by Miriam Cates, Telegraph
Britain’s birth rate has plummeted. It is a sad truth that many couples later regret not having children
Women in England and Wales are having fewer children than ever.
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR, the average number of births per woman) has now dropped to a record low of 1.41. Given a TFR of at least 2.1 is needed to maintain a stable population, Britain is being propelled into a tailspin of demographic decline in which each generation will be a third smaller than the one before.
Most politicians would prefer to sleepwalk towards demographic disaster than confront this problem. But we must urgently wake up to the devastating impacts of the “baby bust”. How much longer can a shrinking proportion of working age people continue to shoulder the cost of pensions, health and social care for a growing number of retirees?
In the 1970s, Britain had four working age people supporting each pensioner. That ratio has now dropped to three to one and is headed for two to one. It will soon be impossible to extract enough tax from what is left of Britain’s working-age population to support so many who are dependent on the state.
So what should we do about it? A recent paper by demographer and data scientist Stephen J Shaw indicates that declining fertility rates are driven not by falling family sizes – as is commonly assumed – but by the growing number of women who never become mothers at all.