Fertility rate at record low in ‘slow-burn’ British crisis

Women having fewer children than at any point in past 83 years as postCovid baby boom falters

THE fertility rate in England and Wales has dropped to a record low, with women having fewer children than at any point since at least 1939 in a “slowburn” economic crisis.

New figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the fertility rate, which measures the average number of children a woman of childbearing age will have, dropped to 1.49 in 2022.

The number, which is the lowest in 83 years, comes amid an increasingly political debate about why women are having fewer children.

Many politicians and economists fear that the economy will struggle to grow and living standards will stagnate or decline as the number of older people grows while fewer children are born.

Christiaan Monden, a professor of sociology and demography at the University of Oxford said: “It is a slowburn build. It is something to be concerned about if this continues for a long time. It will bring problems with our ageing population.”

To offset the impact of a shrinking working-age population, politicians will be forced to find solutions such as raising the retirement age or allowing greater immigration, he said.

“You don’t have to say right now we need to increase the pension age but it will be a reality if we have these levels of fertility for another decade. Something will inevitably have to give,” he added.

The decline defies hopes that a small post-Covid baby boom in 2021, pushing up the fertility rate for the first time in 13 years, would maintain momentum.

Instead, like many rich countries, the UK is heading for a baby bust as demographers warn that high living costs, nursery fees and house prices, and stagnating pay for young people, mean rates will likely continue to fall.

The number of children that British women have has been in decline for a long time, falling from an average of nearly three in 1964.

The latest decline is “a new low but it is not unexpected”, Mr Monden said.

He added: “I think it’s quite likely that we see small, further decreases.”

Mr Monden’s concern is shared by Anna Rotkirch, a leading expert on European fertility rates who is a professor at the Population Research Institute at the Family Federation of Finland.

She said: “Birth rates have gone lower than anyone predicted. We do not know in Europe whether we in the longer run will go below 1 in some countries.”

The average fertility rate across the European Union was 1.53 in 2021. In South Korea, it was 0.82 and is since believed to have fallen further to 0.72.

To maintain a population at its current level women need to have 2.1 children on average. Any return to such numbers is unlikely, Ms Rotkirch warned: “This kind of dream of how will we get back to a fertility rate of 2 now looks very unrealistic. That is not on the table at the moment. The question is how long will the decline continue.

“We see quite dramatically the continuation of the trend where birth rates keep coming down even in countries where they used to be quite high a decade ago, like the UK and France. Very few European countries appear to have even modest increases in birth rates.”