Traditional Britain Group

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You know what's the most heartbreaking single statistic in modern Britain?

The figure in the Centre for Social Justice's recent work on the family that 9 out of 10 young British women say they want children (the customary 2.n each).

The heartbreaking part of that figure is that, for all those would-be mums, the economic question around it is no longer "How do I get there?" but "Will I get there?"

The headline numbers are stark and they are not at all unique to us. Just as global birth rates are sinking, the national birth rate has fallen to 1.41, the lowest ever recorded, well under the 2.08 a country needs simply to replace itself. The marriage rate among women aged 20 to 24 has dropped 97% since 1972. The average age of a first marriage has climbed from the early twenties to the early thirties. On current trends, deaths in Britain will outnumber births by around 2030, and from that year the population grows by immigration alone.

For years the fashionable way to read all this was that people have changed their minds about family - careers first, freedom, the long adolescence. People were just too sophisticated for love and legacy-building; then they were too childish. It doesn't matter. We've allowed a serious demographic problem of a birthing nature to develop in the cradle of our society. The lazy policy conclusion, reached with a shrug, of bringing in more people from abroad to fill the gap has resulted in limited benefit, economic contraction, and streams of tragedy.

I will not accept that the British have any kind of death wish. The desire in them is fully intact: nine in ten of these young women want children. So we need to price them INTO having them, rather than out-.

The cost of merely beginning tells the story. A full-time nursery place runs to £14,000 a year. Housing eats 30 to 40% of income across London and the South East. The whole economy is built around two full incomes.. A couple in their early thirties - working, saving, paying a mortgage - will nevertheless do the arithmetic, have one child (at most!) where they wanted three, and then run out of time.

This is neither a mystery nor a fate. Hungary lifted its birth rate by nearly a third with a serious pro-family programme: subsidised housing loans, tax relief for mothers, a deliberate effort to make family life affordable and respected again. France has held near the top of Europe for decades by deciding, plainly, that families matter and backing that with money. Treat it as a national priority and the rate moves. Treat it as a private lifestyle choice, as we do, and you get 1.41.

Progress takes family formation as seriously as it takes immigration, because they are the same question asked from opposite ends. Our policy is built for the people who want children and can't reach them: a Family Formation Loan, real help with the brutal cost of childcare, a tax system that stops fining the parent who stays home. The aim is plain - that a young couple who want three children can have three children, in a house they can afford, without it being an act of financial heroism.

A country whose young want families and cannot afford them is not a healthy one, whatever the GDP line is doing. The single consolation is that this is one of the few great problems with a known answer. Other nations have done it. We are no poorer than they are. We have only, so far, decided it doesn't matter.

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Maxi (@AllForProgress_) on X

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2.14K viewsedited 11:39