Declining Birth Rates

Lord Davies of Brixton Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Nargund for raising this important issue; it was a good illustration of the expertise that is brought before this House. I recognise the important work that she has done in this area, looking at the barriers to parenthood and the need for family-friendly policies. We need to prioritise long-term thinking, but I want to highlight that falling fertility is also a story about women’s choices. There is a certain symmetry to our debates; the previous debate was about women who want to have children and what we can do to help them, but it is also a choice not to have children.

This is not just a UK issue, of course; we know that the global fertility rate has roughly halved since the 1960s. The standard explanations focus on housing costs, debt, technology and the general pressures of modern life. Those things exist and they are influential, but the evidence is that they are not necessarily the primary explanation. The other explanation is that women now have far greater control over their reproductive lives, and they are exercising it. I do not have the presumption to speak on behalf of women; I simply read the consistent evidence on the pattern of falling fertility.

Fertility decline is not concentrated among women facing the greatest economic pressure. If costs were the main driver, you would expect the sharpest falls among the least well-off. This is not what we see. What cuts across all groups is access to contraception and, equally important, the freedom to use it. The timing of the decline in fertility tracks closely with the expansion of women’s reproductive autonomy, not with any particular economic shock.

Education reinforces this. Better-educated women exercise more choice over how many children they want, when to have them and how many they actually have. It is not that education makes women want to have fewer children, but it is associated with more effective control over that decision. When teenage birth rates fall decade after decade across every country, as they have, that is not young women being unable to afford children; it is a decline in unintended pregnancies. This must be progress, not failure. The conclusion is that much of this decline in fertility simply reflects what women, given genuine choice, actually want. To that extent, it should be welcomed and not seen necessarily as a problem to be solved.

In the time remaining, I will add two further thoughts that bear on this issue. First, the last 100 years demonstrate that human society can deal with massive economic and demographic change. I often ponder what Lloyd George, when he introduced his state pension, would have thought about the possibility of having the current, much better, state pension when circumstances, on the criteria that we are talking about now, have made it massively more difficult. But, of course, we have overcome them over time. It is important that we understand that, while people often say time is a healer, it is also an enabler: it enables us to confront these changes.

Finally, there must come a time, now or in the future, when we say that enough is enough. Growth, whether economic or in the population, is not good in itself; it is what you do with what this world provides that really counts.