Declining Birth Rates

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Nargund, for her choice of subject—what a neatly symmetrical pairing it was. I wish I could have been here for the earlier debate.

I am one of the ageing—or, I admit, aged—generation, a very lucky generation, a post-World War II baby boomer, who never considered not having a job, leaving university with a huge debt, having to go on working longer than I would want, if I could, or not having stable housing. These are all factors relevant to choices today. We are also a generation, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, acutely aware of the importance of social care.

I tend to think in terms of the classic family of parents and 2.4 children, as it was. The replacement rate per woman, I understand, would be 2.1, but the total fertility rate fell last year to less than 1.4. There are many aspects to this issue. I stumbled over a couple of articles recently, and I have picked up on a couple. In the US, people in red states seem to be having more children than those in blue. I am not advocating following Elon Musk, but there is certainly a political hue—which echoes the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady. Viktor Orbán said before his non-election, “We need Hungarian children”, announcing a lifelong exemption from income tax for women with four or more. The more you read about this, the less men seem to feature in the comments. There are also lots of historical references one might make.

There were factors that I had not anticipated, which I got from an article in the FT that cited sources from a range of academic research. One American university published a paper looking at birth rates through the lens of the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and the UK—this takes on the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Nargund, made. The number of births fell first and fastest in areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. Researchers argue that smartphones reduce young people’s in-person socialising. Another academic commented:

“To meet a person you are going to marry”—


they should have said “partner with” instead of “marry”—

“requires filtering through a lot of people”.

He added:

“If you spend lots of time socialising with your peers in the real world, your standards … are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram”—


I confess that I do not know whether that is an out-of-date reference—

“your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what is normal”.

But what is less startling to me is the connection with immigration. It is obvious that the UK’s need for people should not be detached from people’s wish or need to be in the UK—or vice versa. Reform UK says that we need “to cut immigration drastically”, and that:

“At the same time, to fix that population crisis, we’re trying to encourage British people already here to have kids”.


There is a lot to analyse in that, which I do not have time for, but one of their leader’s suggestions is that only “British-born” families should have the two-child benefit limit lifted. We already have a situation in which a lot of people are looked after in care homes and hospitals by the very people who are demonised. The Government and the media should be welcoming them, and lead the way in doing so, because we are in danger of the penny dropping far too late. The following words are not original; I should credit John Harris, who wrote them in the Guardian. He said,

“pulling up the drawbridge as birthrates crashed is the absolute definition of folly”.