Henry Clifford is Head of Communications for Bright Blue
The nuclear family is the building block of society.
As it crumbles so does Britain – and crumble it does. The birthrate has reduced from its record low of an average of 1.41 children per woman in 2024, to 1.39 in 2026.
Many of the challenges facing the country stem from a reduction in the number of children restocking the country for future generations – an expanding pensions bill which can’t be sustained with a shrinking work-age population, a debt burden which requires more workers to act as security, and the pressure this puts on successive governments to import workers despite resistance from much of the public.
But the low birthrate isn’t simply a problem for instrumental reasons, it’s a problem in and of itself. People want to have families, deserve to have families, and yet they are struggling to. Studies vary on exactly how many desired children are failing to arrive, Dr Paula Sheppard put the fertility gap at 0.3 (for every 3 children wanted, only two are born), while the IEA put it at closer to 0.4.
What is getting in the way of people having the children they want?
Around 30 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men cite financial reasons as the main reason they aren’t yet trying for children.
While per capita economic growth overall is needed to solve this issue in the round, there is one group of people who are much more likely to be affected by economic insecurity than others – the self-employed – and they have far less support when it comes to reproduction than most.
New research from Bright Blue has found that the median full-time self-employed person earns about 11 per cent less than the median full-time employee, while 45 per cent have faced a significant disruption to their work in the last year. While employed mothers are entitled to 90 per cent of their earnings for 6 weeks, falling to £194.32/week for up to 33 weeks, self-employed mothers immediately fall onto £194.32/week irrespective of their baseline earnings. Self-employed fathers get nothing at all.
With the number of self-employed people growing by more than a million since the turn of the millennium, this group makes up both an increasing and insecure part of the population. The flexibility to increase or decrease work according to need should in theory make having children easier. But in practice, the massive imbalance between parental rights combines with overall volatility to put self-employed people at a huge disadvantage.
All parental leave is, in effect, paid for by the state, so it makes little sense that self-employed people should lose out by virtue of an unintended quirk of the system that means it is administered through employers.
A balancing of paternity rights would cost only £19.7million/year, while a balancing of maternity pay would cost £52.8million/year – a tiny fraction of government spending, around 0.1 per cent of disability benefits spending.
If we are serious about supporting the family, then this is low hanging fruit.
Currently the self-employed consider the Conservatives as the second least supportive political party (after Labour). At the last election they were 53 per cemt more likely to vote for Reform than the average member of the public. Equalising parental benefits here would not only improve conditions for hundreds of thousands of new families, but it would also show a largely disaffected group that Conservatives take them seriously.
Henry Clifford is Head of Communications for Bright Blue
The nuclear family is the building block of society.
As it crumbles so does Britain – and crumble it does. The birthrate has reduced from its record low of an average of 1.41 children per woman in 2024, to 1.39 in 2026.
Many of the challenges facing the country stem from a reduction in the number of children restocking the country for future generations – an expanding pensions bill which can’t be sustained with a shrinking work-age population, a debt burden which requires more workers to act as security, and the pressure this puts on successive governments to import workers despite resistance from much of the public.
But the low birthrate isn’t simply a problem for instrumental reasons, it’s a problem in and of itself. People want to have families, deserve to have families, and yet they are struggling to. Studies vary on exactly how many desired children are failing to arrive, Dr Paula Sheppard put the fertility gap at 0.3 (for every 3 children wanted, only two are born), while the IEA put it at closer to 0.4.
What is getting in the way of people having the children they want?
Around 30 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men cite financial reasons as the main reason they aren’t yet trying for children.
While per capita economic growth overall is needed to solve this issue in the round, there is one group of people who are much more likely to be affected by economic insecurity than others – the self-employed – and they have far less support when it comes to reproduction than most.
New research from Bright Blue has found that the median full-time self-employed person earns about 11 per cent less than the median full-time employee, while 45 per cent have faced a significant disruption to their work in the last year. While employed mothers are entitled to 90 per cent of their earnings for 6 weeks, falling to £194.32/week for up to 33 weeks, self-employed mothers immediately fall onto £194.32/week irrespective of their baseline earnings. Self-employed fathers get nothing at all.
With the number of self-employed people growing by more than a million since the turn of the millennium, this group makes up both an increasing and insecure part of the population. The flexibility to increase or decrease work according to need should in theory make having children easier. But in practice, the massive imbalance between parental rights combines with overall volatility to put self-employed people at a huge disadvantage.
All parental leave is, in effect, paid for by the state, so it makes little sense that self-employed people should lose out by virtue of an unintended quirk of the system that means it is administered through employers.
A balancing of paternity rights would cost only £19.7million/year, while a balancing of maternity pay would cost £52.8million/year – a tiny fraction of government spending, around 0.1 per cent of disability benefits spending.
If we are serious about supporting the family, then this is low hanging fruit.
Currently the self-employed consider the Conservatives as the second least supportive political party (after Labour). At the last election they were 53 per cemt more likely to vote for Reform than the average member of the public. Equalising parental benefits here would not only improve conditions for hundreds of thousands of new families, but it would also show a largely disaffected group that Conservatives take them seriously.