Edward Davies: Solving the birth rate crisis is a moral and fiscal imperative
Who's accountable for the results?
Edward Davies is Research Director at the Centre for Social Justice.
Motherhood was much in the news this week.
It kicked off with a flurry of last-minute chocolate and daffodil purchasing by the nation’s offspring on Sunday morning. And hot on the heels of Mothering Sunday came Jessie’s Buckley’s Oscar acceptance speech in which she dedicated the honour “to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”.
We at the CSJ also launched a report that found that 600,000 women would miss out on their ambitions of motherhood due to the falling birthrate and that three million women aged 16 to 45 today are projected not to have children if current trends persist.
But for all undoubted importance of motherhood and the human pathos of these three events, the last in particular signals something far greater and more concerning.
The UK’s fertility decline is often framed as a motherhood issue largely because that is how it is measured – births per woman. But it is far from that alone.
The ripples of our declining birthrate travel far and wide. It’s felt by fathers too of course – it takes two to tango after all. And it’s felt by siblings, uncles, and aunts. It impacts grandparents and communities too as the population gets older and older.
They are a few years further down this road than us in Japan but during the first half of 2024, 40,000 people died alone in their home. Of that number, nearly 4,000 people were discovered more than a month after they died, and 130 bodies went unmissed for a year before they were found.
We all depend on the relationships in our lives, right up to, and even beyond our deaths.
This has huge societal effects too, not least on public services. As Japan has discovered, it is not cheap or easy for the state to reproduce what families have traditionally done for millennia. Our social care sector is already groaning under the weight.
But a medic colleague working on doctors’ contracts used to joke to me that the most sensitive nerve in the body is the wallet nerve and it is maybe our economy where we will feel the pinch hardest.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that, on current trends, UK public debt could rise to around 270 per cent of GDP by the early 2070s as ageing pushes up spending on pensions, health and social care.
To maintain our current economy and standard of living with a declining population would require unprecedented and improbable productivity increases. When they fail to materialise, we will have to make significant cuts and perhaps the one hard aging-related lever governments have to play with is the pension age.
The CSJ’s analysis shows that on current population estimates children in school today could face working until their mid-70s before receiving a state pension.
If the government …
Who's accountable for the results?
Edward Davies is Research Director at the Centre for Social Justice.
Motherhood was much in the news this week.
It kicked off with a flurry of last-minute chocolate and daffodil purchasing by the nation’s offspring on Sunday morning. And hot on the heels of Mothering Sunday came Jessie’s Buckley’s Oscar acceptance speech in which she dedicated the honour “to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”.
We at the CSJ also launched a report that found that 600,000 women would miss out on their ambitions of motherhood due to the falling birthrate and that three million women aged 16 to 45 today are projected not to have children if current trends persist.
But for all undoubted importance of motherhood and the human pathos of these three events, the last in particular signals something far greater and more concerning.
The UK’s fertility decline is often framed as a motherhood issue largely because that is how it is measured – births per woman. But it is far from that alone.
The ripples of our declining birthrate travel far and wide. It’s felt by fathers too of course – it takes two to tango after all. And it’s felt by siblings, uncles, and aunts. It impacts grandparents and communities too as the population gets older and older.
They are a few years further down this road than us in Japan but during the first half of 2024, 40,000 people died alone in their home. Of that number, nearly 4,000 people were discovered more than a month after they died, and 130 bodies went unmissed for a year before they were found.
We all depend on the relationships in our lives, right up to, and even beyond our deaths.
This has huge societal effects too, not least on public services. As Japan has discovered, it is not cheap or easy for the state to reproduce what families have traditionally done for millennia. Our social care sector is already groaning under the weight.
But a medic colleague working on doctors’ contracts used to joke to me that the most sensitive nerve in the body is the wallet nerve and it is maybe our economy where we will feel the pinch hardest.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that, on current trends, UK public debt could rise to around 270 per cent of GDP by the early 2070s as ageing pushes up spending on pensions, health and social care.
To maintain our current economy and standard of living with a declining population would require unprecedented and improbable productivity increases. When they fail to materialise, we will have to make significant cuts and perhaps the one hard aging-related lever governments have to play with is the pension age.
The CSJ’s analysis shows that on current population estimates children in school today could face working until their mid-70s before receiving a state pension.
If the government …
Edward Davies: Solving the birth rate crisis is a moral and fiscal imperative
Who's accountable for the results?
Edward Davies is Research Director at the Centre for Social Justice.
Motherhood was much in the news this week.
It kicked off with a flurry of last-minute chocolate and daffodil purchasing by the nation’s offspring on Sunday morning. And hot on the heels of Mothering Sunday came Jessie’s Buckley’s Oscar acceptance speech in which she dedicated the honour “to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”.
We at the CSJ also launched a report that found that 600,000 women would miss out on their ambitions of motherhood due to the falling birthrate and that three million women aged 16 to 45 today are projected not to have children if current trends persist.
But for all undoubted importance of motherhood and the human pathos of these three events, the last in particular signals something far greater and more concerning.
The UK’s fertility decline is often framed as a motherhood issue largely because that is how it is measured – births per woman. But it is far from that alone.
The ripples of our declining birthrate travel far and wide. It’s felt by fathers too of course – it takes two to tango after all. And it’s felt by siblings, uncles, and aunts. It impacts grandparents and communities too as the population gets older and older.
They are a few years further down this road than us in Japan but during the first half of 2024, 40,000 people died alone in their home. Of that number, nearly 4,000 people were discovered more than a month after they died, and 130 bodies went unmissed for a year before they were found.
We all depend on the relationships in our lives, right up to, and even beyond our deaths.
This has huge societal effects too, not least on public services. As Japan has discovered, it is not cheap or easy for the state to reproduce what families have traditionally done for millennia. Our social care sector is already groaning under the weight.
But a medic colleague working on doctors’ contracts used to joke to me that the most sensitive nerve in the body is the wallet nerve and it is maybe our economy where we will feel the pinch hardest.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that, on current trends, UK public debt could rise to around 270 per cent of GDP by the early 2070s as ageing pushes up spending on pensions, health and social care.
To maintain our current economy and standard of living with a declining population would require unprecedented and improbable productivity increases. When they fail to materialise, we will have to make significant cuts and perhaps the one hard aging-related lever governments have to play with is the pension age.
The CSJ’s analysis shows that on current population estimates children in school today could face working until their mid-70s before receiving a state pension.
If the government …
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