Raising the British birth-rate would help address the pressures of an ageing society without the many drawbacks of immigration.
Recently Sir Keir Starmer was asked if people in Britain should have more children. He said, despite a recent flurry of pronouncements on drinking and nicotine, that he wasn’t going to tell people how to live their lives.
But too many people are not living their lives as they want: surveys show that many women want more children than they feel able to have. By contrast, in Europe pro-natalist government plans are all the rage. Hungary is well known for its generous benefits for families, which have had some success. In Italy, they have an annual birth target. And in France, they offer free fertility checks for the young in an effort to increase the number of births.
Many of these measures are driven by anxiety over the decline in global birth rates in recent decades. Why people began having fewer children is hotly debated, but nonetheless the trend is clear. In the 1970s, British births dipped below the total fertility rate of 2.1, which is what is needed to maintain a stable population size, and it has stubbornly continued to drop. That has been masked by immigration, so that the population has grown despite our low fertility.
The Office of Budget Responsibility has spotlighted this as an economic risk. After all, fewer children means fewer people of working age and therefore less tax income. It also means that as larger older generations retire then the fiscal burden on the smaller number of those of working age increases. Over the next 50 years, they predict the number of over 65s may rise as high as 27 per cent of the population.
That would lead public spending to rise from 45 to 60 per cent of GDP, while government borrowing would increase to 20.5 per cent of GDP in 2073-74. Debt would meanwhile reach 274 per cent of GDP. It is no surprise therefore that many people think immigration is essential in order to keep the economy going.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago the UN looked at this issue, in a paper titled Replacement Migration. They found that in order to maintain the ratio of workers to retirees, Britain would need to bring in over 1 million immigrants a year, resulting in a country that was majoritively made up of recent immigrants and their descendents by 2050. If such a policy was ever tried, it would not only be incredibly unpopular but also be unlikely to work.
Human beings are not atomised economic units which can be guaranteed to have the same economic impact wherever they are moved. Indeed, record immigration in recent years has coincided with a stalling economy, low wage growth, and moribund productivity. Studies are increasingly demonstrating that only very high-skilled immigrants are actually fiscally good for the countries they emigrate to.
What’s more, Britain isn’t maximising the economic benefits of migrants. Major recent visa routes, like that for social workers, had no age limit, leading to a situation where some of those arriving were in their 60s and would need to retire soon themselves. Similarly, while countries like Singapore ensure that migrants stay only for their peak earning years, we do no such thing and have ended up with large numbers of economically inactive migrants.
There’s also a misapprehension that the rest of the world is growing. On the contrary, many of the lowest fertility rates exist in the poorer countries of the world. Colombia has the same fertility as Germany, Tunisia as Slovenia, India as Monaco.
The phenomenon of countries getting old before they get rich is increasingly common. Only Africa is still growing, and even their fertility is in decline and statistics are unreliable. Relying on immigration to solve our fertility problems is therefore doubly wrong: not only does it not work, it immorally strips these poorer countries of their workers, making them worse off.
Thankfully there is a solution. As the OBR notes, if we can only increase productivity then we can grow the economy substantially. Not only do AI and greater automation promise that, but we know that Britain has a lack of infrastructure because of our planning laws. Therefore, if the government can reduce immigration and regulations, they could unleash the growth that Britain needs.
It could also have another beneficial effect. As pro-natalist campaigning group Boom have shown, the midcentury Baby Boom was enabled by increasing numbers of white goods and general prosperity. People were able to marry and have children younger because their lives were good. So while it is good for the government to think about how to help families, it may be that we need growth more than we need subsidies.
First published in the Daily Telegraph
About the author
Guy Dampier: Senior Researcher
Guy is a Senior Researcher on Nationhood at the Institute. Previously he worked at a media start-up, where he was the co-creator of the documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame, which played a central role in the decision of then-Home Secretary the Rt Hon Suella Braverman to launch a new taskforce to deal with the issue.
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