Why aren’t we having more babies?

0:00Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow. Hi, I'm Gareth Barlow and this is the Sky News Daily. Fertility rates have fallen to a new record low, but why?

0:37And will there be anyone left to look after us when we're old? Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.

1:20The happy sound of children once sought after by many hoping to build a family. Or maybe the thought of that feels more like this.

1:33Well, new data shows the fertility rate for England and Wales has fallen for the third year in a row to the lowest levels since record began way back in 1938. The total fertility rate across both nations, defined as the average number of children women would expect to have across their entire childbearing life, stood at 1.41 in 2024. So what's putting off potential parents from having babies? I just don't see that it would enhance my life. I also can't comprehend people paying over two grand a month to send two children to nursery for two to three days a week. I would really like kids. It's something I've always wanted to do.

2:15My current concerns are that I'm 31 at the moment and only just got into a serious relationship. We'd love to start a family one day, but as a same-sex couple in our early 30s, our focus right now is on the freedom to travel, explore career opportunities and build the life that we want without feeling rushed by the conventional biological time pressures that a lot of other couples face. It just seems completely unfeasible to be able to afford to have a child in this economy. We'd like to be a bit more settled in our own home but there is always a worry about leaving it too late and then not being able to or finding it difficult.

2:49A few thoughts there and a few reasons why. Well to discuss this further I'm joined by Paul Moreland, leading demographer and author of No One Left, why the world needs more children. And Paul, we heard some of the concerns young people have when it comes to making a decision to have kids or not. We'll get more onto that in a few minutes time. First, though, just talk to us about the difference between birth rate and fertility rate. The birth rate is a crude measure, and you can get that crude measure far back in history. It's very easy to calculate how many births in a country or a society in a year over the number of people.

3:22The trouble with that is it doesn't tell you that much. But we look at the number of births in a year say, and we say, and this is a slight simplification, we say if that's the number of births to that number of fertile women in that year, then if a woman's fertility stretches, say, across 30 years, and let's say in that year for every 10 women one child was born, then over 30 years the average woman would have three children. And it's better than the absolute or crude birth rate. Number one, because it is adjusted for how many young women there are having children, and therefore doesn't look distorted if you've got a differently shaped population pyramid.

4:04And the second thing, it's a number that people can relate to very easily. If you say a birth rate of 30 ,000 or 3 % versus 1%, I don't think people really know what that means. But if you say in this society, the average woman has two children or three children, then I think people can relate it to their own families, to their own experience, their own communities. And then they can think through what that would mean if everybody were adopting that. So the ONS, Office for National Statistics, has published this data regarding fertility. What have we learned? What have they told us? The change is very slight.

4:35It's knocking around at the low 1.4s, slightly down on last year. The total fertility rate is not going to change that much in a year. It's down slightly. I think what's alarming is that this is a real... So we had replacement fertility is something over two children or around two children. Back in the 60s, early 70s, it went below that. But for a very long time, although it was below that, and the fact that it was below that has resulted in an ageing society, wasn't that much below it. But in the last five or six years, it's been heading down. It's now well below 1.5. It stayed there for another year.

5:11And we know that there's almost no limit to how low it can go. You mentioned there replacement rates. What does that mean and what is that figure? If we're at 1.41 in England and Wales at the moment, what would the replacement figure be? Well, the replacement rate is the number of children that the average woman needs to have for the population to stabilise. So based on today's mortality statistics, a child born today is very, very, very unlikely to die before he or she, say, is 45. Now, if that's the case, if almost everybody makes it through their fertile years, then two children per couple just about replaces things.

5:49And so people talk about 2.1 as if it's some sort of mathematical norm, a little bit over two, because not everybody makes it to their fertile years. 1.4 is obviously well below that. Once you're below replacement fertility, you're on the path to a declining population, a declining natural population. That obviously doesn't count the issue of immigration, which is statistically, demographically, another question. The UK is at 1.41 at the fertility rate. replacement you say is at 2.1. What are the international standards? What are the highs and the lows in this respect? So the highs are the countries which are undeveloped or only starting to develop economically.

6:32Sub-Saharan Africa, it's a range. So countries like Kenya, I think, is now below four. Ethiopia is getting its fertility rate down. Chad, northern Nigeria, might be six or seven. It's very unusual to have more than six or seven as an average. But those countries have barely started what we call their demographic transition to lower fertility. Their mortality rates are falling. They're getting some basic health care and some basic education. Therefore, fewer people are dying. And at the same time, they're having very high numbers of children. So their population is growing very rapidly. Outside sub-Saharan Africa, very few countries are at that level.

7:07Yemen, Pakistan, a few countries in the Arab world, Iraq was relatively high recently. Most of these countries, it's coming down. There are a few countries, mainly West and Central Africa, where it's not. So even if they're well above replacement level, it's starting to fall quite quickly. So the only places where you've got a high level of fertility, really high level of fertility, is in those last countries which haven't really got on the development train, if you like. At the other extreme are countries in East Asia and some in Southern Europe, which have very, very low fertility. Extraordinarily falling fast is Latin America.

7:44North America is a bit better than Europe. Everywhere in Europe is well below replacement level. And then there are very, very few countries which are not in the very poor category, which have an okay fertility rate, a fertility rate which is above replacement. And those are the countries of Central Asia and Israel, which is the only country in the OECD, really developed, rich, urban, educated country, which has got a fertility rate of three. All the other OECD countries are below two. So it's a mixture of a bunch of economic and developmental measures. And then on top of that, certain cultures are more prone, April, and certain cultures less.

8:24So a mosaic of fertility rates, but on the whole a trend to lower fertility rates and certainly kind of falling fertility rates. What challenges does this pose on a societal, dare I say, global level? Well, I think the first thing which is so often overlooked is people in most countries say they want two to three children and they're having one to two in the developed world. So there are a lot of frustrations, unhappinesses, people who would have liked to have children. And this isn't a biological issue. So biological fertility is another question. In terms of economic, society, politics, the fundamental problem is that you get more and more people who are of retirement age.

9:04You can move the retirement age a bit, a lot of resistance to the number of people working. So the workers are the ones who are doing the work, paying the taxes. And people over a certain age consume a lot in health care. their pensions are paid, and we have the triple lock in the UK and similar arrangements elsewhere, which means the pensions are quite well off very often, or even at the very bottom are better looked after than poor workers, for example. This puts more and more pressure on the state, more and more pressure on the labour markets. And also younger populations tend to be more dynamic, more inventive, more entrepreneurial.

9:39So if I were in Rachel Reeves' shoes, I would understand that a lot of the problems she's dealing with, whether it's the day-to-day problem of funding the government debt, the terrible fiscal situation we're in, the lack of growth, the lack of productivity growth is fundamentally demographic. I think, unfortunately, most politicians don't get that. We have to address the slight elephant in the room and say to ourselves, come on, we've got two men here discussing the fact that women need to have children to replace the population. And a lot of what we've talked about is the fact that fertility rates have reduced because employment's improved, education's improved, healthcare's improved, the economy's improved, opportunities have improved.

10:16There must be, for some people, a benefit here, that they have more freedom and more choice than they had before. Of course, there's a benefit for certain individuals who don't want to have children. I think if someone does want to have children and doesn't end up having them for whatever reason, that's sad. I certainly think this is a human issue, not a man issue. But there is a feminist pronatalism which says, yes, it's wonderful women now have these choices. How can we help them to make the choice if they want to have children that they can. Why, for example, just to pick one fact out of many, are there so many gyms but so few nurseries in workplaces?

10:53So I think there is a feminist agenda on supporting women who want to have children. And women say they want two to three children. There's good statistical evidence that they're not having the number of children that they want to have. The question then, which we have to answer as a society if we want a future, is how do we couple all those wonderful things for young women with a bunch of other things, whether it's support or it's the culture or it's the tradition or it's the narrative or it's the legal rights? How do we countervail the very positive things which are causing a lower fertility rate with a bunch of other things, whether it's economic or cultural, that mean people still have two to three children on average?

11:34We talk about having children, two to three, the kind of average desire. lots of people will say, hang on, the best thing you can do for the environment to save the planet is not have any kids. It's the best way to reduce your carbon footprint. There are a whole raft of arguments against that. First of all, if you look at the average output of carbon in Britain over the last 30 or 40 years, it's plummeted. The child born today on the current trajectory will probably have very few emissions. Secondly, if we don't have the labour, we then ship people in from very low emissions countries to very high emissions countries.

12:08Now, again, immigration is a debate. You can be pro, you can be anti, but you're not solving the problem. If you say, I won't have children, but I expect a doctor, I expect a nurse, I expect a bus driver, I expect whatever else it is, someone in the call centre. I need all these services. I'm not going to have my own children, but I'll pull people in from other countries where they have very, very low emissions. They'll come to Britain or Germany or America. Their emissions might go up 30, 40, 50 times so they can serve my needs and I can delude myself that I'm saving the planet. The third major argument I would say against that is if we are going to continue on this route of reducing our emissions, we need inventive, creative people, entrepreneurial people.

12:48You get that from the 20s, 30s and 40s as we become an old age society. And there's very good data on this in Japan. We become less creative, less inventive. And the technology we have today will stagnate. It's only with new technologies, new ways of producing motors, new ways of cooling and heating houses, a whole range of things. But we can't do it if we're just an old age home with a few workers and rapidly dragging in the last workers from high fertility countries because we're too busy, self-important or green to have our own children. How are countries trying to fix this? Well, a lot of countries are not trying to fix it.

13:25And Britain is definitely in that category. So our politicians refuse to speak about it. Or if they do, they're contradictory. Keir Starmer said he wasn't interested. Bridget Phillipson has said it is an issue. And that's about as far as it's gone in the UK after 50 years of below replacement fertility. So pretty useless. Other countries have got significant financial incentives in place. Obviously, Hungary is a case in point. France is a case in point. I mean, I read an article for the Sunday Times three years ago, saying we should if we can't afford to give tax cuts to people having kids, we should raise taxes for those who don't and have a differential tax ban.

14:00And that caused a stir, even a stink, I'd say. But actually, that's very normal. We kind of had it under Blair Brown at one stage in a very minor way. It's a big deal in France. So there are tax breaks you can do, which maybe have to be funded or will have to be funded from somewhere else, and perhaps higher tax rates for people who don't have children. And I've got the cost to bring up that next generation. There's subsidised childcare. There are a whole range of economic incentives. There are legal incentives, sorts of things we talked about, more rights for parents in the workplace. But I do think in addition to that, we need to shift the culture so that whilst young people embrace all the wonderful opportunities that they have to travel, to study and effectively to delay the start of a hard and serious working life.

14:48At the same time, we provide them with the encouragements and incentives and support to have children so that getting on and forming a family becomes something that people not only say in theory they want to do, but they really prioritise. We're already suffering from the fact that it's been below two for so long. 1.4 is storing up problems for 20 years time. And I fear it could go even lower if we don't start to push back against it and throw at this. The kitchen sink, effectively cultural, corporate and economic. We started the podcast hearing from some young people and they talked about some of their concerns.

15:23What do you say to the young people of 2025 when they're considering but also concerned about having children and embarking on the journey of being parents? Well, maybe a six-year-old man should have nothing to say and I should leave it to young people who have these discussions themselves. But I am a father and a grandfather. I've seen my own children going through these sorts of issues. issues and I would say that if people had a better sense of history social history if they knew how much better their circumstances are than their grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great grandparents when they were starting out they would realize that sometimes you just have to get on with it if you have children very very few people regret it it will change your life it will make you less self-centered you will have to focus on somebody else but it is in my view and the view of most parents, I think, the most rewarding thing you can possibly do.

16:17It just takes a certain amount of courage to take the plunge. And of course, we have so many options now. It's now in our hands, we now have the ability to make our own choices, to pursue our own dreams. I think if giving birth, if being a parent isn't part of those dreams, and making that a reality doesn't become part of those dreams, then for many people, not for everybody, but for the vast majority of people, you're missing out on the greatest joy in life. That was Paul Moreland. I'm Gareth Barlow. This is The Daily. Thanks for listening. We're back tomorrow.

16:52Hello, Ed Conway here. Here's what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. but on my podcast Stuff Matters I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.