by Greg Noone, UnHerd
Smannell and Enham Church of England Primary School looks more like a chapel than a place of learning. On this fine morning, the Victorian-era building is quiet as I stare at its pebble-dashed walls and unobtrusive green fencing. Last year, Hampshire County Council decided that the place should be closed for want of pupils (24 at the last count). Parents were left angry, confused and anxious, says Andy Fitchett, a local Methodist minister, just as he was when his son’s school in Hatherden, a village just 10 minutes’ drive away, closed in 2022.
Few suspected it would come to this. Yet in Hampshire alone, the population of under-15s has shrunk by 2%, leading to the closure of two other primary schools and half-a-dozen mergers. Nor is Jane Austen country alone. In the past two years, 40 state-funded primary schools have shut nationwide. The reason is simple: not enough Britons want to have children. For any country’s population to remain stable, its total fertility rate needs to be at or above an average of 2.1 live births per woman. Britain’s fertility rate is 1.39. If this trend continues, our population will peak at 71 million in 2034, before dropping to as low as 48 million by 2100.
This is a global phenomenon. Birth rates are tanking from Australia to India, from the US to Uruguay, while the populations of countries including South Korea and Germany have already started to shrink. This is not a good thing. Your instinct may be that, with fewer people around, there will be less competition for resources and fewer carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This is true, and immaterial: there may be less competition for minerals, say, but also fewer people to mine and process them, and Elon Musk’s Optimus butlers are a bet more than a certainty. Nor is depopulation easy to reverse. From encouraging letters (France) and tax incentives (Hungary) to limits on abortion (Russia), countries have tried everything, to no avail. Immigration doesn’t work either, not when the birth rates of new arrivals slow too.