Britain ‘Must Rely on Immigration’ to Compensate for Falling Birth Rate

A rise in women choosing to have children later in life means Britain must rely on immigration to boost its birth rate, an ageing expert has warned.

Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology at Oxford University, told the Lords’ economic affairs committee that the replacement rate of at least 2.1 children per mother, which the UK needs to sustain its population, is unlikely to ever return.

Instead, the UK and other ageing nations must turn to foreign-born mothers to boost population growth, she said.

The official fertility rate in England and Wales is at a record low of 1.44 births per woman. Figures published at the end of last year showed that the number of children born to British mothers has fallen by a quarter in 15 years.

Meanwhile, the fertility rate for foreign-born mothers has jumped to past two years to 2.03 children per woman, close to the UK’s replacement rate.

Prof Harper said: “We have to accept that we are going to be in low-fertility societies. And the only we can compensate for that is by looking at migration.

“We have a growing group of women who want to have children later, and they maybe only want to have one child.

“The idea that we are going to be able to replace ourselves by births alone, I really cannot see that coming back.”

The ageing expert said there had been a generational shift as “a lot of women who would have previously believed that to be adult and female was probably to have children are now reconsidering this”.

Experts have suggested that more women are choosing to prioritise careers or buying a house over having a baby, meaning many are having children later in life or not at all.

In the UK the average age at which mothers give birth has risen from 26.4 in 1975 to 30.9 in 2022, the highest since records began. At the same time, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has projected that the number of people aged over 85 will nearly double to 3.3m by 2047.

Prof Harper’s comments comes days after Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, warned that Britain’s ageing population poses a major obstacles to growth.

Prof Harper noted that even in countries which have introduced policies to boost births, fertility rates have continued to plunge.

The ONS said earlier this year that the UK population is projected to hit 72.5m by 2032, driven by a 4.9m increase in net migration. Meanwhile the non-immigrant population is expected to remain flat, with 6.8m births and 6.8m deaths.

However, Prof Harper warned that Britain cannot rely on migration in the long term as “almost the whole world is going to be ageing”, meaning the UK will be forced to compete with other countries for younger workers.

Asked whether there was a birth rate level where the “red lights really start flashing” on the sustainability of a population, Prof Harper said: “We used to say 1.5. The reason is, if societies dip down below 1.5, they went from a two-child norm to a one-child norm.”

She said this means people “grow up in a society where everyone has one child, so your society is geared up to having just one child” which can make it “very difficult to rise up to have two or three children”.

Prof Harper said the “real fear” is the speed at which the change is happening. She added: “In single generations you’re having women who maybe had several siblings and they’re having one or no children.”