Britain needs more babies

The government must wake up to the fact that “falling fertility rates are one of greatest threats to western nations and their economies,” said Tory MP Miriam Cates, in light of a new study on the dramatic demographic changes afoot across the globe.

“There are now too few babies being born to sustain our society,” warned Cates, as she renewed her calls for Rishi Sunak to introduce pro-natal policies, such as tax breaks for stay-at-home mums. 

According to new research published in The Lancet, three in four countries around the globe are expected to have a shrinking population by 2050. By 2100, over 97 per cent of countries will have fertility rates below what is necessary to sustain population size over time. These plummeting birth rates “will completely reconfigure the global economy” and “create staggering social change”, warn the study’s authors. 

To analyse fertility rates, a team of international researchers, led by the University of Washington, examined data from 204 countries on the average number of children women gave birth to over their lifetime. The UK fertility rate has fallen from 2.19 in 1950 to 1.49 in 2021 – one of the lowest fertility rates in western Europe. By 2050, the figure is forecast to fall further to 1.38. 

A dwindling working age population to look after the elderly brings with it the obvious – and major – challenges, such as placing an evergreater pressure on health services and social care.

But it’s also important to address how these demographic changes could shift the international balance of power. 

While the majority of the world is forecast to transition into natural population decline, the baby boom is set to continue in a number of low-income countries. By 2100, the study predicts that more than half of all the world’s babies will be born in sub-Saharan Africa, up from about a quarter in 2021. 

Sub-Saharan African countries, note the researchers, “have a vital resource that ageing societies are losing: a youthful population.”

At the moment, national discourse on migration is in large part focussed on concerns over Britain’s “unsustainable” levels of population growth. But this study concludes that plummeting birthrates in the majority of the world will leave high income countries such as the UK heavily reliant on immigration, leading to “fierce competition for migrants to sustain economic growth”.

As Cates points out, a few more pro-natal policies certainly wouldn’t go amiss either. And other – not specifically child-related – policies could make a difference too: secure housing, for instance, would go a long way in encouraging more Brits to begin building a family. 

However, once a low birth rate in an advanced country sets in, as we have seen time and time again in recent decades, it is a difficult pattern to reverse. Japan, now home to the oldest population in the world bar Monaco, is a case in point. 

Hungary provides further evidence that pro-natal policies alone are rarely enough to buck the trend. Viktor Orbán’s extensive efforts to boost birth rates while curtailing immigration are yet to bear fruit. 

A low birth rate is not in itself entirely negative. It indicates women’s advances in education and their enhanced career opportunities, as well as the greater autonomy individuals have gained over their lives thanks to improved access to contraception. Nor are these projections set in stone: a host of unforeseen world events – wars, natural disasters, pandemics and so on – could turn them upside down. But, much like overlooked pandemic warnings of the past, these warnings of major demographic shifts are far too important to ignore. They demand preparedness. 

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