Falling birth rates are making Britain poorer

SIR – Population decline (News Focus, February 17) is indeed one of the most pressing issues facing humanity and the economic repercussions of falling birth rates must not be underestimated.

A peer-reviewed scientific paper has shown that a Uk-born child’s economic value is more than £700,000 through tax and pension contributions over their lifetime. Having just fallen into recession, Britain can no longer afford to ignore the detrimental impact of declining birth rates and an ageing population. The recent examples of New Zealand’s lowest-recorded birth rates, Seoul subsidising egg-freezing in a bid to boost fertility, and Emmanuel Macron’s pro-fertility and pro-birth policies in France demonstrate that this is an urgent, global crisis.

We need a multifaceted approach to boosting birth rates, from fertility education in schools all the way through to testing, better workplace support and a top-down approach whereby government departments share the costs of pro-fertility policies.

In Britain, the Department for Health and Social Care, the Department of Work and Pensions, the Women and Equalities Committee and the Treasury all have roles to play.

Measures should include improving the accessibility and provision of fertility treatments and abolishing the IVF postcode lottery. We need a collaborative approach from leaders to secure the country’s economic future amid population uncertainty. Professor Geeta Nargund

Senior NHS consultant and medical director, Create Fertility and abc ivf London EC2

SIR – In your report (“NHS spending on private-sector scans triples in five years”, telegraph.co.uk, February 18), you refer to an increase in spending by the NHS on outsourced radiology.

However, outsourced is not the same as private sector. Here at the Epilepsy Society we have an MRI scanner whose purchase was funded by generous donors. We make scans on this equipment available to the NHS at, broadly, cost price. This means that using our equipment is effectively cheaper for the NHS than using its own, when you take into account the capital costs of purchasing it. I suspect other charities do the same. Clare Pelham

Chief executive, Epilepsy Society Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire