by James Wright, Conservative Home
Britain has a problem that no one in Westminster wants to talk about. We’ve become dependent on immigration as a quick fix for our ageing population, shrinking workforce, and increasingly fragile social care. But the deeper, more uncomfortable truth is this, we’re not having enough children.
For decades, successive governments have treated family size as a private matter, or worse, an inconvenience. As birth rates plummets, schools close and the budget deficit expands, it’s clear that strong, stable families with multiple children are not just a personal choice. They’re vital to national security.
Neil O’Brien recently did a deep dive on baby deserts. The average British woman now has just 1.5 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to sustain a population without mass immigration.
This decline has consequences. Schools are closing in rural areas; businesses are struggling to find workers; and the NHS and pension system are creaking under the strain of too few taxpayers supporting an ageing population.
Take Minehead, a seaside town near where I live. In 2000 the population was 20 per cent over 65; it is now 34 per cent. The ‘systems’ answer has been to import more workers. But this short-term fix, creates even bigger problems down the line and does nothing to address the deeper issue.
Sir Paul Coleridge comments:
As Chairman of Marriage Foundation I applaud James’s excellent piece. It is spot on but fails to make one killer point. The fall in birth rates (common to almost every western country… look at Italy and South Korea) is directly linked to fall in marriage rates. The overall birth rate required to support the population is 2.1 children per couple. The married comfortably achieve that with an average rate of 2.4. The unmarried birth rate is well under two as James points out. If you want to boost birthrates, incentivise marriage through REALLY meaningful tax breaks and let all parties and politicians be unequivocal (AND NOT APOLOGETIC) in their support for the best child rearing arrangement ever invented. Absolutely nothing else will reverse the decline and we dont have much time to dither about this existential threat.