Phoebe Arslanagić-Little is Head of the New Deal for Parents at Onward.
For decades, we have been having fewer and fewer children. Research published last week in the Lancet drew great attention for predicting that this long running trend would continue unabated and leave the UK heavily reliant on immigration to maintain its workforce.
At its heart, this demographic challenge is not about scary OBR projections and dry economic predictions about the old age-dependency ratio. It is about the ability of people to have the families they want. About making sure that all of us – if we wish it – can say yes to the joys and trials of parenthood, from waking up at 3am because someone had a bad dream to clapping madly when Sheep #3 gets their one line in the school nativity.
Ultimately, any country’s fertility rate (the average projected number of children born to each woman over her lifetime) is the result of a multitude of highly personal decisions; individual choices that add up to a collective national outcome.
But something has gone wrong in the UK, because the choice to become a parent is no longer a true choice, and the ‘birth gap’ is evidence of that.
People are having fewer children than they want: 80 per cent of British women of childbearing age want at least two children, with an average number of desired children of 2.35 per woman. This is far above the current total fertility rate of 1.49 children per woman. With so many people ready and wanting to become parents, investigating the barriers that prevent them from so doing – from the poor design of Statutory Maternity Pay to the unfair postcode lottery of IVF access – is vital.
This is exactly what we do at Onward’s New Deal for Parents campaign. Since launching the project, friends of friends and even strangers are keen to tell me their personal stories and I hear the birth gap manifesting itself in their words:
“Childcare is costing us so much my wife is actually paying £400 a month just to go to work!”
“We considered moving across the country to get another round of IVF on the NHS.”
“We’re still waiting for planning permission to add a room to our home. Feels like the council decides whether or not we get to have another child.”
The serious economic consequences of demographic decline that drove the reaction to research in the Lancet are very real. Longer lifespans and fewer young people means a smaller working-age population, placing great pressure on the state to provide for a costly older population just as revenues fall.
There will be other effects: a greyer Britain with fewer young people will also mean less activity of the young, including innovation and entrepreneurship.
Yet the existence of the birth gap should galvanise and invigorate our leaders to meet the demographic challenge. It is a signal that a major step towards solving the demographic challenge is simply to consider how we can make life better and easier for parents and then make those changes.
Of course, tangible, positive changes to peoples’ lives might not always be easy to implement, but they are resoundingly within the gift of government. This is tremendous reason for hope – and for political action.
Equally, the birth gap is a riposte to those who claim that a policy response to the UK’s demographic challenge will consist of ‘pressuring’ women into having children. Instead, meeting the challenge means helping women to have the children they already want.
We stand on the shoulders of generations of feminists who fought for the social acceptance of childlessness as a valid choice and for the right of a woman to be something other than ‘mother’. That victory is rightly treasured. Yet simultaneously, the majority of women do want to become mothers, and ensuring these women are not locked out of parenthood is important in ensuring they lead the lives they want.
For the sake of a UK that preserves the best of what we have built while providing young families with the stability and prosperity to move confidently into the future, we must understand the demographic challenge as one problem that we both can and want to solve.
Solving this problem is a fundamentally humanist project, about new life and human flourishing. Success will require us to roundly reject confidently pessimistic predictions that this country’s future is preordained to be one of fewer and fewer children, necessitating no political response but managed decline.
Such people have been wrong before. Writing in 1936, Dr Carr-Saunders, a prominent English biologist (and eugenicist) who later became Director of LSE wrote:
“…once the small voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain, in time to become so small that the reproduction rate will fall below replacement rate, and that, when this happened, the restoration of a replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem.”
With supreme confidence, Carr-Saunders wrote those words after the UK had experienced decades of falling fertility. But Carr-Saunders did not have to wait long to be proved resoundingly wrong.
In the late 1930s, the Baby Boom began, a completely unexpected demographic phenomenon that swept through Europe and beyond, driven by improvements to household technology, medical technology, and access to housing that made it easier, safer and better to be a parent.
Just as the Baby Boom was delivered by material improvements that made parents’ lives better, so can the politicians of today achieve the same, making the UK the easiest and best place to start and grow a family – and closing the birth gap.
Phoebe Arslanagić-Little is Head of the New Deal for Parents at Onward.
For decades, we have been having fewer and fewer children. Research published last week in the Lancet drew great attention for predicting that this long running trend would continue unabated and leave the UK heavily reliant on immigration to maintain its workforce.
At its heart, this demographic challenge is not about scary OBR projections and dry economic predictions about the old age-dependency ratio. It is about the ability of people to have the families they want. About making sure that all of us – if we wish it – can say yes to the joys and trials of parenthood, from waking up at 3am because someone had a bad dream to clapping madly when Sheep #3 gets their one line in the school nativity.
Ultimately, any country’s fertility rate (the average projected number of children born to each woman over her lifetime) is the result of a multitude of highly personal decisions; individual choices that add up to a collective national outcome.
But something has gone wrong in the UK, because the choice to become a parent is no longer a true choice, and the ‘birth gap’ is evidence of that.
People are having fewer children than they want: 80 per cent of British women of childbearing age want at least two children, with an average number of desired children of 2.35 per woman. This is far above the current total fertility rate of 1.49 children per woman. With so many people ready and wanting to become parents, investigating the barriers that prevent them from so doing – from the poor design of Statutory Maternity Pay to the unfair postcode lottery of IVF access – is vital.
This is exactly what we do at Onward’s New Deal for Parents campaign. Since launching the project, friends of friends and even strangers are keen to tell me their personal stories and I hear the birth gap manifesting itself in their words:
“Childcare is costing us so much my wife is actually paying £400 a month just to go to work!”
“We considered moving across the country to get another round of IVF on the NHS.”
“We’re still waiting for planning permission to add a room to our home. Feels like the council decides whether or not we get to have another child.”
The serious economic consequences of demographic decline that drove the reaction to research in the Lancet are very real. Longer lifespans and fewer young people means a smaller working-age population, placing great pressure on the state to provide for a costly older population just as revenues fall.
There will be other effects: a greyer Britain with fewer young people will also mean less activity of the young, including innovation and entrepreneurship.
Yet the existence of the birth gap should galvanise and invigorate our leaders to meet the demographic challenge. It is a signal that a major step towards solving the demographic challenge is simply to consider how we can make life better and easier for parents and then make those changes.
Of course, tangible, positive changes to peoples’ lives might not always be easy to implement, but they are resoundingly within the gift of government. This is tremendous reason for hope – and for political action.
Equally, the birth gap is a riposte to those who claim that a policy response to the UK’s demographic challenge will consist of ‘pressuring’ women into having children. Instead, meeting the challenge means helping women to have the children they already want.
We stand on the shoulders of generations of feminists who fought for the social acceptance of childlessness as a valid choice and for the right of a woman to be something other than ‘mother’. That victory is rightly treasured. Yet simultaneously, the majority of women do want to become mothers, and ensuring these women are not locked out of parenthood is important in ensuring they lead the lives they want.
For the sake of a UK that preserves the best of what we have built while providing young families with the stability and prosperity to move confidently into the future, we must understand the demographic challenge as one problem that we both can and want to solve.
Solving this problem is a fundamentally humanist project, about new life and human flourishing. Success will require us to roundly reject confidently pessimistic predictions that this country’s future is preordained to be one of fewer and fewer children, necessitating no political response but managed decline.
Such people have been wrong before. Writing in 1936, Dr Carr-Saunders, a prominent English biologist (and eugenicist) who later became Director of LSE wrote:
“…once the small voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain, in time to become so small that the reproduction rate will fall below replacement rate, and that, when this happened, the restoration of a replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem.”
With supreme confidence, Carr-Saunders wrote those words after the UK had experienced decades of falling fertility. But Carr-Saunders did not have to wait long to be proved resoundingly wrong.
In the late 1930s, the Baby Boom began, a completely unexpected demographic phenomenon that swept through Europe and beyond, driven by improvements to household technology, medical technology, and access to housing that made it easier, safer and better to be a parent.
Just as the Baby Boom was delivered by material improvements that made parents’ lives better, so can the politicians of today achieve the same, making the UK the easiest and best place to start and grow a family – and closing the birth gap.