out on their ambitions of motherhood due to the falling birthrate and that three million women aged 16 to 45 today are projected not to have children if current trends persist.

But for all undoubted importance of motherhood and the human pathos of these three events, the last in particular signals something far greater and more concerning.

The UK’s fertility decline is often framed as a motherhood issue largely because that is how it is measured – births per woman. But it is far from that alone.

The ripples of our declining birthrate travel far and wide. It’s felt by fathers too of course – it takes two to tango after all. And it’s felt by siblings, uncles, and aunts. It impacts grandparents and communities too as the population gets older and older.

They are a few years further down this road than us in Japan but during the first half of 2024, 40,000 people died alone in their home. Of that number, nearly 4,000 people were discovered more than a month after they died, and 130 bodies went unmissed for a year before they were found.

We all depend on the relationships in our lives, right up to, and even beyond our deaths.

This has huge societal effects too, not least on public services. As Japan has discovered, it is not cheap or easy for the state to reproduce what families have traditionally done for millennia. Our social care sector is already groaning under the weight.

But a medic colleague working on doctors’ contracts used to joke to me that the most sensitive nerve in the body is the wallet nerve and it is maybe our economy where we will feel the pinch hardest.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that, on current trends, UK public debt could rise to around 270 per cent of GDP by the early 2070s as ageing pushes up spending on pensions, health and social care.

To maintain our current economy and standard of living with a declining population would require unprecedented and improbable productivity increases. When they fail to materialise, we will have to make significant cuts and perhaps the one hard aging-related lever governments have to play with is the pension age.

The CSJ’s analysis shows that on current population estimates children in school today could face working until their mid-70s before receiving a state pension.

If the government attempted to maintain today’s ratio of workers to pensioners, the state pension age would need to rise steadily over the coming years, hitting 70 in the next three decades, and 75 well before the end of the century – that means children aged 8 and under today would not retire until they are 75.

Figures like this understandably provoke a response, particularly among those approaching pension age themselves. But we literally cannot afford to bury our metaphorical heads in the sand over this. Other countries with similar problems are grasping the nettle. Denmark for example recently passed legislation which will raise the retirement age to 70 by the year 2040 – not that far away. By 2060 it will likely rise to 74. Italy and Estonia are set to follow at 71, while the Netherlands, Sweden, and Cyprus are projected to reach 70.

To date, received wisdom in the UK has been to replace the human shortfall with imported labour – high immigration. But not only is it a strategy with declining public support, but it does not really work. High levels of immigration have marginally and temporarily slowed the demographic shift but they do not solve the underlying problem, as age and fertility rates among migrants also tend to fall over time. In short, migrants get old and stop having babies too.

Political capital to have these conversations is in short supply and so huge credit to shadow equalities minister Rt Hon Claire Coutinho MP, who is one of the first senior parliamentarians to put her head above the parapet in this debate. Writing the foreword to the CSJ report she does not shy away from hard questions.

She describes our falling birthrate as “one of the most significant yet least discussed challenges our country faces today”.

“A healthy society depends on its ability not only to preserve what it has inherited, but to pass it on. The institutions, freedoms and traditions that make us who we are were built up over centuries, and their continuation cannot be taken for granted. If we rely on making up the population shortfall with ever higher immigration, then we may risk losing more than we bargained for.

“If we want to be proud of passing on something of importance to the next generation then we must never lose sight of the importance of family.”