The UK’s birth rate is falling. Will a Labour government respond?
11 min read
Sienna Rodgers talks to figures across the left to explore how a Labour government might respond – or not – to the UK’s falling birth rate
The UK’s average birth rate has been falling for almost 15 years. In 2022 it reached 1.49 children per woman – well below the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1, the level at which a population replaces itself from one generation to the next. In England and Wales that same year, the number of women giving birth aged over 40 overtook mothers aged under 20 for the first time. As the birth rate drops, so does demand for schools; in London, they are closing as a result.
This low fertility rate is a phenomenon seen across the continent: not a single European country now has a birth rate exceeding the replacement level. Population decline is a concern around the world, in fact, with only sub-Saharan Africa bucking the trend. Given this, the extent to which immigration can alleviate the effects of an ageing population is limited – even if the left were not in agreement that net numbers must come down.
“The pronatal movement is a right-wing movement, like racism is a right-wing movement”
The conversation around this declining total fertility rate has been led by the right in Britain, but the consequences of the low birth rate are now faced by a Labour government. How will it respond?
Warnings of “population collapse” have been associated most strongly with Elon Musk in the US and Miriam Cates in Britain. The latter, a Conservative MP until earlier this year, has led calls for pronatalist policies on the basis that an “inverted population pyramid” will have a serious impact on Britain’s defence capabilities, NHS and infrastructure. In response she wants to see changes to the tax system and an increased cultural value placed on motherhood.
Meanwhile, the British left has been deeply uncomfortable with talk of pronatalism. This is exacerbated when remarks are made like those of Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance, whose criticism of “childless cat ladies” added to the perception that the policy is fuelled by reactionary attitudes.
“I don’t think there is concern on the left about the low birth rate. I don’t think there is any part of the left’s agenda which endorses the notion that the male state should be able to promulgate a view about women’s reproductive activity,” says Baroness Harman, a veteran Labour MP until the general election, now a life peer.
“I don’t think that there is any way in which population policy can find a place on the left if that population policy is delivered via women’s bodies. That’s just not a credible position for the left.”
As well as a feminist argument, Harman articulates the suspicion held by many on the left that pronatalism must be anti-immigration. “It’s often got tangled up with people wanting a high birth rate from the local population because they don’t want to have immigrants, and it’s been tied up with xenophobia and racism,” she adds.
“The pronatal movement is a right-wing movement, like racism is a right-wing movement. And if you look at what it does in the States, where it’s blossoming, it’s like turning the clock back on everything women have fought for. Basically, I don’t want men telling me – it’s a bit late now! – that my worth is defined by how many children I’ve had, or having a view about how many children I should have. I don’t want women telling me that either. What I want is the state to back up my choices.”
Cates is keen to point out that there is no need to tell women to have children: research shows they already want more children than they are having. A lack of interest is not the cause of the fertility gap.
“It should be an equal enough society that you don’t have to be Jacob Rees-Mogg to be able to choose how many children you have”
Labour MP Rosie Duffield sees the pronatalism conversation in the context of policies she – along with most of her party – opposes, such as the two-child benefit cap. “If we can’t afford to have children, we’re not going to be able to look after ourselves,” she says.
“Surely, that’s a fairly socialist argument, that we should be able to afford decent homes, and just have a few children. We’re not talking about 20, are we? If you want to grow your family to two or three children, you should be able to afford that. It should be an equal enough society that you don’t have to be Jacob Rees-Mogg to be able to choose how many children you have.”
Duffield is disappointed that the left struggles to talk about the low birth rate due to fear that they will be perceived as wanting “all women to just stay barefoot and pregnant”. “That’s literally the opposite of any of my views. I’m scared, I guess, that it could be hijacked by the Trumpian, anti-abortion people, whereas actually it’s nothing to do with that at all.”
One figure on the left who does not shy away from the conversation is Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media. Where Tories like Cates promote changes to the tax system to make it fairer for families, Bastani favours expanded IVF, more paid parental leave, socialised childcare and even direct payments to families willing to expand.
“If you’ve got a family, and they’ve got two kids, it might sound really excessive: literally give them £40,000 have a third child,” he suggests. “If you said, actually we should help all kinds of families to be larger if they want, including middle-class ones, through cash payments, there is a big part of the Labour Party that will flip out.”
Describing the UK birth rate as “a genuine concern for millions of people who vote for left-wing parties”, he says: “If you’re talking about left media, trade unions, think tanks, left-wing influencers, politicians, it doesn’t seem particularly salient. There’s clearly a disconnect there.”
Being on the radical left, Bastani has encountered opposition to pronatalism on environmental grounds. The 1968 book The Population Bomb by Paul R and Anne H Ehrlich, which warned of famine caused by overpopulation, has shaped the debate around ecological sustainability for decades. Only a few years ago a ‘birthstrike movement’ was being touted as a way to fight climate change. Bastani calls these arguments “completely insane”.
Responding to feminist concerns, he says: “The state has been telling women to not have children for a really long time. It’s not neutral territory. And actually, that’s been to the detriment of many women. There are loads of women I know, who are in their late 30s, who have one child, and now they’re like, ‘honestly, I wish we’d started earlier, and I wish the state gave us some more resources – we would’ve had two’.”
Bastani also believes that those who oppose pronatalism for anti-racist reasons have it the wrong way around. “There is the expectation now that people should service our needs tomorrow, when we’re elderly, should keep the economy going, it’s just that we shouldn’t do the work of raising the kids to do that. And that’s an exploitative argument,” he says.
“You’re basically saying, ‘we don’t need to do the work, somebody else can do the work, and then they can look after us’. Racist isn’t the right word but I don’t think people realise how entitled and privileged that argument is.”
Public services are already coming under strain from an ageing population. With Labour saying it wants to bring down immigration numbers, the economic case for increasing the birth rate is clear, even if some on the left cannot accept an explicit pronatalist framing of policies.
Aveek Bhattacharya, research director at the Social Market Foundation think tank, set out “the liberal case for pronatalism” in a 2021 report. “As a society, we have an interest in having reasonably sized future generations, in terms of having a decent population pyramid,” he explains.
“That’s about sustainability of public services, sustaining the economy, keeping the dependency ratio manageable. If you look at all of those arguments, none of them are clearly on a left-right spectrum. These are things that, in principle, the left should be as interested in as the right.”
Although he encountered a “squeamishness” in response to his paper, he points to the priority given to “family” by figures such as Keir Starmer’s former executive director of policy Claire Ainsley as evidence that the left may be more interested in pronatalism than first impressions suggest.
“There was a moment, about a couple of years ago, where the Labour Party were flirting with one of their many slogans was that ‘Britain should be the best place in the world to grow up’. They never really put full weight behind that, but it’s there in the thinking,” Bhattacharya says.
With Westminster discourse so dominated by US politics, awareness of pronatalism in Europe is low. But Bhattacharya highlights that, as prime minister of Finland, centre-left Sanna Marin appointed a demographics tsar tasked with looking into the country’s demographic challenges. “Happiness, social trust and support for childcare are effective means to promote the recovery of birth rates in low birth rate countries,” the principal investigator, Anna Rotkirch, concluded.
In Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back, a recent book by new Labour MP Torsten Bell, the link between the UK’s low fertility rate and its housing crisis is made. “The cost, size and delayed acquisition of a stable home contribute to plummeting fertility,” he writes.
The Other Half, a non-partisan UK think tank focusing on policy in the interests of women, agrees that housing is preventing people from having the children they want. It also advances a more controversial argument: that the typical mainstream focus on increasing affordable childcare may be misplaced.
“None of what I could hear from Westminster felt like it lined up with what I heard in the playground,” says The Other Half chief executive Fiona Mackenzie. “Post-financial crisis, you see mums working full-time, it goes up and up and up. I think people stopped saying things like ‘mums want to work part-time’ because in a defensive employment market you don’t want to be saying ‘these women need special treatment’. You want to be saying ‘we can match any man, tool for tool’.”
A new report by the think tank, “What do mums want from the early years?”, shared with The House, heard from 582 UK mothers. The overriding response was that they wanted more family-friendly work, and more parenting time with young children rather than less.
Mackenzie says the findings challenge the idea that people aren’t having children principally because childcare is expensive.
“That feels like cart before the horse. Actually, what the mums were telling us is that this model where they have to work more and more, in order to pay for childcare, so that they can work more, so than they can afford their house – it just doesn’t work. It’s a horrible way to live,” she explains.
“Everyone just ignores them because they think that answer is inconvenient: either it’s not progressive, because it implies mums might want to spend time at home, or it’s inconvenient from an economic GDP perspective.”
Whichever path Labour chooses, the effectiveness in pronatal terms of any policies around housing and childcare are disputed. Many argue that countries with family-friendly policies either have falling birth rates, such as in the Nordics, or have struggled to increase them significantly despite huge investment, as in Hungary.
In its 2021 report, the SMF found “significant evidence that policy can be effective in nudging people to have more children”, but also that “such policies are expensive, and may not be sufficient to return us to replacement rate fertility”.
“When you start looking at the demographics, it’s not either/or,” says Bhattacharya. “It’s got to be ‘yes, and…’ all over the place. This is not an anti-migration strategy – migration can help a bit.”
He continues: “I don’t think this is going to be: you can either raise the retirement age, or you can do immigration, or you can raise the fertility rate. It’s probably going to have to be some combination of them… Getting back up to 1.8, 1.9 – it’s not like that’s failure, that’s still getting us in the right direction.”
According to the SMF paper, pronatalism often “merely provides another reason to do things the government should probably do anyway”. With so many on the left still repulsed by the idea of an explicit state push to drive up the birth rate, that is perhaps where pronatalists’ best hope lies under a Labour government.
But if the birth rate falls as quickly as predicted, its effect on the key challenges Keir Starmer’s administration faces – from immigration to the social care crisis – and the likelihood of success in the central task it has set itself – increasing economic growth – will be harder than ever to ignore.
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