Young women should be having more children and sooner, the minister for women and equalities has urged.
Bridget Phillipson said too many young people have been put off from having families because of soaring costs for things like housing and childcare.
She has warned there could be ‘worrying repercussions’ of a plummeting birth rate in Briton and that her childcare plans will encourage more people to have families when they may have previously rejected the idea.
‘I want more young people to have children, if they so choose,’ said Ms Phillipson in an article for The Daily Telegraph.
Yet Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last year said he would not tell people how many children to have or set out a national birth plan.
‘A generation of young people have been thinking twice about starting a family; worried not only about rising mortgage and rent repayments, wary not only of the price of fuel and food but also put off by a childcare system simultaneously lacking in places and ruinously expensive,’ the MP said.
She said Britain’s falling birth rate represented a ‘trend which has worrying repercussions for society in the future but tells a story, heartbreakingly, about the dashed dreams of many families‘.
Ms Phillipson revealed the government is set to go beyond it’s target of 4,000 new school-based childcare places this September.
Young women should be having more children and sooner, Bridget Phillipson, the minister for women and equality has urged
Yet Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last year said he would not tell people how many children to have or set out a national ‘birth plan’
Currently there are nearly 200 schools that will be open in the next two months with the new rooms.
Ms Phillipson’s comments come as the fertility rate in England and Wales is down to 1.49 per woman – when 2.1 is the minimum needed to keep a population steady.
A waning population could mean there are not enough workers to care for the ageing members of society and to pay taxes to keep funding public services.
Last year, the Office for Budget Responsibility warned that Britain’s falling birth rate could see the national debt soar over the next 50 years.
It said the country would have to become reliant on migration to boost the population as deaths will outnumber births in Britain from the middle of the next decade.
Ms Phillipson’s comments come after a number of European leaders urging their citizens to grow their families in order to bolster their economies.
Last year, the French president Emmanuel Macron brought in free fertility checks for those aged 18 to 25.
And Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Prime Minister, set a target of 500,000 births annually.
