This year, according to official projections released at the end of April, there will be more deaths than births in the UK. While this has occasionally happened before, including during the coronavirus pandemic, this time will be different. We won’t see the bounceback from odd blips we have undergone in the past. Instead, the reaper will remain stubbornly busier than the stork—and, unless something changes, the activity gap between the two will only continue to widen. With the Office for National Statistics (ONS) foreseeing a drop of 1.6m in the country’s tally of children by 2034, a trickle of stories about schools closing or merging, currently in very particular areas such as inner London, could build into a torrent over the coming decade. In the decade that follows it, the flow of young adults into the workforce will slow. Pensions that have been promised to ageing cohorts could be jeopardised, while society confronts a desperate shortage of hands to care for its rising share of frail and elderly people.
One half of the demographic equation has long been inevitable: as the outsize “boomer” cohort edges towards advanced old age, deaths were bound to rise. But at least as important is something few would have forecast until recently: a “baby bust” at the other end of life. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of annual UK births has tumbled from about 810,000 to about 660,000.
The crossover of deaths and births is a profound moment, and yet as we pass through it, life will initially seem to be continuing much as before. Look further out and the effects of an increasingly substantial imbalance will become impossible to miss. Within a decade, there are projected to be about 100,000 more lives ending than starting annually: that’s like a town the size of Carlisle disappearing. The gap between deaths and births in Scotland, where the baby bust is particularly advanced, is already sufficient to snuff out a town like Fort William every year.
The thing holding Scotland back from edging towards disappearance—and the only reason why official statisticians aren’t yet forecasting a shrinking society across the wider UK—is migration. This is an escape valve it is easy to presume will always operate, after political stunts small (Rwanda) and large (Brexit) that purported to close it abjectly failed to do so. And yet, here too, things could soon be very different. Underexamined measures to tighten up on visas in the dying days of the Sunak government (higher earnings thresholds, restrictions on family reunions) and the early days of this one (tougher compliance for sponsors of work and student visas) are steadily biting. The new ONS projections reduce assumed net migration by about a third. James Bowes, a data analyst at the University of Warwick, tells me that net migration could actually turn negative by the end of this year, and is “likely” to do so in the following year or two. After that, he forecasts migration should bounce back—a bit.
Logically, visa policy could be liberalised again. Politics, however, could easily preclude that. Besides, there is a deeper reason why migration cannot provide an escape valve forever. It is not just the UK but the world that, eventually, looks set to run out of babies.
Well within living memory, this would have been thought of as a nice problem to have. In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a polemic written with his wife, Anne. It notched up two million sales and concerned the mismatch between the exponential multiplication of our species and the fixed environmental resources required to sustain us. The world stood at a crossroads, it said, between “conscious regulation of human numbers” and “the road to oblivion”. Some of the book’s solutions, such as subsidising contraceptives for poorer countries, became mainstream. It acknowledged that squeamishness might thwart other ideas, such as adding “temporary sterilants” to the water supply. And yet its spirit successfully permeated a World Bank-backed sterilisation drive in India which deployed press gangs and bribes paid in cash or household appliances to neuter millions.
Just as the ink was drying on this book, however, shifting realities were overtaking its argument. Until 1968, the world’s population had not merely been growing, but growing at a continually accelerating rate: UN estimates imply that was the exact year when this growth peaked. Then began the great slowdown which continues to this day. While the average woman worldwide back then would have been expected to give birth to around five children, today that figure is just 2.4, and edging remorselessly towards 2.1, the benchmark for parents “replacing” themselves. (The magic number is just above two to allow for slightly more boys than girls being born, and some babies not reaching adulthood.) By mid-century, the world as a whole is forecast to teeter over that statistical edge, after which our ageing stock of human beings makes global depopulation a matter of time. The UN’s central estimate is for the ranks of humanity to start thinning during the third quarter of this century.
The border-straddling forces at work could be hard to defy, but paying attention to such exemplars is not futile
Of course, there are still parts of the world, mainly in west Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where, for now, fertility remains well above replacement. In Chad, for example, a typical woman might still expect to have six babies. At the other end of the fertility league, in South Korea the average number of births per woman is well below one. There are, however, precious few exceptions to the directional trend. It’s not only rich countries, but also developing giants, including India, Brazil and (especially) China, that are now below replacement. In 2024, the Lancet published country-by-country analysis projecting that, by 2100, fertility would exceed replacement rate in only six of the world’s 204 territories and sovereign states, with those six including such relative minnows as Tonga and Samoa.
Among the UK’s usual peer group of nations, we are neither a baby-bust leader nor laggard. We’re still having more children than the Italians, whose birthrate never really recovered from a remorseless slide over the final third of the 20th century. Still, the recent British dip—which is very much in line with that in the United States—has sunk us halfway towards the depths already plumbed by Italy and Japan. The border-straddling forces at work could be hard to defy, but paying attention to such exemplars is not futile for the UK. They open a window on where we could head—and provide useful pointers on what not to do.
“It’s a bit like hearing someone come at climate change for the first time: witnessing the realisation that this will affect everything.” So says Andrew Young, a former senior government actuary, when I air naive general worries about our developing failure to replace ourselves. Look around the world with fertility in mind, and you suddenly see it everywhere. In reports that Japanese manufacturer Oji Holdings is quitting a dwindling nappy market to concentrate on incontinence pads. Or in the reorganisation of South Korea’s provinces to adjust to the depopulation taking hold across the country. Or in China’s move, just a decade on from the formal end of the one-child policy, to impose a new sales tax on condoms.
What about closer to home? Young has the sort of expert longview that is usually soothing, having kept an eye on fertility trends since 1972, when—as a young graduate recruit—analysing them was his “very first job”. But he’s not in a soothing mood. He tells me about two primary schools near to his Brighton home which, not so long ago, were discussing adding extra classes but are now considering some form of merger. On pensions, he sees a reality gap between the unremitting demographics and painstaking official reviews about a possible future inching-up of the qualification age to 68. “If we were to restore the basic pension to its original purpose, of providing for people when they’d reached an age where they were likely too disabled to work, we’d be looking at setting it at more like 80.”
Young’s suggestion might sound like wild talk. After all, merely rationalising the arbitrary generosity of the “triple lock” pension formula (which, over time, sees the pension rising by more than earnings) ranks as a political taboo. But for Young, pensions are the “easy bit” because “at least with the pension age you’ve got a lever you can pull” to bring the arithmetic back into line. He’s more worried about healthcare: if young nursing recruits are in short supply, you obviously “can’t just put up a sign telling over-80s to keep away from A&E”.
Still, medicine might—with a fair wind—become a bit more automated as the workforce shrinks. That is much harder to imagine in social care. Yes, immigration could theoretically fill the gaps for a time, though it would have to come, says Young, from “Africa and a few other places like Afghanistan” where populations are, for now, still surging. With the Home Office cracking down on visas for Afghan students and even former Afghan accomplices of the British army, “nothing in the debate is preparing people for that.” Indeed, James Bowes pinpoints the closing of a previously popular route from study visas to work in care homes as one big recent drag on migration totals.
Historically, Young explains, only one force has been equal to defying challenging demographics: productivity growth. The analogy here comes from the other end of life: “death rates were falling from the 1850s”, and yet it proved possible to introduce and then maintain pensions right through the 20th century. Why? Because a growing economy could shoulder the rising burden. “Only in the 1980s,” Young says, “did pension professionals start to worry about things becoming unsustainable.” And only around the millennium did the trends crystalise into the impossible deficits which actually killed final salary schemes.
Sadly, it is difficult to imagine rising industrial efficiency postponing a reckoning with the baby bust. UK productivity has, notoriously, scarcely advanced since the global financial crisis of 2008. A thinning cohort of school-leavers entering the workforce after the mid-2030s could spell deeper stagnation. Just consider Japan. The usual story is financial boom and bust: the bursting of a terrific asset bubble at the end of the 1980s sinking an all-conquering economy into a sluggish stupor that it has never shaken off. In reality, this drift has been greatly compounded by fertility having fallen permanently below replacement way back in the 1970s. Looking at GDP per person of working age rather than GDP per head of the whole population transforms the picture. Instead of being bottom of the rich-world league over the last generation when it comes to growth, Japan suddenly assumes a respectable midtable position, with a touch less growth than Germany and a touch more than France.
The great drag on its living standards has simply been arithmetic—more retirees supported by a smaller workforce inevitably means relatively less output to go round. That shortage of productive activity is not something that any ingenious scheme of care insurance, medical co-payments or pension reform can, in itself, hope to fix. No matter how the bill for ageing is split between taxes, employer subsidies, individual charges or insurance premiums, without enough young workers coming through, consumption of everything else is going to be squeezed.
Even worse, ageing demographics could depress the output of the remaining workforce. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has highlighted various channels by which this could happen, including a dearth of the younger, enterprising types who most often kickstart new organisations. The International Monetary Fund envisages annual global growth dipping by more than one percentage point over the next quarter-century, overwhelmingly because of demographics; this is a hit which, it projects, will eventually be greatly compounded if a scenario of especially low fertility unfolds.
So just how bad could things get? Henry Gee is a “recovering palaeontologist” who views the unfolding plight of our species with the detachment of someone who has devoted years to waves of vanished fauna, from prehistoric cows to humanoid cousins like Neanderthals. His wide-ranging recent book, The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire achieves something unlikely: electrifying gloom. It points to a “generous” global fertility rate of 1.5 to 1.75—well above where the UK has already got to, at 1.4—roughly halving the world’s population by 2200, and in the worst case tanking it to below a billion by 2300. Humanity was last at that benchmark in 1804, so this extreme scenario creates a 500-year rise-and-fall story starting in the Napoleonic age, with the 21st century providing the halfway point of inflection.
I call Gee at home in Cromer in rural Norfolk, an area where erosion is slowly washing villages into the sea. Gee sees it as a “microcosm” of the demographics that will soon engulf everyone else. Aside from tourist season, he says, “you can go from one end of the day to the other here without seeing anyone under 50. It’s full of care homes, which provide almost the only jobs. A local sixth-form college in [nearby] Sheringham is closing: it can’t find the students.” This chimes with the hollowing-out of rural societies across tracts of South Korea and Japan. Looking ahead, Gee insists, “whole countries will collapse.”
So if the baby bust is really that devastating, why is it happening? For Gee, controversially and with an unexpected echo of Ehrlich, “the whole thing is basically to do with resource availability.” As we have pushed past various sustainability thresholds, “there is less of everything to go round, and remaining resources are harder to extract.” Human numbers began to rise in earnest when we began to reshape our environment in the agricultural revolution. Now, as we have pushed it to a point of uncontainable consequences, “freefall” beckons.
One pertinent marker of the way we are living is plummeting sperm count. As a senior editor at Nature, Gee mostly receives dry-as-dust manuscripts, but “not on this subject: words like ‘existential’ keep cropping up”. Counts in many places are rapidly approaching the World Health Organisation’s “cutoff value” where physical infertility soars. One study in Nigeria—perhaps the world’s most important remaining engine of population growth—records a 73 per cent drop over 50 years. The science can debate whether the cause is particular pollutants, obesity or a more nebulous “stress” effect, but the potential effect on the future is stark.
Gee points to very different sorts of feedback from the environment to explain the present. He sees strains on the supply of various resources and indeed on the climate as underlying the persistent stagnation and cost-of-living pressures of the last quarter-century. He believes that these pressures have—in turn—left young adults feeling unready to have kids. In this last part of his thesis, at least, he can draw support from mainstream economic research.
Recent Resolution Foundation* analysis suggests that the decline in British fertility has unfolded in two chapters—a story of emancipation followed by a tale of rising constraints. When the contraceptive pill became available through the 1960s and early 1970s—initially to married women, then gradually to others—new choices about the number and timing of children opened up. Meanwhile, expanding higher education created new reasons to take up those choices. For a new cadre of female graduates, it made economic sense to get securely established within a professional career before starting a family.
By contrast, the big rise in childlessness over the last dozen years has been heavily concentrated among the less-advantaged half of contemporary twentysomethings: non-graduates. The chance of homeownership among this less-educated group has halved over the last generation, the Resolution Foundation found. Fewer of them are now living with a mortgage than “living with their parents”, a tenure category that some jest doubles as a natural contraceptive. In parallel, twice as many among this group are now in private rentals. Often costly, cramped and insecure, this accommodation offers the opposite of the conditions in which prospective parents would hope to start a family.
At least this housing part of the puzzle should be fixable? Andrew Young agrees more social homes would make “a difference”—but doubts it would be “anything like” enough to get back to replacement fertility. Getting there, he thinks, would involve reversing too many things that we couldn’t—and shouldn’t—flip: “The numbers having children under age 21 has gone through the floor. We’re never going to get that back, thankfully.” Deeper in history, humanity’s great triumph in reducing child mortality eased the impetus for very large families.
More generally, “a lot of the real collapse” was about “women taking control”, particularly of when they had children. A clear majority of British women born in 1950 had children by 25; a clear majority of those born in the mid-1990s remain childless at 30. A recent New York Times opinion piece looked at the very similar US data and applied a positive gloss, pointing out that most of the cohort will still eventually have one or more children as they age. Compare across earlier generations, and—it’s true—there was sometimes an element of “delay now, catch up later”. Young, however, is sceptical about the scope for repeating that trick, because people are now “putting off having children to ages where having children is more difficult”. Yes, the majority will still have a child, but what matters for society is how many.
Remove IVF, which is often rationed, and the research suggests a young woman who wants to be 90 per cent sure of ending up with three children should start trying at 23. Even among about Gen Xers like me, that would have seemed entirely unrealistic; for today’s 20-year-olds, it must sound ludicrous. And yet, as Young says, it “is simply impossible to get the fertility rate all the way back up without bringing forward the age at which some people have kids”.
But how? France’s government has recently tried writing to 29-year-olds (men as well as women) to remind them about the biological clock. Even though it included potentially useful information about freezing eggs, it ran into the derision you would expect.
Another option is yanking the clock back. The culture warrior and former MP Miriam Cates suggests long university courses are making “it much more difficult, particularly for women, to decide when is a good time to pause and have children”. Reform UK’s Danny Kruger has vowed to “reset” the sexual culture and to restore sex to its proper role as a public act done in private. Liberals shudder at such talk—as will anyone who has read The Handmaid’s Tale. Especially after the recent rollback of abortion rights in the US, this sounds like the sort of rhetoric that could provide cover for an attempt to cast women back into a world where life ambitions are expected to yield to a duty to breed. And it certainly won’t solve the problem. Nobel prize-winning economist, Claudia Goldin, highlights how fertility has fallen more sharply in societies such as South Korea, Japan and Italy, where an ossified sexual morality failed to adjust to women’s education and economic development.
By the time I reach Phoebe Arslanagić-Little, co-founder of Boom, which campaigns for those who know they want children, I am getting close to despair. A day short of her 30th birthday when we talk, and pregnant with a second child, she has a keen eye for bright spots in the data—such as the fertility aspirations of younger adults, which have held up even while fertility outcomes slide. Don’t underestimate, she says, the sheer variety of social factors that can have a bearing. She draws my eye to the bump in -Georgia’s fertility charts—“you can absolutely see it!” —that followed the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announcing in 2007 that he would personally baptise and godfather all Georgian third children. We swap notes on a study of how Brazil’s falling birthrate tracked the broadcasting reach of soap operas starring small families.
Reform’s Danny Kruger has vowed to ‘reset’ the sexual culture and to restore sex to its proper role as a public act done in private
But her biggest inspiration is historical. Way back in the 1930s, after years of stagnation, fertility was low across much of Europe. In the UK, a Royal Commission on Population was established in 1944. And yet by the time it published its report in 1949, an entirely unforeseen baby boom was solving the problem of low births: more people suddenly had more children earlier. Arslanagić-Little attributes this turnaround to a positive and multilayered “parenting cost shock”. Having children became “much safer” as antibiotics reduced maternal illness or death, and then, as the 1950s and 1960s rolled on, “much easier” as domestic technologies such as fridges eased the burden of running a family home and kitchen. The rapid building of private homes just before the war and social homes afterwards was important, too.
Also introduced in the 1940s were family allowances which—with the opposite logic to George Osborne’s two-child limit on benefits—were concentrated on “second and subsequent children”. In the mood of those times, today’s infants were understood to be essential to building tomorrow’s future, whereas today they are too often thought of as a drain on the present. The shaming of Benefits Street is not the only way this can happen. In South Korea, a key mechanism was revealed by Daniel Markovits in his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap: a competitive scramble that leaves young people needing increasing amounts of private tutoring to secure a decent career. Parents conclude that they can only “invest” in one child, at best.
Dispelling such negative patterns of thought and behaviour is the real challenge, not micropolicy “nudges” which, Arslanagić-Little says, “won’t work”. Yes, the Starmer government has now ditched the two-child limit, which is terrific. But its journey towards that important result was faltering and apologetic. Instead, we need to reset the whole discourse about families, telling a big, positive story about the social contribution of parents, one which carries an onus on public policy, employers and everyone else to adjust to their needs and support them.
After all, as everyone I interviewed agreed, fertility is a field in which ideas, assumptions and expectations are self-reinforcing. If you’re 30 and none of your friends have kids yet, it won’t occur to you; if you don’t know anyone with three kids, you probably won’t have three kids either. Such norms can take a long time to shift. Arslanagić-Little finds another root of South Korea’s demographic disaster in its zealous “two is already too many” antinatalist campaigns way back in the 1960s. Likewise, the expectations of China’s one-child era were so entrenched that the policy’s passing barely moved the numbers. It isn’t too late to modify all the grim arithmetic I have cited from unfolding—but if we close our eyes to the problem for long, it could soon be.
*The Resolution Foundation is part of the Resolution Group, which also owns Prospect, but the two operate independently
